"Sing scrapple" is the kind of opening that belongs to a grand occasion, the old epic habit of calling on a Muse to sing. The joke is that the subject is a loaf of pork scraps bound with cornmeal and buckwheat. The ode is traditionally a form for exalted subjects, and Dave Bonta uses it to praise something most people would rather not look at too closely. The poem is also entirely sincere. Its central idea is that the unglamorous, the leftover and the "gray & gritty" deserve celebration, and that eating can be a gloriously physical, unembarrassed pleasure.
The poem moves in three stages. First comes a definition by catalogue: scrapple as "relative of head cheese," made from "every part / that couldn't be cured / into ham or crammed / into sausage casings." Then comes a burst of defensive scorn aimed at the "ignorant mass / of weiner-eaters." Finally there is a set of cooking instructions that turns into an invitation to feast. The opening lines are fragments with no main verb, as if the speaker were too eager to wait for grammar. The poem only settles into full sentences when it says, flatly, "This is a square meal," and the plainness of that statement feels earned.
The line breaks do a lot of the comic work. The first line ends on a hyphen, "buckwheat-," and the next picks up "& cornmeal mush-stuffed," so the ingredients seem to spill across the break the way the mush fills its mould. The ampersands add to the casual, kitchen-table feel. Near the end the same trick returns with "go hog- / wild," where the break splits a compound word and makes the reader pause before the pun lands.
The word choice is where the poem is wittiest. "Oleaginous" is a fancy, almost medical word for oily, and it sits beside the blunt "grunt" in the line "up to & including / the oleaginous grunt." That line recalls the saying that a pig is used up "but for the squeal," and the poem takes the boast one step further by serving up the sound as well. The phrase "gray matter" appears near the start as a name for the hog's brain, and "gray / & gritty mush" returns in the last line, so the poem's colour comes back at the end. In between, the food becomes "the color of earth," which makes it seem honest and rooted, the opposite of the "pink / & prefitted" hot dog. The phrase "square meal" works two ways, as the old idiom for a proper, filling dinner and as a nod to the slabs scrapple is sliced into. "Butt of jokes" does the same, since a joke about a pig's rear end is exactly what the scrapple-hater would make.
The satire of the "weiner-eaters" is the poem's sharpest turn. "Ignorant mass" borrows the voice of a snob, but here the snobbery is pointed at people who like their meat smooth, uniform and easy to swallow. The phrase "prefitted for the throat" suggests food that has been designed so nobody has to think about where it came from. Scrapple, by contrast, admits what it is.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the poem has plenty of sound. The hard consonants of "cured," "crammed," "grunt," "butt" and "gritty" make the language feel as coarse as its subject. The rhythm speeds up during the frying, "slap in the hot / fat of a griddle & fry," where the short stressed words land like spatula strokes. Then it slows to the monosyllables of "a thick / brown skin," as the crust forms. The "Grade-A / maple syrup" adds a touch of mock-luxury, a bit of official quality stamped on a humble plate.
The ending is an order, and the poem reaches it by a neat reversal. The speaker tells us to "go hog- / wild, wallow in the gray / & gritty mush," and in doing so makes the diner into the animal, to be eaten and eaten as. It refuses the squeamish distance most people keep between themselves and what they eat. Judging by the poem's tone, the real target of the joke is embarrassment. By pairing a lofty form with a mud-coloured breakfast food, the poem argues that a thing's worth does not depend on how it looks, and it makes that argument with enough relish that you almost want to pick up a fork.