Fifty (50) years ago, on 19 April 1968, I wrote in my journal, "The Book of Forms has arrived! It has the most incredible art nouveau cover." The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paperback original.
The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986 (www.UPNE.com), ISBN 0874513804, cloth; 0874513812, paper.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible."
The epitaph is lapidary verse; that is, a gravestone inscription (not to be confused with the epigraph). It is one of the two major short forms of satirics, the other being the epigram which has been defined as terse verse with a cutting edge. The clerihew, a particular type of epigram, was invented by E[dmund] Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). It is a quatrain in dipodic [two-beat] meters rhyming aabb, the first line of which is both the title and the name of a person:
SIGMUND FREUD AND KARL JUNG
Sigmund Freud
Became annoyed
When his ego
Sailed to Montego.
Sigmund Freud
Became more annoyed
When his id
Fled to Madrid.
Sigmund Freud
Grew most annoyed
When his superego
Tried to Montenegro.
Sigmund Freud
Was nearly destroyed
When his alter-ego
Showed up in Oswego.
Karl Jung
Found himself among
Archetypes
Of various stripes.
-- Lewis Turco
In 2014, the history of the Clerihew took a curious twist. According to its publisher, the collection of The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram, with illustrations by Julia Anderson Miller, [North Liberty, IA: Ice Cube Press, 2014, 146 pp., incl. 128 illus., trade paper, ISBN 97818888160772], by the “Legendary bookseller at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, Paul Ingram,” came to light after having been “long lost,” apparently in the author’s basement. In his Introduction Ingram says, “I started writing Clerihews about twenty years ago. The process seemed involuntary, rather quick Tourette’s-like explosions bound by rhyme and form. I would speak a name and the rest of the poem would spill from me without careful thought.” Oddly enough, Ingram’s collection begins with this clerihew:
Carl Gustav Jung
Was impressively hung,
Which sorely annoyed
The good Dr. Freud.
Wikipedia says, “E. C. Bentley (10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this (1905):
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's.’”
Perhaps in my definition above I ought to have said simply “podic” rather than “dipodic,” because Clerihew’s practice was to allow his lines three, or as many as four beats if an author such as Ingram wishes; even I allowed myself three stresses in some of the lines of my examples above. But the inventor of this form was even less strict than the Wikipedia definition, for sometimes Clerihew didn’t write about people:
The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.
And sometimes personal opinion is more important than biography:
What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.
On occasion fiction overcomes even personal opinion in Clerihew’s epigrams:
Edward the Confessor
Slept under the dresser.
When that began to pall,
He slept in the hall.
Clerihew even allowed himself at times to be judgmental:
It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame.
But this is a lesson, not an encyclopedia entry, and the book under consideration is certainly a worthy descendent of the work of the English journalist who invented the form, which Ingram stretches to the breaking point on occasion:
Margaret Mead
Used to fart when she peed,
A fact well known
To every Samoan.
Of course, the object of derision in a clerihew must be famous, or at least well-known, if the verselet is going to be effective:
Charles Baudelaire
Picked at his scrotal hair,
And found a weevil
In his Flowers of Evil.
Baudelaire’s reputation has stood the test of time, but others of Ingram’s targets may not be quite so lucky:
Forrest Gump
Told Donald Trump
“You know I like you
We have the same IQ.
Although Clerihew was a journalist, it was not his practice to be historically accurate, as Ingram is well aware:
Rebecca West
Became obsessed,
With the nether smells
Of H. G. Wells.
And
Vivian Vance
Put cheese in her pants,
Both Swiss and Havarti,
When she used to party.
In Jul of 2012 Jack Foley wrote me,
Lew,
Here are some probably objectionable [Clerihews] by Jonathan Williams:
Alma Mahler
could really holler!
On those odd, ur-Freudian occasions when she took it up the butt,
she often hit fortissimo high-C and commenced doing the "Danube Strut."
Leos Janacek
in photographs looks a bloody blank Czech.
His music, as it unfurls,
appeals mostly to squirrels.
Franz Liszt
even played the piano when he pissed.
It was odd to see his piano stool dripping
during performances of Annes de Pelerinage that were
absolutely gripping.
Puccini
is arguably better than zucchini.
But a pound of spinach
could write a better symphony than Zdenek Fibich.
Thus Jonathan Williams from his "Clerihews." Williams comments,
“The clerihew was invented in 1890 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who was a schoolboy of sixteen at St. Paul's in London when the divine numen of Orpheus struck him. His best one seems to me:
The digestion of Milton
Was unequal to Stilton.
He was only feeling so-so
When he wrote Il Penseroso.
“He never got any better than that, and few people have ever managed to equal him, though such as Auden, John Sparrow, Constant Lambert, James Elroy Flecker, Maurice Hare, and Gavin Ewart have tried. I can recall one sublime effort:
How odd
of God
to choose
the Jews.
“This was written by the now-obscured World War One poet William Norman Ewer (1885-1976). It makes me quote the equally sublime rebuttal by Leo Rosten, (as someone says,) the Yiddishist:
Not odd
of God.
Goyim
Annoy 'im!
“E.C. Bentley went on to Oxford, was a lifelong friend of G.K. Chesterton, wrote editorials for The Daily Telegraph for more than twenty years, and is remembered as the author of the detective novel Trent's Last Case.”
So:
Turco, that crazy fellow Lewis
will sometimes curse and even beshrew us
but mind your manners, you old schoolmarms,
this man wrote The Book of Forms.
— Jack Foley
I replied,
Wouldn't it have worked out better if I'd written The Book of Farms?
Jack said, “I have some sort of precedent. From an old song:
“Just a Love Nest
Cozy and warm
Like a dove nest
Down on a farm
“Here's one for old Jonathan:
Jonathan Williams, lamented, gone,
Had pages he put his pen upon
Now he's in his grave, out he canna step —
He depends on people like me for his rep.”
Of all these examples, the only one that looks like a Clerihew is the “old song” Jack quotes above, but even that is not a precise Clerihew if the current definition of the term is that the first line is only the subject’s name. Very few of the examples above, including those by Bentley, inventor of the form (which has clearly evolved since he wrote his first), are true Clerihews. Here is a Clerihew for Jack:
Jack Foley
Thought he was holy,
But found he was not
When it got too hot.
-- Lewis Turco
And here is his epitaph from Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets2:
R.I.P. JACK FOLEY
August 9, 1940
Here lies Jack Foley
Decomposing slowly.
When he composed faster
It was a disaster.
-- Wesli Court
Jack himself clearly knows how to write a true Clerihew; here are a few by him:
Nina Serrano
doesn’t play the piahno[,]
but she sings with her verses
even when they are curses
Mary Ann Sullivan
is better for you than Serutan[;]
She makes verses and videos that tick-
even though you’re a rather lapsed Cat’lic.
Dana Gioa
will never annoy ya[;]
He’s clever and smart and dutiful
and careful to show why we pity the beautiful
(The second couplet turns into prose like those of Johathan Williams; they are not dipodic.)
Al Young
has a song he’s sung
on pages and stages:
he writes for the ages[.]
Writing Exercise:
Write four or five (or more) Clerihews on your friends’ names, or on any names you choose.
The Virginia Quarterly Review "The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).
The Tower Journal Two short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.
The Tower Journal A story, "The Car," and two poems, "Fathers" and "Year by Year"
The Tower Journal Memoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.
The Michigan Quarterly Review This is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).
The Gawain Poet An essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.
The Black Death Bryan Bridges' interesting article on the villanelle and the terzanelle with "The Black Death" by Wesli Court as an example of the latter.
Seniority: Six Shakespearian Tailgaters This is a part of a series called "Gnomes" others of which have appeared in TRINACRIA and on the blog POETICS AND RUMINATIONS.
Reinventing the Wheel, Modern Poems in Classical Meters An essay with illustrations of poems written in classical meters together with a "Table of Meters" and "The Rules of Scansion" in the Summer 2009 issue of Trellis Magazine
Republicanation
I. MAINE'S GOVERNORAMUS
"if you think the Democrats hate me now, wait till you see what I do next!"
Paul Le Page
Can't act his age:
Mentally four, he
Is physically hoary.
II. Mitt Romney
Delivers a homily,
A homely message
Concerning dressage.
III. Anne Romney,
Though quite comely,
Looks a bit bony
On her dancing pony.
IV. Tim Pawlenty
Had B. O. Plenty
But wasn't racy
Like Dick Tracy.
V. Mitt Romney
Had insomni-
A, thought he'd rely on
Paul Ryan.
VI. Paul Ryan
Despises pie in
A blue sky,
Prefers a lie.
VII. Mitt Romney
May sit on me,
But please take note:
He'll lose my vote.
VIII.
Rush Limbaugh
Liked a bimbaugh
Once in a while
To dilute his bile.
August 18, 2012 in American History, Clerihews, Commentary, Current Affairs, Humor & Satire, Punography, Satire, Verse forms | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Mitt Romney, Paul Le Page, Paul Ryan