Kat Apel

In addition to 21 states and the District of Columbia in the U.S., IMPERFECT poets also live in Australia, Haiti, and Italy. Here is a historical mini mistake-maker poem from one of our Australian poets, Kat Apel:

A patron decried
the potato; ‘Not fried!’ –
so I sliced it in strips,
’cause I was spitting chips!*

Kat explains: There are different versions of the first potato chip story - but this is one of them, attributing the first chips to George (Crum) Speck, after someone complained (multiple times) that his fried potatoes were soggy.

* spitting chips is an Aussie slang meaning angry/annoyed.

George Speck with "Aunt Kate" Wicks

When I was looking up photos of George (Crum) Speck, I discovered that he named a restaurant after a mistake! One of Speck's customers was Cornelius Vanderbilt (founder of the university in Nashville). Vanderbilt, who had trouble remembering Speck's name, mistakenly called him "Crum." Speck liked "Crum" because he thought "a crumb is bigger than a speck," so he ended up calling his next restaurant "Crum's"!

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Kat also spotted something that reminded her of kintsugi: beautiful manuscript repair.

KATHRYN APEL is a born-and-bred farm girl who’s scared of cows. She lives among the gum trees, cattle and kangaroos on an Australian grazing property. Kat has five published books, including a rhyming picture book (about a cow stuck in the mud) and three verse novels.

Found!

Are you familiar with found poems? To make a found poem, you "find" a poem within some other text. Blackout poems, like what Austin Kleon does, are found poems. IMPERFECT poet Robyn Hood Black talks about found poems on her blog.

Here's one that IMPERFECT poet Kat Apel created from our cover reveal:

Kintsugi

Precious scars
filling cracks
with liquid gold,
mended
more beautiful;
broken history
displayed with pride;

imperfection golden.