Free Verse
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Comment by bgold43 on June 6th, 2008 at 4:25 am
Of note would be a humorous take on Free Verse,
the life & times of archy & mehitabel by don marquis. (Lower case obligatory).
This, a classic of it’s kind from the 1920s, in humorous fashion, dealt with serious subject matter dear to that time, namely the the transmigration of souls.
Here is a quote from Donmarquis.com;
THEY ARE THE MOST UNLIKELY OF FRIENDS: Archy is a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel is an alley cat with a celebrated past — she claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life. Together, cockroach and cat are the foundation of one of the most engaging collections of light poetry to come out of the twentieth century.
“expression is the need of my soul,” declares Archy, who labored as a free-verse poet in an earlier incarnation. At night, alone, he dives furiously on the keys of Don Marquis’ typewriter to describe a cockroach’s view of the world, rich with cynicism and humor. It’s difficult enough to operate the typewriter’s return bar to get a fresh line of paper; all of Archy’s dispatches are written lowercase, and without punctuation, because he is unable to hit both shift and letter keys to produce a capital letter.
“boss i am disappointed in some of your readers,” he writes, weary of having to explain the mechanics of his literary output. ” … they are always interested in technical details when the main question is whether the stuff is literature or not.”
It is.
This Web page celebrates the genius of Don Marquis, the creator of Archy and Mehitabel. Marquis was a writer for The Evening Sun in New York when, in 1916, he introduced Archy the cockroach in his daily column, The Sun Dial. For six years Archy’s prodigious output found a home in The Evening Sun (later renamed The Sun), and for four years after that in the New York Tribune. When Marquis left newspapering in 1926 he took Archy with him, to Collier’s magazine and a handful of other publications. In all, he wrote nearly 500 sketches featuring Archy, Mehitabel, Pete the pup, Freddy the rat, and assorted fleas, spiders, ghosts and martians. The vast majority of the sketches were written under daily deadline pressure, but the simplicity of their style and the humanness of cockroach and cat give them timeless appeal.
The first collection of Archy’s writing, “archy and mehitabel” (1927), is still in print in paperback, and used hardbacks appear regularly in bookstores and online auctions. Other titles include “archys life of mehitabel” (1933), “archy does his part” (1935) and the omnibus volume “the lives and times of archy and mehitabel” (1940), as well as two recent anthologies of long-forgotten sketches: “archyology” (1996) and “archyology ii” (1998).
I heartily recommend a book that has been in my family for two generations now entering its third!
Brian Goldstein
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