It’s April, it’s National Poetry Month, and it’s Furry Poetry Month.
I have two items to tell you about. I’ve written an essay about poets in or from the state of Utah, where I live, who have written some animal themed poetry. As of this writing I’m still waiting on our local furry group, United Utah Furry Fandom to publish it on their website’s news/blog page https://utahfurs.org/news/ If you would like to see it now it’s posted to my DreamWidth journal at https://shining-river.dreamwidth.org/47683.html “The Animal Poems of Utah Poets.”
It seems that poets and probably writers in general move about quite a bit during their careers. So, we must be generous when we claim poets for our home states or cities, or even countries. My hope is that younger local furry writers will see that they don’t live in a cultural desert as some local cynics sometimes like to claim.
Moving along, I looked at the poets.org site again last night and their front page featured a poem by a young poet, Monica Youn. Titled “Study of Two Figures (Ignatz/Krazy)”, it caught my attention because I know, as surely all of you do too, that Ignatz and Krazy Kat were popular comic strip characters. (Just a little tongue-in-cheek there friends; it was a comic that got started over one hundred years ago so if you don’t remember it, that’s cool.) The poem is available at
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/study-two-figures-ignatzkrazy
It begins with what looks like a poem, attributed to George Herriman, the artist creator of Ignatz and Krazy. Youn’s original part of the poem follows that and is somewhat unusual to me but then there is much of the very contemporary poetry on poets.org that I find unusual. Not bad, mind you, just unusual. I’m familiar with spoken word poetry, and in fact have quite a bit of interest in it, but I’m more familiar and comfortable with poetry of the twentieth century.
Regarding Ignatz and Krazy Kat and George Herriman, here’s a Toonopedia page on him
http://www.toonopedia.com/herriman.htm
It’s a shorter read than the extensive Wikipedia page but the Wiki has more pictures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman
So, there it is, a young poet reaching back almost a century to figures from popular entertainment for a poem theme. That’s good, that’s cool.