If you're not a regular reader of the Baltimore Sun's Diing@Large blog, you visit to check out the winners of the First Annual Scrapple Poetry Contest. Realizing that scrapple poetry abounds, blogger Laua Vozzella made the contest tougher by awarding extra points for including the words "offal," "apple" and "shrapnel." Here's the first verse of the winning poem, "The Emperor of Scrapple" by Voodoo Pork (After Wallace Stevens's The Emperor of Ice-Cream, with apologies):

Call the wrangler of big porkers,

The crepuscular one, and bid him whip

I abattoir vats offalescent orts.

Let the sows dawdle in such pens

As they are used to dwell, and let the boars

Bring apples as porcine gift victuals.

Let be be finale of eat.

The only emperor is the emperor of scrapple.

You can read the rest of the poem and the second place finisher on this blog post. The rest of the entry scraps can be found as comments here.

Baltimore Sun photo by Kim Hairston