Last week, as part of my hurricane preparations, I went to Bob’s News and bought a copy of The Spectator. In addition to comfort food, I need comfort prose. Opening the magazine I was immediately rewarded by the Competition on page 50 (I always read the Speccie back-to-front), which had invited readers to imagine the Hokey Pokey (in England, the Hokey-Cokey) as written by a famous poet. Alanna Blake rewrote the lyrics in the style of Kipling’s If. A reader who didn’t win got a mention in the introduction for the title of his effort, Walt Whitman’s “Song of My Self-Humiliation.”
