Someday Someone Will Bet That You Can't Name All Fifty States
California, Mississippi
North and South Dakota.
New York, Jersey, Mexico and
Hampshire, Minnesota.
Vermont, Wisconsin, Oregon,
Connecticut and Maine.
Hawaii, Georgia, Maryland.
Virginia (West and plain).
Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas,
Illinois, Alaska.
Colorado, Utah, Florida,
Delaware, Nebraska.
the Carolinas (North and South).
Missouri, Idaho.
Plus Alabama, Washington,
And Indiana, O-
Klahoma. Also Iowa,
Arkansas, Montana,
Pennsylvania, Arizona,
And Louisiana.
Ohio, Massachusetts, and
Nevada, Michigan,
Rhode Island, and Wyoming. That
Makes forty-nine. You win
As soon as you say ____________.
Commentary
It should come as no surprise that I loved this poem. “Someday, Someone…” is an unabashed piece of playful ingenuity that does for the states what Lehrer did
for the Elements [Poem #490], and I loved it for the same reasons - the sheer satisfaction of seeing a hodgepodge list of names organised into a neat series of rhymes, and the pleasure of the rhymes themselves. Not to mention a vicarious thrill at the cleverness of it all.
This is, indeed, more puzzle than poetry, a puzzle that Viorst does a brilliant job of solving. Indeed, the brilliance is twofold, for first she had to formulate the puzzle, to ask herself “would it be possible to…?”. The twist at the end was wonderful too, even if it did cause me to spend a good fifteen minutes staring at the list and eliminating states in a scattershot manner (yes, I did solve it. No, I’m not going to spoil the answer :))
— Martin
p.s. Some of you will doubtless be amused that my first thought on reading line 8 was “West Virginia and just Virginia”. I apologise to everyone else :)
p.p.s. If anyone knows of other poems in a similar vein, please do send them in.
Links
Biography: http://www.annonline.com/interviews/980112/biography.html
AAP site: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=62
Show 7 commentsHide comments
From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Suresh Ramasubramanian · 26 September 2003
Martin DeMello [9/26/2003 5:53 AM] :
[…]
“Tchaikowsky (and Other Russians)”, sung by Danny Kaye in “Lady in the Dark” in 1941, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
Just the extremely polysyllabic names of 49 russian composers, from Malichevsky, Rubinstein and Arensky to Gretchnaninoff, Kvoschinsky and Rachmaninoff. Machine gun speed - thirty five seconds flat.
Then Tom Lehrer has the entire periodic table set to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Major General’s Song”.
Cant find lyrics to either of them online …
srs
Martin DeMello · 30 September 2003
Well, most such poems wind up neatly in the end - “and that (said John) is that”, “these are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard / and there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered”. The “twist” was Viorst’s building up expectations of a neat finish and, instead, turning to the reader and saying “well?”
martin
barney · 30 September 2003
I can see the missing state (so to speak), but not the “twist”. Anyone care to put a poor ignorant Brit out of his misery?
Barnaby
Abraham Thomas · 30 September 2003
I have this on CD, will go home and check if printed sleeve lyrics exist. They probably don’t, which means I’d have to transcribe them. Not impossible, just don’t expect results in a hurry :)
t.
Martin DeMello · 7 October 2003
Nope, you’re right - Kansas is indeed the answer. It threw me for a while too, but then I realised that
Ohio, Massachusetts, and
Nevada, Michigan,
Rhode Island, and Wyoming. That
Makes forty-nine. You win
is a complete stanza, and that the last line stands in isolation.
martin
Dale Rosenberg · 7 October 2003
I also don’t really get it. I mean, it seems to me that S
P
O
I
L
E
R
Kansas is the answer. At least I can’t find it in the poem and it is a state. But it doesn’t rhyme with “that”…. Am I missing something?
The Danny Hustle Show! · 27 January 2007
The Gershwin song Danny Kaye sang that you were looking for
“Tchaikowsky and Other Russians”
VERSE (not sung in the original production)
Without the least excuse
Or the slightest provocation,
May I fondly introduce,
For your mental delectation,
The names that always give me a concussion,
The names of those composers known as Russian.
REFRAIN
There’s Malichevsky, Rubinstein, Arensky, and Tschaikowsky, Sapelnikoff, Dimitrieff, Tscherepnin, Kryjanowsky, Godowsky, Arteiboucheff, Moniuszko, Akimenko, Solovieff, Prokofieff, Tiomkin, Korestchenko.
There’s Glinka, Winkler, Bortniansky, Rebikoff, Ilyinsky, There’s Medtner, Balakireff, Zolotareff, and Kvoschinsky. And Sokoloff and Kopyloff, Dukelsky, and Klenowsky, And Shostakovitsch, Borodine, Glière, and Nowakofski.
There’s Liadoff and Karganoff, Markievitch, Pantschenko And Dargomyzski, Stcherbatcheff, Scriabine, Vassilenko, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mussorgsky, and Gretchaninoff And Glazounoff and Caeser Cui, Kalinikoff, Rachmaninoff,
Stravinsky and Gretchnaninoff,
Rumshinsky and Rachmaninoff,
I really have to stop, the subject has been dwelt Upon enough!
ENSEMBLE: Stravinsky!
RINGMASTER: Gretchaninoff!
ENSEMBLE: Rumshinsky!
RINGMASTER: Rachmaninoff!
ENSEMBLE: He’d better stop because we feel we all have under- Gone enough!