Tuesday 18 May 2010

Humorous poetry sucks: parodies can be hilarious

I can’t stand so-called humorous poetry: I hate the chortlingly gleeful, self-congratulatory way people read it. But I do enjoy parodies of famous poets – how wonderful to have a style so identifiable that others can ape it affectionately (almost all parody poems are affectionate). 

Here’s a selection of my favourites, starting with “Place-Names of China” by Alan Bennett:
   
                    Bolding Vedas! Shanks New Nisa!
                    Trusty Lichfield swirls it down
                    To filter beds on Ruislip Marshes
                    From my lav in Kentish Town

                    The Burlington! The Rochester!
                    Oh those names of childhood loos -
                    Nursie rattling at the door knob:
                    'Have you done your Number Twos?'

                    Lady typist - office party - 
                    Golly! All that gassy beer!
                    Tripping home down Hendon Parkway
                    To her improved Windemere.

                    Here I sit, alone at sixty,
                    Bald and fat and full of sin,
                    Cold the seat and loud the cistern
                    As I read the Harpic tin.

This is so perfect that for many years I thought the last stanza - which had lodged itself in my memory - was a piece of genuine Betjeman.

I came to A Shropshire Lad relatively late in life, through Vaughan William’s musical setting of six of the finest verses. For those who haven’t read it, it’s full of irritating references to “lads” (the word obviously carried some sexual charge for the young homosexual author, A. E. Housman, but it rings terribly false now) and a seemingly endless stream of deaths, mostly violent.  This led Hugh Kingsmill to write:

                    What, still alive at twenty-two, 
                    A fine upstanding chap like you? 

Its only fault is the use of the word “chap” instead of the ubiquitous “lad”.

Even better is this, from Humbert Wolfe:

                    When lads have done with labour
                    In Shropshire, one will cry
                    "Let's go and kill a neighbour,"
                    And t'other answers "Aye!"
                    So this one kills his cousins,
                    And that one kills his dad;
                    And, as they hang by dozens
                    At Ludlow, lad by lad,
                    Each of them one-and-twenty,
                    All of them murderers,
                    The hangman mutters: "Plenty
                    Even for Housman's verse."

I’m sure you’ll all remember this, from Wordsworth’s “Lucy”:

                    She dwelt among the untrodden ways
                    Beside the springs of Dove,
                    A Maid whom there were none to praise
                    And very few to love.

Hartley Coleridge, the son of Wordsworth’s erstwhile pal, Samuel Taylor, offered this version, where Wordsworth replaces Lucy:

                    He lived amidst th' untrodden ways
                    To Rydal Lake that lead: --
                    A bard whom there were none to praise,
                    And very few to read.

Anthony Brode wrote a wonderful Gerard Manley Hopkins’ parody after reading the following on a packet of breakfast cereal: "Delicious heart-of-the-corn, fresh-from-the-oven flakes are sparkled and spangled with sugar for a can't-be-resisted flavour." Brode’s poem was entitled “Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins”:

                    Serious over my cereals I broke one breakfast my fast
                    With something-to-read-searching retinas retrained by print 
                        on  a packet;
                    Sprung rhythm sprang, and I found (the mind fact-mining at 
                        last)
                    An influence Father-Hopkins-fathered on the copy-writing
                        racket.

                    Parenthesis-proud, bracket-bold, happiest with hyphens,
                    The writers stagger intoxicated by terms, adjective-unsteadied
                    Describing in graceless phrases fizzling like soda siphons
                    All things, crisp, crunchy, malted, tangy, sugared and shredded.

                    Far too, yes, too early we are urged to be purged, to savour
                    Salt, malt, and phosphates in English twisted and torn,
                    As, sparkled and spangled with sugar for a can't-be-resisted 
                        flavour,
                    Come fresh-from-the-oven flakes direct from the heart of the 
                        corn.

T.S. Eliot is another perfect subject for parody. There are several fine ones, but my favourite is Henry Reed’s “Chard Willow”:

                    As we get older we do not get any younger.
                    Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
                    And this time last year I was fifty-four,
                    And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
                    And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
                    To see my time over again— if you can call it time:
                    Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
                    Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

                    There are certain precautions— though none of them very
                        reliable—
                    Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
                    But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
                    The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
                   
I was going to include a favourite Kipling parody, which includes the obviously fake lines: 

                    ‘E isn't one o' the reg'lar Line, nor 'e isn't one of the crew. 
                    'E's a kind of a giddy harumfrodite -- soldier an' sailor too! 

But when I looked it up, I discovered the poem in question is actually by Kipling. (I’m pretty sure there’s a parody which contains the lines “I was a poet - her majesty’s poet/ Solder and sailor too”, but I can’t find it.) So here’s a famous parody, “To R.K.” by J.K. Stephen:

                    Will there never come a season
                    Which shall rid us from the curse
                    Of a prose which knows no reason
                    And an unmelodious verse:
                    When the world shall cease to wonder
                    At the genius of an Ass,
                    And a boy's eccentric blunder
                    Shall not bring success to pass:

                    When mankind shall be delivered
                    From the clash of magazines,
                    And the inkstand shall be shivered
                    Into countless smithereens:
                    When there stands a muzzled stripling,
                    Mute, beside a muzzled bore:
                    When the Rudyards cease from kipling
                    And the Haggards Ride no more. 

I’m not sure if anyone reads the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg any more, but most people must be familiar with “Howl”:

                    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, 
                        starving hysterical naked,
                    dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
                        for an angry fix;
                    Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
                        connection
                    to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

I far prefer the ending to Louis Simpson’s “Squeal”:

        I saw the best minds of my generation 
                    Reading their poems to Vassar girls, 
                    Being interviewed by Mademoiselle. 
                    Having their publicity handled by professionals. 
                    When can I go into an editorial office 
                    And have my stuff published because I'm weird? 
                    I could go on writing like this forever . . . 


The only problem with all the above is that it takes a while before you can read the original poets again without laughing. 

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