Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley!

What follows is a fake history of a fake form of poetry which I made up for a formalist poetry workshop. Yes, I am partaking in a formalist poetry workshop. No, you cannot read my sonnets. Anyway, the name of this form is "Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley." I might get around to putting up a good example one of these days, but for now, here's the history:

The Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley may have one of the oldest and richest histories of any poetic form. The form dates back to Ancient Sumeria, where archaeologists have found five-line stanzas using words from the preceding stanza inscribed on the walls of ziggurats. The traditional name for this kind of stanza was either “coat the high priest with pitch tar and call him Surshlash,” or “the one with the honorary title ‘Shurlash’ is covered in resin,” translators remain divided. This likely refers to the embalming practices for the bodies of high priests. The form appears to have been preserved through the Mesopotamians and Babylonians, as several key passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh are written in a similar form, most notably the scene in which Enkidu burns down the cedars in Lebanon after being mocked by the goddess Mishmash for putting his left boot on his right foot. The form was also one of the most popular in use by the common people of Babylon…

          The tradition was adopted by the Jews during the Babylonian captivity, and was brought back to Jerusalem, where it was used as the format for a number of psalms and various other passages of the old testament, notably the book of Amos. Following the conquest of Alexander the Great and the establishment of the Selucid Empire, the form was adopted to Greek, which flourished in not only the Selucid Empire itself, but within Ptolemaic Egypt and the Greek Mainland itself. At this point there is no evidence that the sixth stanza had developed. The Greeks only used the pattern seen in the first five stanzas. Most were written in dactylic hexameter.

            Virgil, Pliny the Elder, and Cicero all wrote this form, but it was not popular with the Roman nobility. In fact, the Emperor Nero threatened Pliny the Elder with being impaled from the anus to the mouth if he “wrote one more stanza of [that] detestable form!” The form would disappear from the European continent for over a millennium.

The tradition, however, had survived through Greco-Bactrian traders on the Silk Road, who would compose long songs in this form to pass the time as their caravans rode through the Taklimakan Desert. Few were written down, but from what has been recorded, it seems that this was where the form of the sixth stanza developed, sung as a kind of refrain. However, this stanza would never change throughout the entire song, which would sometimes last for upwards of one hundred stanza. The skill of the poet would be measured by how many stanzas he could manufacture using the same end-words in the same configuration, but with different content and meaning.

Emperor Han Shundi received one such merchant and was so impressed by his abilities to improvise that he commissioned all one hundred and sixty seven of his court poets to write similar poems, and executed the poets whose work he deemed unworthy. His method of execution was to dip them in a thick boiling liquid known as “fang gao,” which was described as resembling tar but smelling of young lychee blossoms. The form was therefore known as “feng gao dip shrieking tradition.”

Famous navigator Zeng He brought copies of his favorite poems with him on his voyages, and one of them was a poem composed in the early-modern Dip Me in Molasses form, which he read to the Sultan of Zanzibar as an overture of diplomatic goodwill. Despite some adaptation in mainland Tanzania by tribal populations under the cruel heel of the Sultan, the form would see little use until its reading was again used as a token of diplomatic goodwill, this time to Portuguese explorer Vazco Da Gama, who brought it back to Portugal where it gained wide use among the Portuguese nobility.

In his later years, Milton penned what were allegedly translations of a “mergulhe me no molaço,” but were actually creations of his own. His senile brain is thought to have imagined poems allegedly in some language vaguely Portuguese-sounding. The “translations” themselves are mostly gibberish. Never the less, Byron, Wordswroth, Keats, and Coleridge all tried their hand at the form, finding it to be, in Byron’s words, “so bombastedly complicated and inelegante that it is only suitable for orphanes, trampes, and streete urchines of the loweste birthe.”

Meanwhile the Portuguese tradition continued, coming with the Empire to Brazil, where it flourished among Amazonian and Highland backwaters, before spreading to the Pampas and eventually to Buenos Aires, where it was discovered by Borges. It was in this form that he wrote his long narrative “Un Sueño de mi Sudamerica Cósmico,” (A Dream of My Cosmic South America), which was mostly a thinly veiled critique of the Pinochet regime in neighboring Chile.

The form got its English name from Brazilian immigrant João Fermin da Cunha arriving at Ellis Island in 1893. When trying to explain the pronunciation of his name to immigration officials, one official was reported to have said “Well dip me in molasses and call me Shirley, where did you get a name like that?” Da Cunha promptly changed his name to John Clemens to avoid any future confusion. But the phrase had stuck in his mind, and he penned a poem in the form which now bears this phrase as its name. It became wildly popular, posted on broadsides across the nation. It did not, however, catch on with educated city dwellers. Carrie Nation wrote an anti-liquor propaganda poem called “The Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley of Prohibition,” and the Woodrow Wilson campaign was known to have distributed pamphlets with Dip Me in Molasses poems to remind voters to get to the polls while keeping their black neighbors from doing so.

It was for this reason that Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen appropriated the form, feeling that it would empower blacks who were disenfranchised at the polls. The Duke Ellington Orchestra performed “The Dip Me in Molasses (And Call Me Shirley) Suite” to commemorate Hughes’ and Cullen’s work.

Ginsberg, in his early years, dabbled with the form in his early years, but found it to be “too heavy, maaan.” However, an early draft of “Howl” was found among Ginsberg’s papers after his death, indicating that he had intended to write his magnum opus as a Dip Me in Molasses before abandoning the idea.

The form has seen recent resurgence thanks to its frequent use by poet Billy Collins, and many alt-lit “authors” (the term used very liberally) on the blogosphere. A recent adaptation has been the “Tweet Me in Molasses,” where Twitter users collaborate to create an entire poem, tweeting one line at a time. There is also resurgent interest in places where the form has history, including Iraq, Xinxiang, Tanzania, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and New York City. President Obama has stated that after his second inaugural address, current poet laureate Natasha Tretheway will read a Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley. He hopes this poem will be less of a disaster than the last one.