D. A. POWELL all the tired kids ELIZABETH BARLOW have gone to bed What Beauty is For, 2019 orange lamps Saudade Oil on linen, 36 x 30 in (Diptych) on the coast highway the lady gaga concert has let out and the fog has rolled in I’ve got a guitarist’s fngers wrapped around my strings slightly out of tune there are no words D. A. Powell’s books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012). He lives and teaches in San Francisco, California. COURTESY THE ARTIST 78 D. A. Powell DAVID HATHWELL Again, in the dimmed assembly hall ELIZABETH BARLOW ready as a church for ritual, an evening exhibition of spectral warhorses: Beauty Above Me, Beauty Below Me, 2019 a something suite after an overture Sunday at the Oil on linen, 18 x 24 in to nothing, a long, lulling ride on a phantom gondola, before intermission Symphony a masterly seascape deemed the best. To recover ourselves, we stand, seek bright cleared spaces, regroup or roam. Next a young Polish (Finnish?) violin with an accomplished, quiet bearing and Tchaikovsky’s grand concerto, plush reliquary of fne feeling, so wan its gestures, so feeble its hold on the heart its frst devotees must have been ghosts, summoned tonight to this convocation of pale spirits. David Hathwell’s new collection, The Power of the Telling, follows Between Dog and Wolf (2017) and Muses (2016), his debut collection. A former English teacher, he has degrees in English from Stanford and Columbia Universities, and a degree in music theory from CUNY. He lives in San Francisco, California, and sings baritone in local choruses. Note about the poem: “Concert performance of symphonic overtures to dramas was common in the nineteenth century. An instrumental ‘barcarole’ imitates a Venetian boat song. The ‘best’ seascape is Debussy’s La Mer.” COURTESYARTISTTHE 80 David Hathwell ELIZABETH BARLOW JOHN BRISCOE n the school for Latin and Greek at Westminster,” “ reminisced Jeremy Bentham in 1827, “instruction I in the art of making nonsense verses under that An Imperfect Balance, 2018 name, precedes the art of making such verses as pretend to Oil on panel, 10 x 10 in The Ancient and sense.” “Such verses as pretend to sense”—there’s a phrase Honorable Art to launch a thousand indignant scholarly ships of screed. Bentham, the English philosopher and jurist, published those words in his monumental Rationale of Judicial Evi- of Light Verse dence (for which we can thank his adoring pupil, compiler and editor John Stuart Mill). Examining the history Five years later Charles Dodgson was born. Dodgson studied not at Westminster, but at Rugby. But if Rugby, of humor in poetry which later schooled poets such as Rupert Brooke, taught verse as Westminster did, it is little wonder that Dodgson, In academic America the prejudice writing under the pen name Lewis Carroll, produced such jewels of nonsense as “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and against humor in poetry is matched “Jabberwocky.” “Jabberwocky,” among other examples of only by the bias in favor of the sincere light verse, is included within the pages of the New Oxford autobiographical utterance. Book of English Verse and so many other anthologies of the best of English poetry. That inclusion confers a dignity, an —David Lehman, The American Poetry Review, honor, upon the genre. November–December 1995 Yet light verse appears as frequently as Halley’s comet in literary and popular magazines today. It is scorned as lowbrow, base-born babble not worthy of inclusion within the larger genre of poetry. It rose in prominence and popu- lar appeal in Dodgson’s time and again during the heyday of the New Yorker, when that “sophisticated humor maga- zine” printed light verse by such literary wits as Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley, and Ogden Nash. Is light verse truly like Halley’s comet, attaining ascendance only once every seventy-fve years or so? It appears not. The present period in poetry, a period of sustained stony seriousness, seems an aberration, one that soon will disappear like a fading, frightful apparition. Light verse is ancient and hardly the sole province of English. Its provenance may be traced to the Greeks of antiquity, though there’s no reason to think the Greeks invented it. (In Western civilization that is; the Chinese composed light verse much earlier, at least as early as the poems collected in Confucius’s Shijing [The Classic of Po- etry], from what we call the eleventh to the seventh centu- ries BCE.) Referring to wine, Homer famously joked (most probably wrote), “No poem was ever written by a drinker of water.” The frst book of Iliad contains the account of a COURTESYARTISTTHE CATAMARAN 83 That the limerick is Here is Lysistrata herself, translated by George Theodoridis, of energy as prodigious as Patrick’s, Columcille then es- Clément Marot and Pierre de Ronsard to spread and fan exhorting the women of Athens: tablished an additional ffty-nine monasteries in Scotland. their vibrant verbal plumage. A vein of light melancholy named that is no accident. Columcille returned to Ireland from Scotland once, to runs through the witty verse of many English Renaissance And so, girls, when fucking time comes . not the faintest argue a tax case before a government council meeting in poets, from Thomas Wyatt to Richard Lovelace. The early medieval whiff of it anywhere, right? From the time those Milesians Drumceatt. Columcille must have been a fne advocate, for The hilarity of many of Chaucer’s verse stories—“The betrayed us, we can’t even fnd our eight-fngered leather this long-absent Irishman prevailed in his argument in that Miller’s Tale” and “The Reeve’s Tale,” for starters—and of Irish, literate for little dildos. At least they’d serve as a sort of fesh-replacement tax case. Columcille then tarried at that council meeting Shakespeare’s comedies, all of course likewise in verse, is for our poor cunts . So, then! Would you like me to long enough to rise to debate another item on the agenda, the stuff of literary immortality. Too many Shakespear- more than a century, fnd some mechanism by which we could end this war? a proposal to suppress the order of poets. That proposal was ean characters to name speak some of the greatest comic understandable enough, for the fendishly satirical verses lines in Western history—and in iambic pentameter at were intoxicated with Several centuries later, the Roman poet Catullus, of the wandering Irish bards vexed the authorities and ar- that. Think just of Falstaff, Nick Bottom in A Midsum- known for poems of love and longing and here translated istocracy no end. Poetry, argued Columcille, was as essen- mer Night’s Dream, or the Clown in All’s Well That light verse, as we know by Stanton Hager, could be as bawdy and coarse as the tial to Irish life as laughter, food, and the clay-and-wattle Ends Well. Miller and Reeve in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. hermitages of the monks. Not only ought the bards not be Late seventeenth-century light verse saw Samuel But- from a story of the mid- banished but, thundered Columcille, they should be urged ler’s Hudibras, which, after the English Civil War, satirized You shouldn’t be surprised, Rufus, that no girl to enlarge their circle and travel far, teaching to all the arts the English Puritans (not to mention bad poetry), and the sixth-century Irish ri, Wants to lay her pretty thigh under yours, of verse, serious and light. Columcille prevailed again (and 239 Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, which drew broad comic That not even your enticements of silk dresses thus won two cases in one day in a high court of Ireland). sketches of society, and were so respected they became or king, Columcille... And dazzling jewels can seduce a single one. When the verdict was announced, the merry poets broke required learning for schoolchildren. What’s keeping them away? A fatal rumor out in a riotous celebration in the council chambers, com- The most masterly English light poem of the eigh- That a wild goat capers in the barnyards of posing, extemporaneously, witty and bawdy verses in praise teenth century is Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock your armpits! of Columcille, verses that embarrassed the former ri and (1712–1714), a mock-epic in which the polite society of He scares off the poor dears—and no wonder, for budding saint. Columcille thereupon dispatched the bards his day shows to be but a shadow of the ostensibly heroic He’s a rank, mangy beast. Who can blame a to all of Ireland and beyond to teach the craft and sullen days of old. Lord Byron’s verse novel Don Juan (1819– pretty maid comic art of poetry. 1824), sardonic and casual, combined the colloquialism high and hilarious Olympian quarrel between Zeus and his For retching at the thought of bedding with him? Medieval light verse could be bawdy, satirical, and ir- of medieval light verse with a sophistication that begat wife, Hera. Edith and Archie, Alice and Ralph were never Choose! Either kill the beast that fouls the nose reverent, though at bottom it was fercely moral. Goliards, imitations. funnier. And just as with the Bunkers and the Kramdens, Or quit being surprised when the girls turn tail. students and clerics in England, France, and Germany, Literary sorts conventionally think of the early nine- Hera gets the best of her blustering husband. were followers of Bishop Golias. Their riotous twelfth- teenth century as the Romantic Age in English letters.