Archy Who?  Archie was a famous cockroach-poet, the invention of Don Marquis. Don was mentioned in passing in one of last year’s columns – as a friend of Christopher Morley.

Archy, who inhabited Marquis’ office, along with his cohort Mehitabel the cat, amused himself by composing humorous free verse. Archy typed by hopping on the keys -  he couldn’t hit the shift key so everything he composed was written lower case without punctuation. Perhaps Archy’s poetic stylings – which began in 1916 and became widely syndicated  thereafter – were an influence on another lower-case writer of novel free verse – e.e. cummings. Archy claimed to be the reincarnation of a human poet, and, as his first published work explains, so was Freddy the Rat – who kept criticizing (and eating) his poems:

The Coming of Archy (1916)

expression is the need of my soul

i was once a vers libre bard

but i died and my soul went

into the body of a cockroach

it has given me a new outlook on life

i see things from the under side now

thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket

but your paste is getting so stale i can't eat it

there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have

removed she nearly ate me the other night why don't she

catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for

there is a rat here she should get without delay

most of these rats here are just rats

but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him

he used to be a poet himself

night after night i have written poetry for you

on your typewriter

and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet

comes out of his hole when it is done

and reads it and sniffs at it

he is jealous of my poetry

he used to make fun of it when we were both human

he was a punk poet himself

and after he has read it he sneers

and then he eats it

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat

or get a cat that is onto her job

and i will write you a series of poems

showing how things look

to a cockroach

that rats name is freddy

the next time freddy dies i hope he won't be a rat

but something smaller i hope i will be a rat

in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach

i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then

don't you ever eat any sandwiches in your office

i havent had a crumb of bread

for i dont know how long

or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings

and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine

every night you can call me archy

Don Marquis, born in Walnut, Illinois in 1878, was a newspaper columnist, poet, playwright and humorist, whose editorials, poems, and cartoons appeared in the Evening Sun, the New York Herald Tribune, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening post from 1912 into the 1930’s. Marquis was good at inventing characters, including several animal friends for Archy and Mehitabel, and a character called The Old Soak, known for his satires against prohibition.

While known for his humor, Marquis had a difficult life in many respects. Both his first wife, Reina and his second wife, Marjorie died suddenly, and his son and daughter both died in childhood. Marquis himself suffered a series of strokes, dying from the third one in 1937 at 59. With this in mind, there is an extra poignancy to his poem, A Plan, in which he walks us through his take on the ‘ages of man’, and what he planned to do when he reached 80. More at 1poet.com

A Plan

YOUTH is the season of revolt; at twenty-five
We curse the reigning politicians,
Wondering that any man alive
Stands for such damnable conditions.
Whatever is, to us, is wrong,
In economics, life, religion, art;
The crowned old laureates of song
Are pikers, and accepted sages
Appear devoid of intellect and heart;
Continually, the ego in us rages;
Our sense of universal, rank injustice
Swells till it's like to bust us;
We love to see ourselves as outcast goats
Browsing at basement tobbledotes,
The while we forge the mordant bolt
That is to give society its jolt;
And any man who wears two eyes upon his face
Contentedly and unashamed,
And glories in the pose
And makes a virtue of his having just one nose,
We curse as dull, conventional, and tamed
And commonplace.
Thirty finds us a trifle sobered, with a doubt
Whether we'll turn the cosmos inside-out,
Reform the earth, re-gild the moon
And make the Pleiades sing a modern tune;
Some of the classics are not bores, we think,
And barbers have their uses;
We grow more choice in what we eat and drink,
Less angry at abuses;
We work a little harder, want more pay,
Grab on to better jobs,
And learn to make excuses
For certain individuals erstwhile condemned as snobs;
We do not worry nine hours every day
Because the world in its traditional, crool way     [sic]
Continues to roll calmly on and crush
The worthier myriads into bloody mush;
And yet, at thirty, on the whole,
If analyzed we still would show a trace of soul.
At forty--well, you know:
Chins, bank accounts, and stomachs start to grow;
The world's still wrong in spite of all we've tried
To do for it, and we're no longer broken hearted--
We sit on it and ride,
We're willing, now, to let the darned thing slide
Along in just about the way it stated.
Of course, we're anxious for reforms,
And all that sort of stuff,
Unless they cause too many economic storms--
But really, on the whole it's well enough:
We hold by standards, rules and norms.
But when I'm eighty I intend
To turn a fool again for twenty years or so;
Go back to being twenty-five,
Drop cautions and conventions, join some little group
Fantastically rebel and alive,
And resolute, from soup
To nuts; I'll reimburse myself
For all the freak stuff that I've had to keep upon the shelf;
Indulge my crochets, be the friend of man,
And pull the thoughts I've always had to can--
I'm looking forward to a rough, rebellious, unrespectable old age,
Kicking the world uphill
With laughter shrill
And squeals of high-pitched, throaty rage.

     Don Marquis

Our understanding of the world around us, and of the Universe itself, has been transformed repeatedly throughout history, and continues to change as new theories are proposed and new data is sent back to Earth from observatories and robot explorers sent into outer space.

Once upon a time theories of cosmology prompted heated debate (and stern religious decrees) over some very basic geometry – what is the true shape of the world, and of the universe, and what is our place in it? Are we Very Important Creatures at the center of our universe, with all things revolving around us, or are we just ordinary residents of an average planet revolving around one of innumerable stars in infinite space?

You might expect, after such an introduction, that this article would be about Galileo or Hubble, Hawking or Ptolemy , Kepler or Copernicus. It’s not. It isn’t even about an astronomer. It’s about a doctor, about the Koreshan Unity Settlement, and about why you shouldn’t play with electricity. And it’s about some photos that I took this past December, while my father and I were passing through Estero in southwest Florida.

Dr. Cyrus Teed was one of many 19^th century physicians horrified by the carnage of the American Civil War, and by Medicine’s inability to deal with its human aftermath. Teed explored alternative medicine after the War, turning to Alchemy, and turning to experiments with electricity.  After one of those experiments – which may have nearly killed him, he experienced a ‘vision’ that would eventually lead to concepts for a Utopian society, plans for the construction of ‘New Jerusalem’, and the basis for Koreshian Cosmology (i.e. the Universe according to Cyrus).

On the banks of the Estero River lie the remains of  Teed’s dream – a cluster of buildings that include rooming houses, workshops, a store, a bakery, machine shops, gardens, the Founder’s House, and the grandly titled Planetary Court. Teed died in 1908, and his utopian society went into decline. In 1961 the surviving members donated the land to the State of Florida, which has restored and maintains what is left of Teed’s New Jerusalem. The city planned for ten million followers never housed more than three hundred.

Some of the Koreshian artifacts remain. Included are bits of furniture and household effects, a variety of tools, and something else -  a scale model, and the sole surviving segment of the “rectilineator” – which leads us to Ulysses Grant Morrow, and the Koreshians attempts to prove Teed’s theories of “Cellular Cosmology”.

One of Teed’s revelations was that humans are unable to comprehend the idea of an ‘infinitie’ universe, so we must exist in one of finite dimensions. The universe was, in fact, a sphere, 8000 miles in diameter – and we live not on the outside – but on the inside. So in the universe according to Teed, the World is the Universe, turned inside-out. The sun, half light, half dark, rotates in the center. Light curves, gravity ‘waves’ hold us in place, and the moon, planets, stars and nebulae are illusions or reflections.

So what is a ‘rectilineator’? Morrow was asked by Teed to prove that we live in a convex world – one where the horizon actually curves upwards instead of downwards. And how do you make such a measurement if light itself is not to be trusted? His answer was to do it mechanically – by building perfectly squared frames and placing them one-next-to-the-other – stepping his way for miles down nearby Naples and Fort Myers beaches. The results were open to several interpretations – one being that Morrow’s experiments proved the Earth was concave (round), and that the circumference was around 25,000 miles.

There aren’t many Hollow Earth advocates around anymore, though we have no shortage of theories that contentiously attack the prevailing wisdom. Intelligent design advocates would do well to research Teed’s Cellular Cosmology (published in 1898)  and marvel at the level of detail. By the way, before you get too smug in the accuracy of your own concept of the Universe, remember that Morrow did, by one interpretation, get the Earth’s diameter right. And current theories do predict that light can bend, and gravity can have waves…..

--Steve

 One of the most-neglected collections, Universe has been updated, with a few added works, an author-based index, and cleaner scripting. I've maintained the same color scheme and for some odd reason migrated to even more visually obnoxious graphics. Sorry.

The idea behind this particular collection was that, once upon a time, a LOT of readers began sending in their own poems, wanting them to be listed in the Poets' Corner collection somewhere between Byron and Browning. While there is a great deal of good poetry out there - and much of it very readable, it is also very thrue that the vast majority of poems hold a very uniquely personal value that does not translate well for a wider audience. It is also true that the mechanics of poetry are not widely taught nowadays, and mechanical flaws can detract from even the best of works.

But there is some good stuff, and it was a shame not to have a home for it.  The title, while grand-sounding, is actually a poor play on words (either verse in Unicode or single-minded poetry, if you prefer).

Congratulations, by the way to contributor Robin Berard, whose first book not only made both Sunshine State reading lists, but also came out this summer in a mass-market paperback edition.

 Here's one for our current election campaign season:

Campaign Promise

I promise to eliminate poverty
raise the peasant to rich peasant
so that he may suffer with us
the burden our happiness
and the pain of our understanding
God willing, we shall have the hill
without the valley and the river
will become an ocean and contrast
will be a thing of the past-

   Anthony Casoroso, © 1996

Alex and I were recently visiting Jungle Island in Miami on an overcast but otherwise pleasant day, along with a large group of friends. Whlie we were there, a variety of other faces caught my eye. Here is a sampling.

Click on any image to view at 1024 x 768 

  --Steve

Eye of the 'Crocosaurus'

    Unwilling Resident

Cautious Pedestrian

      Best Dressed

My goal is to get the Alpha collection substantially done before the holidays. Next year’s emphasis will be on expanding and updating the poetry collection, and finding a better format for Universe. I continue to receive inputs from contemporary poets and need to find a better way to handle the material, most of which has not been put online. There are also some photo additions planned for the near future.

For now, a sampling of added material:

True is it that we have seen better days.

--William Shakespeare, As You Like It
     Act II, scene vii, line 126 [Duke Senior]

I do desire we may be better strangers.

--William Shakespeare, As You Like It
     Act III, scene ii, line 98 [Orlando]

If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave were ink,
Your own handwriting would tell you what I think.

--William Shakespeare,  The Comedy of Errors
     Act III, scene i, lines 15-16 [Dromio of Ephesus]

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.

--William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
     Act III, scene i, line 158

If you're not ready to die for it, take the word "freedom" out of your vocabulary.

--Malcolm X [1962]

America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!

--Israel Zangwill [from The Melting Pot]

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

--Frank Zappa

Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.

--William Butler Yeats

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for?

--Alice Walker

Deep breaths are very helpful at shallow parties.

--Barbara Walters

I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions on what to paint. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, "Well, what do you love most?" That's how I started painting money.

--Andy Warhol

Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.

--George Washington [1873]

When I grow up, I'm not going to read the newspaper and I'm not going to follow complex issues and I'm not going to vote. That way I can complain when the government doesn't represent me. Then, when everything goes down the tubes, I can say the system doesn't work and justify my further lack of participation. – Calvin

--Bill Waterson

Here’s a smattering.

--Steve

Sit at the western window. Take the sun
Between your hands like a ball of flaming crystal,
Poise it to let it fall, but hold it still,
And meditate on the beauty of your existence;
The beauty of this, that you exist at all.
   Conrad Aiken, Chiarascuro: Rose

Water, water, everywhere,
   Nor any drop to drink.
   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, II, Verse 9

Patience is a plant
That grows not in all gardens.
   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo, Part ii

Learn to live, and live to learn,
Ignorance like a fire doth burn,
Little tasks make large return.
   Bayard Taylor, To My Daughter

 I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams...
   William Butler Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last chapter missing.
  --Quentin Crisp

As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists.
  --Joan Gussow, 1986

Moral indignation is, in most cases, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.
  --Vittorio de Sica

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I'm having a good time.
  Lady Nancy Astor

Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.
  Agatha Christie

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their finest hour.
  Lillian Hellman

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their finest hour.   Oh, to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small, and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.
  Rebecca Richards

 As I wade through the Quotations collection and update each of the collections, its obvious that I will be eliminating or consolidating some of the older collections. I like the idea of maintaining 30 collections to keep a wide variety of subjects and formats, so I'm contemplating some new collections.

 Here are some of the subject areas under consideration:

(a) Of Biblical Proportions - a collection of quotes from biblical and other religious sources.

(b) Found in Translation - a collection of quotes in other languages with translations in english

(c) Historical Quotations - quotations by or about historical events and personages

(d) Quotations from Popular Song

(e) Theatrically Speaking - other than Shakespeare (who already has his own collection)

(f) Lingua Latina - quotes in Latin

 So, if you have an opinion, please give me some feedback, and let me know your first and second choices.

 Thanks,

 --Steve

 Along with the format update (the first in six years), collection # 27, African American Expression, has been substantially enlarged to over 600 entries.

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
--Marian Wright Edelman, 1992

It is easy to look back, self-indulgently, feeling pleasantly sorry for oneself and saying I didn't have this and I didn't have that. But it is only the grown woman regretting the hardships of a little girl who never thought they were hardships at all. She had the things that really mattered.
--Marian Anderson, 1956

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
--James Baldwin, 1962

 Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.
--Althea Gibson

In the beginning there was neither nothing nor anything. Darkness hid in darkness -- shrouded in nothingness.
  -- Zora Neal Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain 1939

 What Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky does not add up to Bush lying to the world, saying, Let's invade Iraq because they've got weapons of mass destruction. It just doesn't add up. The man cheated on his wife, but nobody died. Americans are not coming home in body bags because of that.
--Spike Lee

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
--Charlie Parker

For most entertainers, there is a single experience, one defining moment, when confidence replaces the self-doubt that most of us wrestle with.
--Charley Pride

Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.
--Jackie Robinson

Wishing, of all strategies, is the worst.
  --Andrew Young

 Anyway, here is the third and final crossword puzzle. On a scale of 1(easy) to 10(tough), this one would be about a 7.

 Click HERE to download the puzzle as a GIF image. This should print OK in portrait mode.

 Send me an e-mail if you like it, or if you are in desperate need of the solution key. 

--Steve

 Click HERE to download the puzzle as a GIF image. This should print OK in portrait mode.

 Send me an e-mail if you like it, or if you are in desperate need of the solution key. 

--Steve

Morley was many things, chief among them, like Adams, he was a columnist, writing The Bowling Green for many years with humor, insight, and everyman-ish viewpoint that makes pleasant reading 80 years later. Though I doubt many employers, then or now, would appreciate his version of the Algonquin round table, the self-titled “Three Hours for Lunch Club”.

He was a prolific writer, putting out over 50 books of humor, fiction, essays and poetry. Several of his books, including Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Library are available on Project Guttenburg. 

 Click HERE to download the puzzle as a GIF image. This should print OK in portrait mode.

 Send me an e-mail if you like it, or if you are indesperate need of the solution key.

 I'll work on some tougher ones when I get a chance.

--Steve

Adams was a columnist for several New York newspapers, most notably the World and the Tribune. His column "The Conning Tower" ran for nearly 30 years. He was a member of the Algonquin Round Table - a circle of playwrights, actors, critics and humorists that met and traded quips over lunch daily for ten years at the Algonquin Hotel.

Today he is perhaps best remembered for two things - helping start the careers of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and Edna St. Vincent Millay (among others), and for a concise little poem about baseball, written after the NY Giants loss in the baseball World Series to the Chicago Cubs, titled Baseball's Sad Lexicon ("Tinker to Evers to Chance") about a double-play that ended the Giants hopes of winning.

Baseball's Sad Lexicon

THESE are the saddest of possible words:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Trio of Bear-cubs, fleeter than birds,
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double --
Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.

-- Franklin P. Adams

Poems and other satirical pieces from Adams' columns were put together and published in several collections. One of them, Something Else Again appears here in The Poets' Corner collection in its entirety, including several pseudo newspaper articles that are parodies of well-known poems.

Adams enjoyed writing everthing from parodies of Latin poets Horace and Catullus to poems about his barber, waiter, landlord and grocery delivery boy. He even wrote an ode to his thesaurus. In Tobogganing on Parnassus he included this poem - which just may have been inspired by his friend Kieran, the naturalist.

The Amateur Botanist

A primrose by a river's brim
Primula vulgaris was to him,
  And it was nothing more;
A pansy, delicately reared,
Viola tricolor appeared
  In true botanic lore.

That which a pink the layman deems
Dianthus caryophyllus seems
  To any flower-fan; or
A sunflower, in that talk of his,
Annuus helianthus is,
  And it is nothing more.

By the way, while it is meant metaphorically (Tobogganing on Parnassus = a rough treatment of Classical Literature) you actually can go skiing on Mout Parnassus, so I suppose you could toboggan. I have only been there once, to visit Delphi, during a very hot August. As you might guess, there was no snow in sight.

Christopher Morley also used Parnassus as a physical metaphor in his short novel, Parnassus on Wheels (the text is readily available on the Web now). More about Morley, and his 'Domestic Poetry' later.

--Steve

To start of the school year my son's AP English teacher gave his students the assignment of compiling a list of all of the books, plays, and poems they have ever read. I am curious to see what the purpose of the assignment is. Perhaps he is trying to find out whether they read at all, considering today's media distractions, or whether, by the age of 17 or 18 they are reading any material that worthy of consideration for the AP reading list.

I was also reminded of a news blurb I read last year that announced several midwestern libraries, needing more floor space for DVD's and Computers, had gone through their circulation records and were beginning to discard any books which had not been checked out in at least two years. This included, sadly, many works by the like of Hemingway and Steinbeck. There was some outrage at the time, and a campaign to check out Great Books to save them from oblivion, but the indignation seems to have died down. You can not force people to read what you think is good for them (unless they are your students), any more than you can get them to trade reality TV shows for CSPAN. We should probably all thank J.K. Rowling and The Discovery Channel for their efforts to help our children maintain a reasonably long attention span.

All of which leads me in a round-about way to today's subject, and John Kieran's quote. Kieran led a long, varied, and busy life, much of it in the public eye (or ear, at least), yet the line he is perhaps most remembered for is this one on reading. There was probably a time when most of America new who he was - between his sportswriting, appearances on quiz shows (Information Please), radio and TV documentaries, and other interests. Now he is a footnote in Wikipedia.

This in turn leads to the desire for people, events, lessions, etc. to be remembered and not forgotten. Whether it is a poet whose works are no longer on the AP reading lists, or an author whose books are no longer in the library because they have been forgotten beneath layer after layer of the latest pointless media obsessions.

Fortunately, while the busy world has a short attention span, people, individual people, have long memories. It is suprising what can be remembered if only you can find the right person to listen to, and take the time to listen. Such memories might form the basis for Kenneth Ashley's Brief first-person recall of a man named Rudkin. A short poem with a simple rhyme scheme but a lurching, almost stumbling meter (perhaps a little like Rudkin himself). The conceit of the poem is that evidence of Rudkin is still everywhere, surrounding the people of "Threckington", and the narrator's own household - but only the narrator remembers. A good poem for reading aloud, once you get accustomed to the uneven rhythm.

Rudkin

RUDKIN was one who cattle sold,
Laughed loud, talked bold;
Children got, drank at inns,
Nor thought much of his sins.
Stout his legs, broad his back;
To live and thrive he had the knack.
All who went out, all who came in,
By Threckington, knew stout Rudkin.
Long he's been dead; his name has gone
Clean out of mind at Threckington;
If one should ask for Rudkin there
The village folk would stare and stare.
Rudkin is dead; dead as Queen Anne:
Hangs on my wall his warming-pan;
In hall hard by, solemn and clear,
Ticks the tall clock he used to hear;
Little Miss Wright, all unaware,
Reads her paper in his chair.
Down by the bridge the parapet
Is still chipped where his wain upset;
By the old barn there's an old pear
When he was wed he planted there.
His drover's dog was very like
Our butcher's cur: a mongrel tyke;
He had a bull with a crooked horn,
A heifer like it I saw this morn.
Down at "The George" in market-place
There's a bold wench wears his bold face.

Kenneth H. Ashley

I guess what Ashley was trying to say is that Rudkin left his mark - literally - on the people, places, and things around him - whether they knew it or not. Perhaps Kieran did as well - as evidenced by present-day game shows such as Wait Wait Don't Tell Me  or in Discovery Channel / Animal planet features that patiently try to get us to understand the world around us and the creatures in it. Perhaps Kieran also left his mark on friends who became part of the Algonquin Round Table. More about them at a later date.

 P.S. - If I had to compile a list of all I have read, I wonder if I'd ever finish. --Steve