Day 6- Poems, Polari and Catullus:

After the UW Classics Dept. visiting lecture about translating Catullus’ poetry into Polari, a language I confess only learning about this week, I felt daunted about writing a poem until my kid said, “You’re daunted by poems about asses and sex!” She didn’t say that exactly. I should find the handout with the Polari dictionary and poems read by the visiting Professor Jennifer Ingleheart. Of course I left my handouts with notes at the hotel.

Here’s a random quote:

Of a morning when someone goes to take a piss,

They brush their hampsteads nice and white with it.

“Hampsteads” are teeth but reference to Hampstead Heath as a popular cruising site.

It’s cool that the meaning of the word rhymes with the place the word is referring to, kind of a complicated way to express in a different language that mixes its own secret words with regular English.

Without providing a recording of her reading these poems and discussing her translations which actually straddle between translation and creative writing, or the handouts, it’s like you had to be there.

Anyway , I wonder if I could take a Catullus poem in Polari and get it to inspire a poem of my own..:

Sitting in the toilets, I see on the wall some changes from “Lisa is a —— fill in anything insulting; it’s not my job to come up with the fitting epithet: you can do that on your own; it’s ubiquitous.

You be the one to trash talk for me.

I’ve never written on a toilets’ wall.

Now it’s “You’re beautiful——(Lisa),”

or fill in the blanks.l

Of course “Lisa is a——-,” persists.

But I’ve heard of a school where they put sticky notes and nice things on them for girls to take out of the toilets, and they didn’t have to fish them out of a bowl of piss.

“You’re beautiful.” Is already there, written down, dry, clean, and free.