What about Ogden Nash, you say? Well, his best stuff is really really short:
Reflection On A Wicked World
Purity
Is obscurity.
and:
Further Reflection on Parsley
Parsley
Is gharsely.
He also has some very long (too long) stuff that is unevenly brilliant. His longer things are often so rambling and so littered with untidy padding it can be quite a trial to read (compared to, for example, the light verse of kindred people like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, which is always satisfyingly tight and competently edited and never gives you even a moment’s urgent desire to snarl get this to the nearest poetry workshop young feller me lad which, unfortunately, happens quite a lot with O.N.). Anyhow, two things about Ogden Nash. One, as Dana Gioia points out in this essay: Nash's literary career was sui generis. What other American poet of the Modernist era published best-selling collections of verse, collaborated in Hollywood screenplays, authored Broadway lyrics, recited his work on radio variety shows, and served as a television game show panelist—all the while writing poems on contract for several of America's biggest magazines?
A movie-star poet! Good for him, although all that probably explains his rathery iffy fly-by-nightish status these days and why he gets called a “neglected” American poet. The other thing about him, and why I decided to talk about him today-or-rather-yesterday, is the name of this blog. A couple of people (who apparently think that either they or the blog will explode if they actually post comments to the blog) have said to me, what’s with the name of this blog?
The name of this blog comes from this Ogden Nash piece. And he got it, in his turn, from Hamlet, that most insolent of princes. It has also - although one does not hear it as much as one probably should – entered the language. I take myself seriously, as you can see. (And next time you have a question, please leave a comment on the blog. Do not email me with questions about this blog. Thank-you.)
One last thing from Nash - a couple of extracts from his send-up of Wordsworth, also known as Kind of an Ode to Duty:
O Duty,
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously?
Why art thou clad so abominously?
and:
Why art thou so like an April post-mortem
Or something that died in the ortumn?
Above all, why dost thou continue to hound me?
Why art thou always albatrossly hanging around me? <><><>
And, to round it all off, here’s one last thing from me:
Instructions
(following Ogden Nash)
Gallop down the sunny hillside
of your forgotten duty
sing in a raucous voice as you run
because duty has its place
and its place is a far one.
And when guilt
throws itself over you like dishwater
from your lover’s latticed window,
cheer for yourself from home,
from the summit where the falcons are.
__________
Happy Friday evening, all.
