Just banning "Trees" would save a million trees

Kay Ryan was named poet laureate of the United States. "I might take it upon myself," she said, "to prevent all bad poetry from being published."

She's a poet,
And boy, does she know it.
Just because she's the Laureate,
She feels entitled to excoriate
The poetasters among us?
As if we were fungus,
To be scraped away.
But how can say
What is superior in verse
Without preserving what's worse?

Fraternite, egalite, aliteracy

"I see no point in reading." -- Louis XIV of France (1638-1715).

And then there was Louis Quatorze,
For whom all books were great bores;
   No Frenchman of breeding
   Would waste time on reading
While shirking the company of whores.

And how am I today?

Interviewee: "Do I think the situation is irreversible?"
Interviewee: "Absolutely not."
Interviewee: "Do I think we'll have to make some drastic changes in order to reverse things?"
Interviewee: "Absolutely."

No further need for reporters these days
 -- Let's put them all on the shelves;
We'll simply make do with this latter-day craze
Of interviewing ourselves.

Travel-logy

You tempt me not, o tower Eiffel,
O Louvre, you are the merest trifle.
While some may say that Paris sizzles,
I’d be there on the days its drizzles.

Why lug my camera off to Rome
For ruins? Have you seen my home?

Don’t talk to me of Hong Kong’s charm—
I’d rather see a poultry farm.

Darkest Africa? Not I—
It teems with anthropophagi!

Scandanavia? Too chilly.
Switzerland? The Alps? Too hilly!

Big Ben, Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square—
I find no romance anywhere.

No, London’s not my cup of tea,
And neither is the Baltic, see?

New Zealand fills me with no zeal—
I’d long for home again, I feel.

The Riviera’s just too crass.
On Monte Carlo’s games I’ll pass.

Swilling beer in bawdy Munich?
Not for me, though I’m no eunuch;

No, just the shy, retiring type,
Whose greatest joys are slipper, pipe,

An armchair where, with quilt of flannel,
I can watch the Travel Channel.

How the Grunch stole driving

Every hick down in Hickville liked driving a lot,
But the Grunch, who lived north of Hickville,
Did not!
The Grunch hated autos, and people who ran them;
If he'd had his way, the government would ban them!
It could be that his head was screwed on the wrong way;
It could be, perhaps, that he just had a sleigh.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
Was the Grunch, being Arab, didn't want to play ball.

(Grunch: proper noun, a portmanteau word composed of gas and crunch)

A heads-up to the baggage handlers

“60 severed heads were discovered on a Southwest Airlines flight to Fort Worth, Texas.” -- Harper’s Magazine.

Today's Perverse Verse:

Were they all in one trunk?
Don’t you think it would flunk
Pre-boarding inspection?
Did Economy section
Lose their heads when they learned
That these riders had earned
Discounts that were moreso?
(Flying without torso.)

Just banning "Trees" would have saved a million trees

Kay Ryan was named poet laureate of the United States. "I might take it upon myself," she said, "to prevent all bad poetry from being published."

She's a poet,
And boy, does she know it.
Just because she's the Laureate,
She feels entitled to excoriate
The poetasters among us?
As if we were fungus,
To be scraped away.
But how can she say
What's superior in verse
Without preserving what's worse?

Noisy Parker

Writer and wit Dorothy Parker died on this day in 1967. She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, journalists, raconteurs and general idlers and time wasters that regularly met at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City to drink and insult everyone including each other, and to exchange the barbs and one-liners they'd saved up for the occasion.

Parker was probably the most talented of the group. She wrote several short stories that have stood the test of time, notably "Big Blonde," and her poems ("Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.") are still quoted.

She apparently coined the phrases "what the hell," "one-night stand," and "ball of fire."

"Maybe it is only I," Parker wrote, "but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies."

For more about Dorothy Parker, visit Today in Farewells

Borne back into the present

May 5 is a palindromic date (5.05) -- one that is the same backward as forward.

There is no tome
That's a palindrome,
Nor scarcely a paragraph, I believe;
The form is plain,
As: when the first swain
Said "MADAM, I'M ADAM" to EVE.

Do you clerihew?

Edmund Clerihew Bentley died today in 1956. He invented the verse form named after him, the clerihew. Here is one of his famous ones:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Bentley's first collection of verse in this vein, Biography for Beginners, was published in 1905. The name clerihew was bestowed on the form soon after.

There are no rigid rules to creating a clerihew, but basically it should be a humorous quatrain about someone well-known, rhymed as two couplets with lines of unequal length. The name of the subject usually ends the first or second line.

Here are some clerihews by the Master:

The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

The meaning of the poet Gay
Was always as clear as day,
While that of the poet Blake
Was often practically opaque.

I doubt if King John
Was a sine qua non.
I could rather imagine it
Of any other Plantagenet.

Dante Alighieri
Seldom troubled a dairy.
He wrote the Inferno
On a bottle of Pernod.

Nicholas Bentley followed in his father's footsteps with this admirable clerihew:

Cecil B. De Mille,
Rather against his will,
Was persuaded to leave Moses
Out of 'The Wars of the Roses'.

Here’s my attempt:

The playwright Moliere
Could be quite a holy terror.
While telling audiences they were vile,
He had them rolling in the aisle.