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 The
tax-man is icummen in - as you may have noticed. As it happens,
most poets, and everyone who works for The Mediadrome, are not troubled
a great deal by this - after all, as we know, art is its own reward!
Yeah, right.
So anyway, I thought it was appropriate to revisit nonsense verse
again. As we remember, not all comic verse is nonsense verse, but
the aim of all nonsense verse is to amuse, and perhaps shock. A
few weeks ago, I wrote a little piece to mark the death of Spike
Milligan, the man who is largely responsible for the surrealist
aspect of English humor (or 'humour' as he would have written it),
and a man capable of nonsense verse:
Rain
There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in,
But they're ever so small
That's why rain is thin.
In
1926, E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) published is 5, and it leads
off with a FOREWORD that deserves to be on every poet's wall; I quote
here from it briefly:
 "On
the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original
or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an introduction
to this book.
At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from
original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words,
by quoting The Eternal Question and Immortal Answer of burlesk,
viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child? - No, I'd hit her with
a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that
precision which creates movement."
"It
is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity
Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagra Falls)
that my "poems" are competing.
They are also competing with each other, with elephants, and with
El Greco."
The following is poem VIII in that collection:
mr youse needn't be so spry
concerning questions arty
each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party
gimme the he-man's solid bliss
for youse ideas i'll match youse
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
 Ogden
Nash (1902-1971) is (or was) a gifted nonsense poet, except (of course)
as with all important nonsense poetry sense is the whole point. Nash
achieves this by positively striving for rhyme and the unexpected
disjunction, sacrificing absolutely everything else - meter, cadence,
line length, whatever is necessary. In our last essay on nonsense
poetry I wrote about Lewis Carroll, whose methods could not be more
different to those of my three poets this week. For that reason, and
perhaps because it seems once again timely, here is a Nash:
Mini-Jabberwocky
Most people would find rising unemployment
A source of unenjoyment
Not so the anonymous presidential advisor
Whose comment might have been wiser.
He has informed the nation
That rising unemployment is merely a statistical aberration.
I don't want to argue or squabble,
But that gook I won't gobble.
Christopher
Isherwood (1904-1986), best known perhaps for his books about Berlin
before the Second World War, which included Goodbye to Berlin.
This became the source for the stage and movie musical Cabaret;
he wrote poetry also, collaborating with his friend W. H. Auden. He
wrote the following piece of nonsense verse, which I have in two slightly
different versions: I quote the one I know best:
The
Common Cormorant
The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paper bag
The reason you will see no doubt
Is to keep the lightning out.
But what these unobservant birds
Have never noticed is that herds
Of wandering bears may come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.
In
a way, one could regard this as the perfect nonsense verse: it looks
like poetry, the words appear to be rational and grammatically correct,
but it touches reality at no point!
Bit like some of my articles, now I come to think about it.
Anyway, the poems for the week are: Granny,
by Spike Milligan; If
He Scholars, Let Him Go, by Ogden Nash; and nobody
loses all the time, by E. E. Cummings.
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