The Poetry Duel

I've been hinting recently about one of my harebrained schemes. I just finished! Once I had a list of poems I thought would work, it was a lot easier than I thought to stitch it together.

It's kind of based off of Sokka's haiku battle in Avatar: The Last Airbender. 

I wanted to do a poetry duel between Fern and one of her friends. Which is why I pulled out my small poetry collection. I occasionally print out a poem I like, so I flipped through those first. I was astonished to find a pile of poems I'd hand-written back in middle school, or possibly high school. I guess I've been collecting poems for a long time. Even if I didn't always write the name of the poet.

There was one poet in particular that I was hoping to use at least once: TS Eliot (Fern's friend mentions him by name). I looked up a few of his works online, before I went to my own bookshelf. I only have a few books of poetry, so I was stunned to find that I had a book of TS Eliot poems. 

~Heavenly choir sings~

Okay, it's silly cat poems. But still! These are the kinds of poems Fern would know anyway. I didn't actually use any of the cat poems in my project, sadly. But I did manage to fit one TS Eliot poem in there. 

Well, this will unexpectedly become another embarrassing post about Fern and her friends.

I guess I'll explain the whole stupid thing. When I was writing the Fern stories with Spiderman, I was wondering about ways they could honor Rosie. She studied poetry. And since Rosie was so supportive of Otto's work, I'll bet that he read a lot of poetry with her. After he joins Fern's team, Fern starts reading more poetry. She doesn't understand anything about nuclear physics, so poems would be something they could bond over. 

Otto would be pretty well versed in the classics. Fern would know more of the animal and nature poems. They start having these silly duels, where Otto says a line of poetry, and Fern has to say one in response. They'll pick a theme or word from the first poem, and have to answer with a poem that has the same theme or word. It goes on until one of them gets stumped (except it's always Fern who loses). Ben narrates it, like it's a soccer match. When Fern starts to run out of ideas, she uses song lyrics. And even movie quotes when she's really desperate. That's when Ben says that she's starting to slip. When she loses yet again, she complains that Otto is classier than her.

This will end up being a comic (though those take me forever to draw, so it might be a while). I want to draw Fern as she struggles to come up with responses. It will be fun to come up with her tortured expressions. XD

Since TS Eliot is the only poet Otto mentions by name in the movie, I thought it would be fitting to include at least one poem of his. Hence my reaction at finding my book of TS Eliot cat poems. Another poem I chose by accident is from my book of Japanese poetry, and the author is Oto. Not to be confused with Otto. And I ended up using two Tennyson poems. Only to realize that Tennyson's first name is Alfred. Because of course Alfred Molina is the actor that plays Otto. There were so many crazy coincidences in this ridiculous project. And I had far too much fun working on it.

Is this my attempt to be classy and quote poetry? Or is it just another waste of time on a silly Fern comic? Good question.