(There’s a contest at the end.)
A few days ago, the phrase musk and testosterone led me to the verse form the double dactyl, and I was reminded of the doubly dactylic poet Saskia Hamilton, who got attention from Ben Zimmer on Language Log a while before that (“She’s got two sibilants, no bilabial plosives”), thanks to a song; from the song’s Wikipedia entry:
Saskia Hamilton was featured in the album Lonely Avenue as the subject of the eponymous song written by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby who ‘thought she had a fantastic name for her line of work’. The liner notes indicate that the song’s narrator is a teenage poetry nerd. Ben Folds commissioned Charlie McDonnell to make a video for the song.
And then — synchronicity! — she turned up in the June 9 New York Review of Books, in Christopher Ricks’s review (“Mixing Mystery and Intrigue”) of The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (ed. by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto), a book with many translations of Anglo-Saxon riddle poems. Including Hamilton’s “It is Written in Scriptures”.