Feast of Light Verse, Heavy on the Humor

Recently I deplored the passing of light verse of the kind we used to get from Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker and Richard Armour.

Now that Armour has joined Nash and Parker in the great beyond, it might seem that that flickering light had gone out altogether.

When those three were in their prime, magazines and newspaper columns were peppered with their witty lines. Their brief verses encapsulated the joys and frustrations of modern life.

Take heart. The genre is not dead. I find from my mail that many minor versifiers are still out there plugging away, even with little hope of being published.

Several note that they used to contribute verse to the late Matt Weinstock and often made his column. Joseph Krengel of Santa Monica says Weinstock used 200 of his. In this one, he notes the perils of versifying:

One versifies, at risk, to wit,

Succeeding but in half of it!

Louis Gast of Laguna Hills says he made Weinstock’s column on his first try, with this one:

High on a Hollywood hill, I live

Higher, you can’t git up

Nightly, I see the Prudential Tower

All lit up.

Gast says he got this one into Walter Winchell’s column:

The snow, the snow, the beautiful snow

You slip on a chunk, and away you go

Scholer Bangs, press chairman of the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, writes that once in a Sacramento hotel he watched a man he took for a lobbyist dining with a gorgeous young woman he took for a State House secretary. Later Bangs labored from midnight until 3 a.m., filling his wastebasket with crumpled scribblings, and finally brought forth this:

BUSINESS TRIP

At home a saint,

Away -- he ain’t

Eileen Hunt Schilz of Alhambra submits one of her own:

California, here I stay

I shall never move away.

Loyd Rosenfield writes that he contributed many verses to the Saturday Evening Post and Atlantic, and offers this one from the Post:

HERE I AM!

Their stares of stark astonishment

Have told me, to my sorrow,

When people say ‘Drop in some time,’

They seldom mean tomorrow.

Gracie B. Wilson of Glendale denies my complaint that “the writing of light verse is a passing affliction.” She says, “I’ve been doing it on and off for 80 years, and it hasn’t passed yet!” Here’s one of her latest, and very contemporary:

Caesar had his Brutus

And George Bush has his Quayle

God help Americana

If Bush’s heart should fail

Charles Kaplan recalls that Franklin P. Adams (F.P.A.) often used verses in his column, and published a collection (“Innocent Merriment”) that included this one by John A. Holmes:

LINES PORTRAYING

A NORDIC REACTION TO THE

MYSTICISM OF THE EAST

It makes me sweat at every pore

To read of Rabindranath Tagore

(As you can see, Holmes’ titles were longer than his verses. Here’s another:

ON LEARNING THAT A LEADING

DRAMATIST HAS SKETCHED PLOTS

OF THIRTY PLAYS TO COME

I stagger and reel

From Eugene O’Neill

Jack Sacks of Indio applauds my praise of Samuel Hoffenstein--”a poet I admired in my college days a half century ago. There is a timelessness to his writing. I recall (before the days of freeways, interstate highways, entrance and exit ramps, and diamond lanes) his succinct:

Along the road the roses grow,

And Texaco.

Gast recalls attending readings in Greenwich Village (“for $2 you received a couple of tiny sandwiches and coffee and poetry”) at which Hoffenstein and E. E. Cummings read their unpublished verses. “It’s lovely to think back. There were no shootings except a few bootleggers; we liked each other, even in New York, and there was peace. Not the absence of war but personal, inner peace.”)

Yvonne M. Martin of El Toro recalls her favorite Armour.

GETTING THE BIRD

I peered at my face in the mirror for years,

And didn’t mind the crow’s feet.

So why now the tears?

Well, the rest of the crow is beginning to show.

To which I presume to add my own lines in memory of a man I was proud to know as a friend:

Richard Armour has gone away,

But his verse is here to stay.