Nette "Nettletongue" Sorengratz III, The Poet (1931-1999)

Born to Nette Sorengratz II and Argassy Trink during the Summer of Perpetual Mistakes, Nette Sorengratz was the only child in the Sorengratz family of fourteen to develop the Othello’s Sight, a rare form of savantism in which a child can only speak in poetic verse. Considered a curse within the Gratzian community of Eastern Poland – a distant relation of the Durengratz Conclave of Bavaria – Nette spent her early years at Specjalna Szkoła Wiecznych Kwiatów, where she received private sessions from nuns of the Ursulines of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus, an order of the Roman Catholic church. These sessions became the standard by which King George VI’s stutter was treated, though they were ultimately unsuccessful in curing Nette of Othello's Sight. Nette remained a student of the nuns throughout the Second World War before gaining passage to London aboard the SS Szybkaryba, a former Polish supply ship converted into a transport and commissioned as a mobile immigration platform.

Little is known about Nette's life during the Second World War except that she convinced two German merchants to defect from Nazi Germany and provide vital intelligence to the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action in France; the merchants fled to Britain and supplied the intelligence via pigeons direct to a BCRA cell in Paris, thereby aiding French resistance fighters in the campaign against Nazi Germany. This is the only verifiable fact of Nette's involvement during the war, as the remaining stories are largely considered to be myths or apocryphal tales. These stories are collected in The Many Tales of The Poet by Andrej Soule and From Myth to Legend: How Nettletongue Became a Folk Hero by Dr. Jill Michaels.

After arriving in London, Nette took up residence with the British Knights of the Word, an organization housed in a decommissioned Second World War bunker beneath Trafalgar Square. There, she joined W.H. Auden, Orville Whickenboch, E.E. Cummings, R.L.J. Gorde, T.S. Eliot, and the Eponymous Bill in order to design a new and wholly modern form of poetry that would shock the masses. In 1959, Nette made a breakthrough, devising alternating internal and external rhymes based on a mathematical randomizer sequence. Her most important work, 1961's The Telling Sad Bells Ignobly Swells Bad, was the longest epic poem ever recorded; it featured 2.3 million words across 395,000 lines and is the only known poem of substantial length to rhyme the first and last stanzas. The work was so influential among the British Knights of the Word that it was performed in Trafalgar Square and local pubs in North England on a daily basis for eight months with little regard to local laws or the wishes of the public. These readings eventually inspired Douglas Adams to invent Vogon poetry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in part because his ears began to bleed on his second attempt at listening.

Following The Telling Sad Bells Ignobly Swells Bad, Nette took a leave of absence from the British Knights of the Word and became a recluse in a cave on the Iberian Peninsula (actual location unknown). In 1985, she emerged again only to discover that her work had earned her a new nickname: Nettletongue. In her journals, she claimed to be so offended by this nickname that she wrote The Jelly Dresses in Nightly Messes of Spilt Shade and retribution. The epic poem was written in an invented language called Slow and featured an alternating iambic/trochaic pentameter with a AFDEC rhyme scheme. The work caused riots in three British cities before it was deemed a danger to the public and banned.

However, this did not stop Nettletongue from pursuing a poetic war against the public and the “system.” Every year from 1985 until her “death” in 1999, she released a new work of poetry and had it delivered via a guerilla campaign to schools, churches, and pubs. The British government attempted to suppress these efforts but were ultimately unsuccessful. It is believed that Nettletongue relied on a network of guerilla poets, though this remains unconfirmed.

In 1999, Nettletongue completed her final work, I, Nobody in the Greek Alphabet, a surrealist poem about the afterlife which some believe helped her transition to the next life (theoretically one of fourteen). Whether this is true remains to be seen. What is known is this: Nette Sorengratz III's body was never found; all that remained in her bed were 3,000 pages of poetry intentionally mixed up with no way to discern a correct order. To date, no scholars have discovered the meaning or order of these pages, though several have been hospitalized with mysterious knee problems and gout.