Meet Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

 

 Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

An American Sunrise

BY JOY HARJO

 

We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We

were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike. 

It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight.

Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We

made plans to be professional — and did. And some of us could sing

so we drummed a fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin

was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We

were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them — thin

chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little gin

will clarify the dark and make us all feel like dancing. We

had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz

I argued with a Pueblo as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June,

forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We

know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die

soon.

* * * * * * * * * *

Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

Verse Like Water presents

U.S. Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo in virtual event

article link here

Family foundation donates more than a thousand copies of Joy Harjo's book “An American Sunrise” to indigenous students across Minnesota. CLC instructor distributes some of those copies to students here in the lakes area.

Written By: Jennifer Kraus

November 7, 2020

She was named the United States Poet Laureate in June 2019 and is the first Native American Poet Laureate in the history of the position — she is Poet Joy Harjo.

Harjo will be the featured speaker in Central Lakes College’s ninth year of its visiting poet program Verse Like Water. Typically poets travel to the Brainerd campus for the program, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic the program will be streamed live at noon Thursday, Nov. 12. Harjo will do the program from the comforts of her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Anyone can tune in and listen to the free program via YouTube by visiting https://bit.ly/3eBgKcE.

The program is a collaboration between CLC, Riverland Community College in Austin and the Olseth Family Foundation.

Jeff Johnson, CLC instructor and director of Verse Like Water who has loved poetry reading since he was a boy, said he is excited to have Harjo, a major voice in American literature who also is an activist, musician, and writer of memoirs and essays, as Verse Like Water’s next poet. What is even more exciting to Johnson is this poetry program will reach high school students across the state, as the Olseth Family Foundation is sending out 1,250 copies of Harjo’s latest book, “An American Sunrise” to indigenous students throughout Minnesota.

“I'll be sitting on the hood of my GMC truck peddling poetry in a pandemic," Johnson said prior to distributing Harjo’s hardcover poetry books at noon Friday, Nov. 6, in the east CLC parking lot. His truck was filled with about 450 poetry books and he had three signs about social distancing and two others about poetry.

When Johnson began teaching at CLC 11 years ago, he wanted to start up a poetry series similar to one he had when he previously taught at Saint John’s Preparatory School and Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Johnson, who has been in teaching for 34 years, talked with his dean at CLC about starting a poetry series.

“I asked him if I would step on any toes if I started a poetry series,” Johnson said of his conversation with the dean. “And he said, ‘Absolutely not, knock yourself out.’ He said we've never been able to get more than 30 people here at any literary reading. He told me that they had had Will Weaver come and only 30 people came.”

Johnson came to the Brainerd campus with the experience of booking poets and getting people to come, and he wanted to promote literacy and poetry in the lakes area. And Johnson didn’t bring just any poets to the series — he brought top tier poets who have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards and are MacArthur Genius Fellows. In the past nine years, Johnson has brought more than 20 poets to the Verse Like Water program including Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Richard Blanco, Marie Howe, Terrance Hayes, Mark Conway, Matt Rasmussen, Tracy. K. Smith, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Mary Szybist, Major Jackson, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Osama Olamar, Kaveh Akbar, Peter Balakian, Vijay Seshadri, Luis J. Rodriguez, Juan Felipe Herrera and Nick Flynn.

Johnson said the poetry series benefited the entire community and also has reached many high school students through the years. Schools bus students to the poetry events and CLC provides them with food.

“We wanted to make them feel special,” Johnson said.

The poetry series has been made possible through regional grants, with a bulk from the Five Wings Arts Council. Johnson thought he was going to lose grant money this year because of the pandemic, but learned he was going to be able to keep it so began planning the virtual event with Harjo.

The difference with this coming event with Harjo compared to the previous poetry events is Johnson has help.

“I’m usually a one-man show,” Johnson said. “Like I do everything. I write the grants. I pick up the poets at the airport. I put them in the guest house here in Stearns County where I live and I make them a big feast. But this time around, I'm collaborating with two other entities ... Riverland Community College in Austin and the Olseth Family Foundation.”

Johnson said one thing he wants people to know about the upcoming poetry event is that Harjo is not only a poet.

“There's music in every poem. There are musical notes in the human hearts and imaginations of every single poet, but I see more music in Joy Harjo than I do in any average poet,” Johnson said. “And this is partly because she is a musician. She picked up a saxophone at the age of 45 because her grandma played a saxophone. There's a poem about it in that book ... so you're going to hear her sing. She won't just read poetry and perform the poetry; you’re going to hear her sing the poetry.”

More about Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo was appointed the new United States Poet Laureate in June 2019, and is the first Native American Poet Laureate in the history of the position. Born May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv, according to poets.org/poet/joy-harjo. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Mexico before earning a master's degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978.

Harjo is a poet, musician and playwright. She is the author of several books of poetry, including “An American Sunrise” in 2019; “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” in 1994, which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; and “In Mad Love and War” in 1990, which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her memoir “Crazy Brave” in 2012 won the 2013 PEN Center USA literary award for creative nonfiction. Harjo also published collections of interviews and conversations, children's books and collaborative art texts.

In 2015, she received the Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry from the Academy of American Poets, the website stated. She also is a performer, playing the saxophone and flute solo and with the Arrow Dynamics Band, and previously with the band Poetic Justice. She has appeared on HBO's “Def Poetry Jam” in venues across the U.S. and internationally and released four award-winning albums. In 2009, she won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year.

In 2015, Harjo gave The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics, which is offered annually in New York City by a prominent poet, called “Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets.” Her other honors include the 2019 Jackson Poetry Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award and The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize among many others.

In 2019, Harjo was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In addition to serving as U.S. Poet Laureate, Harjo directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for young Mvskoke women, and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.

(Source: poets.org)

Harjo’s 2018 poem:

“Once the World Was Perfect”

“Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.

Then we took it for granted.

Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.

Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.

And once Doubt ruptured the web,

All manner of demon thoughts

Jumped through—

We destroyed the world we had been given

For inspiration, for life—

Each stone of jealousy, each stone

Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.

No one was without a stone in his or her hand.

There we were,

Right back where we had started.

We were bumping into each other

In the dark.

And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know

How to live with each other.

Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another

And shared a blanket.

A spark of kindness made a light.

The light made an opening in the darkness.

Everyone worked together to make a ladder.

A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,

And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,

And their children, all the way through time—

To now, into this morning light to you.”

---

JENNIFER KRAUS may be reached at jennifer.kraus@brainerddispatch.com or 218-855-5851. Follow me at www.twitter.com/jennewsgirl on Twitter.

* * * * * * * * * *

Becoming Seventy

BY JOY HARJO

Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday.

This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close.

We

arrived

when the days 

grew legs of night.

Chocolates were offered. 

We ate latkes for hours 

to celebrate light and friends. 

We will keep going despite dark 

or a madman in a white house dream. 

Let’s talk about something else said the dog

who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill:

a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks — 

I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris — 

it was impossible to make it through the tragedy

without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?

Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into 

love. Another level of love, beyond the neighbor’s holiday light 

display proclaiming goodwill to all men who have lost their way in the dark 

as they tried to find the car door, the bottle hidden behind the seat, reason 

to keep on going past all the times they failed at sharing love, love. It’s weak they think — 

or some romantic bullshit, a movie set propped up behind on slats, said the wizard 

of junk understanding who pretends to be the wise all-knowing dog behind a cheap fan. 

It’s in the plan for the new world straining to break through the floor of this one, said the Angel of 

All-That-You-Know-and-Forgot-and-Will-Find, as she flutters the edge of your mind when you try to 

sing the blues to the future of everything that might happen and will. All the losses come tumbling 

down, down, down at three in the morning as do all the shouldn’t-haves or should-haves. It doesn’t matter, girl — 

I’ll be here to pick you up, said Memory, in her red shoes, and the dress that showed off brown legs. When you met 

him at the age you have always loved, hair perfect with a little wave, and that shine in your skin from believing what was 

impossible was possible, you were not afraid. You stood up in love in a French story and there fell ever 

a light rain as you crossed the Seine to meet him for café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You wrote a poem beneath the tender 

skin from your ribs to your hip bone, in the slender then, and you are still writing that song to convince the sweetness of every 

bit of straggling moonlight, star and sunlight to become words in your mouth, in your kiss — that kiss that will never die, you will all 

ways fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old, how many days, hours, or memories, we can fall in love over and over 

again. The Seine or Tennessee or any river with a soul knows the depths descending when it comes to seeing the sun or moon stare 

back, without shame, remorse, or guilt. This is what I remember she told her husband when they bedded down that night in the house that would begin 

marriage. That house was built of twenty-four doves, rugs from India, cooking recipes from seven generations of mothers and their sisters, 

and wave upon wave of tears, and the concrete of resolution for the steps that continue all the way to the heavens, past guardian dogs, dog 

after dog to protect. They are humble earth angels, and the rowdiest, even nasty. You try and lick yourself like that, imagine. And the Old 

Woman laughed as she slipped off her cheap shoes and parked them under the bed that lies at the center of the garden of good and evil. She’d seen it all. Done it 

more than once. Tonight, she just wanted a good sleep, and picked up the book of poetry by her bed, which was over a journal she kept when her mother was dying. 

These words from May Sarton she kept in the fourth room of her heart, “Love, come upon him warily and deep / For if he startle first it were as well / to bind a fox’s 

throat with a gold bell /As hold him when it is his will to leap.” And she considered that every line of a poem was a lead line into the spirit world to capture a 

bit of memory, pieces of gold confetti, a kind of celebration. We all want to be remembered, even memory, even the way the light came in the kitchen 

window, when her mother turned up the dial on that cool mist color 
of a radio, when memory crossed the path of longing and took 
mother’s arm and she put down her apron 

said, “I don’t mind if I do,” and they danced, you watching, as you began your own cache of remembering. Already you had stored the taste of mother as milk, father as a labor 

of sweat and love, and night as a lonely boat of stars that took you into who you were before you slid through the hips of the story. There are no words when you cross the 

gate of forbidden waters, or is it a sheer scarf of the finest silk, or is it something else that causes you to forget. Nothing is ever forgotten says the god of remembering 

who protects the heartbeat of every little cell of knowing from the Antarctic to the soft spot at the top of this planetary baby. Oh baby, come here, let me tell you the story 

of the party you will never forget, no matter where you go, where you are, or where you will be when you cross the line and say, no more. No more greedy kings, no more disappointments, no more orphans, 

or thefts of souls or lands, no more killing for the sport of killing. No more, no more, except more of the story so I will understand exactly what I am doing here, and why, she said to the fox 

guardian who took her arm to help her cross the road that was given to the care of Natives who made sure the earth spirits were fed with songs, and the other things they loved to eat. They like sweets, cookies, and flowers. 

It was getting late and the fox guardian picked up her books as she hurried through the streets of strife. But it wasn’t getting late. There was no late, only a plate of tamales on the counter waiting to be 

or not to be. At this age, said the fox, we are closer to the not to be, which is the to be in the fields of sweet grasses. Wherever you are, enjoy the evening, how the sun walks the horizon before cross 

sing over to be, and we then exist under the realm of the moon. There’s where fears slay us, in the dark of the howling mind. We all battle. Befriend them, the moon said as a crab skittered under her skirt, her daughter in 

the high chair, waiting for cereal and toast. What a girl she turned out to be, a willow tree, a blessing to the winds, to her family. There she is married, and we start the story all over again, said her father 

in a toast to the happiness of who we are and who we are becoming as Change in a new model sedan whips it down the freeway toward the generations that follow, one after another in the original 

lands of the Mvskoke who are still here. Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It’s a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time. We 

instinctually reach for light food, we digest it, make love, art or 
trouble of it. The sun crowns us at noon. The whole earth is a queen. Then there are always goodbyes. At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, to the pain you caused others, 

or yourself. Goodbye, goodbye, to Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars phenomenon, and George Michael, the singer. They were planets in our emotional universe. Some of my memories are opened by the image of love on screen in an 

imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is 

a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so 
I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of words, phrases 

garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were, my daughter 

and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and 
I couldn’t push yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the 
bluest water. We waited there for a breath 

to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our ears stuffed with Barbie advertising, 

with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture, the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a spiritual backwash. Worship 

boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash, 

hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a fox, dangling between 

them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh 
understanding. Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger, 
pride, greed, or more destructive material. They place them in a 

part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because 

we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a
watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.

Why We Read Books and Poems

Dylan Thomas Update

Just a quick mention that I had spent most of the last two days updating all of the older Dylan Thomas poetry posts for those who may have an interest in Dylan's verse. I had noticed that many of the 14 posts needed larger reading fonts from the older fonts once provided in the early days of Google Blogger and that many of the videos had expired on YouTube. To these I've added a few more articles to each one to help flesh out the many perspectives from Dylan's life journey. I hope by reformatting and upgrading each verse set they will become even more readable and enjoyable to delve into than they were before.

R.E. Slater

June 26, 2021

Central Lakes College instructor Jeff Johnson sits atop his truck, reading a poem by Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo, from her book "An American Sunrise", Friday, Nov. 6, in the parking lot at CLC in Brainerd. Johnson was distributing copies of her book to students in the lakes area. Kelly Humphrey / Brainerd Dispatch

5 Poems About Books

and the Joy of Reading

https://www.bookishsanta.com/blogs/booklings-world/5-poems-about-books-and-the-joy-of-reading

by Bookish Santa

August 3, 2020

When I was younger, I often went to the park just for one reason: The Monkey Bars. I’d climb up to the highest rung, hook my legs around the frame, and suspend myself upside-down. It was the best thing I would do all day! I saw everything that I saw normally, except that it would all look so new, so foreign, and so different. I looked at familiar scenery from an unfamiliar perspective.

When you tilt your head sideways or look at something upside-down, a normal object can look completely new. It’s the same thing that you’re seeing, just differently, from a view, you’re not used to. A rarer take on something mundane.

That’s what Poems do to our perspective. They tell us what we may already know, in words and devices that we might not already know. The simple, musical, flowing narrative of poems breathe some artful life into Literature. Poems tell tales and convey feelings just as well as paragraphs or stories do. But they communicate differently, and that’s what makes them special (Oof, don’t I sound like a yearning lover describing her affections).

Well, I’m guessing, some very eloquent people of the past thought:

“So, we love poems, and we love books...let’s throw them together in a blender and make the best smoothie there ever will be for all people Bookish.”

You’re here, so it must mean that you’re somewhere on the Bibliophile Scale. Well, I’ve got just the thing for you! Or just the...five things? Here are 5 wonderful poems about the joy of reading and life as a Bookworm:

1. There is no Frigate like a Book
by Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll;
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul!

2. Old English Song - A Jolly Good Book
by Anonymous

Oh for a book and a shady nook,
Either indoor or out;
With the green leaves whispering overhead,
Or the street cry all about.
Where I may read all at my ease,
Both of the new and old;
For a jolly good book whereon to look,
Is better to me than gold.

3. The Book-Worm
by C.W. Pearson

To heroes who on battlefields win fame
We do not grudge the lordly lion's name;
Those who, insensible to others' cares,
Are always rough and surly, we call bears;
To those who learn no lesson from what passes,
The ever dull and stupid, we call asses.
All claim to be a lion I resign,
And shun all bearish traits and asinine;
Nature has cast me for another part
And I embrace my lot with all my heart;
To satisfy an ever-craving need,
All day upon the leaves of books I feed,
And by night I find a resting-place
In what by day appears of books a case;
Thus day and night I think my title firm
To be that busy idler—a book-worm.

4. I Opened a Book
by Julia Donaldson

I opened a book and in I strode.
Now nobody can find me.
I’ve left my chair, my house, my road,
My town and my world behind me.
I’m wearing the cloak, I’ve slipped on the ring,
I’ve swallowed the magic potion.
I’ve fought with a dragon, dined with a king
And dived in a bottomless ocean.
I opened a book and made some friends.
I shared their tears and laughter
And followed their road with its bumps and bends
To the happily ever after.
I finished my book and out I came.
The cloak can no longer hide me.
My chair and my house are just the same,
But I have a book inside me.

5. My Book
by Annette Wynne

A little gate my book can be
That leads to fields of minstrelsy,
And though you think I sit at home
Afar in foreign fields I roam.

---

And here’s a bonus as dessert; A Poem about Poems, perfectly describing what it feels like once you’ve jumped aboard the train of poetry. There’s no going back, because poetry is ADDICTING.

Pass The Poems, Please
by Jane Baskwill

Pass the poem please

Pile them on my plate
Put them right in front of me
For I can hardly wait
To take each tangy word
To try each tasty rhyme
And when I’ve tried them once or twice
I’ll try them one more time:
So pass the poems please
They just won’t leave my head
I have to have more poems
Before I go to bed.

- Anukriti Sharma

Bill Gates - Good Reads

 GOOD READS

5 ideas for summer reading

These books gave me something to think about. I hope they do the same for you.

By Bill Gates

| 

June 14, 2021  3 minute read

When I finish one book and am deciding what to read next, there usually isn’t always rhyme or reason to what I pick. Sometimes I’ll read one great book and get inspired to read several more about the same subject. Other times I am eager to follow a recommendation from someone I respect.

Lately, though, I find myself reaching for books about the complicated relationship between humanity and nature. Maybe it’s because everyone’s lives have been upended by a virus. Or maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time this year talking about what we need to do to avoid a climate disaster.

5 Ideas for Summer Reading

Whatever the reason, most of the books on my summer reading list this year touch on what happens when people come into conflict with the world around them. I’ve included a look at how researchers are trying to undo damage done to the planet by humans, a deep dive about how your body keeps you safe from microscopic invaders, a president’s memoir that addresses the fallout from an oil spill, and a novel about a group of ordinary people fighting to save the trees. (There’s also a fascinating look at the downfall of one of America’s greatest companies.)

I hope at least one of these books sparks your interest this summer.

Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann. How could a company as big and successful as GE fail? I’ve been thinking about that question for several years, and Lights Out finally gave me many of the answers I was seeking. The authors give you an unflinching look at the mistakes and missteps made by GE’s leadership. If you’re in any kind of leadership role—whether at a company, a non-profit, or somewhere else—there’s a lot you can learn here.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert’s latest is the most straightforward examination of “humanity versus nature” on this list. She describes it as “a book about people trying to solve problems caused by people trying to solve problems.” She writes about a number of the ways that people are intervening with nature, including gene drive and geoengineering—two topics that I’m particularly interested in. Like all of her books, it’s an enjoyable read.

A Promised Land, by Barack Obama. I am almost always interested in books about American presidents, and I especially loved A Promised Land. The memoir covers his early career up through the mission that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. President Obama is unusually honest about his experience in the White House, including how isolating it is to be the person who ultimately calls the shots. It’s a fascinating look at what it’s like to steer a country through challenging times.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers. This is one of the most unusual novels I’ve read in years. The Overstory follows the lives of nine people and examines their connection with trees. Some of the characters come together over the course of the book, while others stay on their own. Even though the book takes a pretty extreme view towards the need to protect forests, I was moved by each character’s passion for their cause and finished the book eager to learn more about trees.

An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives, by Matt Richtel. Richtel wrote his book before the pandemic, but this exploration of the human immune system is nevertheless a valuable read that will help you understand what it takes to stop COVID-19. He keeps the subject accessible by focusing on four patients, each of whom is forced to manage their immune system in one way or another. Their stories make for a super interesting look at the science of immunity.

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Nonsensical Tales, Poems and Limericks

Let's begin with Dr. Seuss and then explore several other writers

of the limerick genre. - re slater

ps - "Can you find the non-limerick panel(s) which don't belong?"

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

https://www.julieoleszek.com/blog/happy-birthday-dr-seuss-poetic-tribute

Today is the birthday of old Dr. Seuss,

A man of many words, all put to good use.

Books with dark-lit windows and too many doors,

With upstairs and downstairs and too many floors.

Using words like "Once-ler" and "Sneetches" is silly at times,

But words such as these make for silly ol’ rhymes.

Creatively described on the house and the lawn,

Duck feet and Fox in Socks ingeniously drawn.

Children don’t question Geisel’s word choices he makes,

"DiffenDoofer" and "Octember" reveal no mistakes.

He writes without misspelling, he writes with no wrongs,

He constructs silly sentences, stringing new words along.

With creative new words, you’ll find that you’ll laugh,

With The Cat in the Hat and on Yertle the Turtle’s behalf.

No challenge is too challenging in writing a plot,

Impactful and impressive is Ten Apples Up on Top.

Horton hatches the egg because he said that he would,

Be careful of words like "I could" and "I should".

"I can" and "I will" is the way to success,

A Wacky Wednesday is meant to lessen the stress.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go if you just take a look

At The 500 Hats and The Tooth and Eye Book.

Impressions LeSieg has made on so many,

With a cat and the Lorax and characters of plenty.

Oh the Thinks you can Think, and all that you’ve earned,

Comes from reading and loving all the things that you’ve learned.

You’re Only Old Once, so dive into McElligot’s Pool,

Be open to adventure on your way to Solla Sollew.

Meet Thidwick and Horton, and Thing One and Thing Two,

Meet Mr. Brown and Marco, Daisy-Head Mayzie and Sue.

I Can Read with My Eyes Shut because you said that I could,

I’ve tasted Green Eggs and Ham because you insisted I should.

I can count One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,

And pretend There’s A Wocket in my Pocket, if I wish.

Dr. Seuss, I’d like to thank you for all the things I could do,

Like reading A, B, C’s and imagining If I Ran the Zoo.

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street with you,

Theodor Geisel, today, I wish a happy birthday to you!

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A Sense for Nonsense:

From Edward Lear to Lewis Carroll to Dr. Seuss

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by Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 1, 2014

Every now and then the Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature gets ambitious and tries to live up to its name by buying something that is truly antique. This month we are proud to announce the acquisition of a first edition of Lewis Carroll’s book-length nonsense poem masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark (MacMillan and Co., London, 1876.) To be precise, the real first edition was a limited run bound in red that is very pricey to come by these days, but our copy is from the main press run bound between tan brown boards with front and back cover illustrations, gilt on all edges, and including nine interior panels illustrated by Henry Holiday (1839-1927), who was associated with the pre-Raphaelite group of Victorian artists.

Snark is Lewis Carroll’s most famous and popular work outside of the two Alice in Wonderland books. The Holiday illustrations are priceless, quite unlike his other paintings, which were very much in the Edward Burne-Jones school of late Victorian sensual, romanticized realism. If you like the classic Tenniel illustrations for the Wonderland books, you will find the Holiday illustrations for the Snark poem to be in a similar vein, only more grotesque. An added treat in this edition is a little leaflet that has been attached to the front endpapers, dated Easter, 1876, and titled “An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves ‘Alice’.” While I suspect that mostly adults with an interest in 19th Century literature read The Hunting of the Snark these days, Carroll obviously intended it to be for the same youthful audience who inspired the Wonderland tales. 

“The Beaver’s Lesson” from The Hunting of the Snark
by Lewis Carroll; illustrated by Henry Holiday

Henry Holiday’s interpretation of “The Beaver’s Lesson” from The Hunting of the Snark, bearing more resemblance to something by Hieronymus Bosch than to his fellow pre-Raphaelites. The lines that inspired this plate:

The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens,

And ink in unfailing supplies:

While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens,

And watched them with wondering eyes.

The Hunting of the Snark recounts a nonsensical voyage in search of a mysterious beast, and it builds to a rather unexpected climax. As the story of a whimsical voyage, it is much more complex than - but still very reminiscent of - Edward Lear’s poem “The Jumblies,” which was written a few years earlier. The Jumblies go to sea in a sieve, which of course allows the water to get into their boat, but they manage to sleep in a crockery pot, somehow stay dry and alive, get to their destination, go shopping, buy some strange things (including a monkey with lollipop paws), and they come back home in twenty years having grown somewhat taller. In contrast, the crew of the Snark has a stranger, darker, more mysterious voyage, and the outcome is much less certain.

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is chiefly remembered and endlessly anthologized as the author of two poems published originally as “nonsense songs” in 1871. These are “The Owl and the Pussycat” (who also venture out to sea in the beginning of their poem) and “The Jumblies.” During his lifetime, Lear was predominantly a painter of animals and landscapes. He happened into writing by chance. While employed painting the avian collection and menagerie of the Earl of Derby, he took to writing nonsense limericks illustrated with pen drawings to amuse the children in the Earl’s family. The limericks were not published for 10 years (appearing in 1846). A second book didn’t appear until 16 years later (1862). By then, Lear must have had a following, because he trickled out a steady stream of nonsense stuff after his second book until his death in 1888. 

Lear was a pioneer of this sort of whimsical writing. Lear is good, and in his time he had few if any competitors writing nonsense lyrics; but aside from a couple masterpieces, Lear is not great. His two famous poems are really his best, and there are not a great many other hidden gems. Mostly, his kind of writing has been improved upon by people who came along later and did his sort of poem better (such as Lewis Carroll, Eugene Field, Ogden Nash, and Dr. Seuss.) 

Easily half of Lear’s nonsense output was limericks. He wrote more than two hundred. He was an early popularizer of the limerick, but he did not contribute much to its creativity. Most of his limericks are crafted in the old mold (going back to Mother Goose and before) of repeating the first line in the last line, often with a little variation. Unfortunately, this structure rather has the effect of making the last line anticlimactic because you have heard it before, like a joke without a surprise in the punchline. Lear’s limericks are silly and nonsensical, and the line drawings that accompany them are cute, but they are mostly not particularly funny. 

Here are three of Lear’s limericks as originally written. Then I will follow with the Dale Dalenberg “improvements,” designed to demonstrate how replacing the repetitive final line with a new rhyming “punchline” can make the limerick both more interesting and more funny. 

Edward Lear:

There was an Old Man on whose nose,

Most birds of the air could repose;

But they all flew away

At the closing of day, 

Which relieved that Old Man and his nose. 

Dalenberg version:

There was an Old Man on whose nose,

Most birds of the air could repose;

But they all flew away

At the closing of day, 

Leaving night’s share of bird-stuff to hose. 

Edward Lear:

There was an Old Person of Burton, 

Whose answers were rather uncertain;

When they said, “How d’ye do?”

He replied, “Who are you?”

That distressing Old Person of Burton.

Dalenberg version:

There was an Old Person of Burton, 

Whose answers were rather uncertain; 

When they said, “How d’ye do?”

He replied, “Who are you?”

“Is he daft?” all would ask. “No—impertinent!”

Edward Lear:

There was an Old Person of Hurst, 

Who drank when he was not athirst;

When they said, “You’ll grow fatter!”

He answered, “What matter?”

That globular Person of Hurst. 

Dalenberg version:

There was an old Person of Hurst, 

Who drank when he was not athirst;

When they said, “You’ll grow fatter!”

He answered, “What matter?”

They replied: “Keep it up and you’ll burst!”

Limericks were around before Edward Lear. Supposedly they first appeared in England in the early 18th Century. It is said that as folklore poetry, limericks were always raunchy. Lear took them out of the gutter and popularized the form as nonsense poems.

Despite moving from the pub to the nursery, ribald limericks do still persist today. They are rather addictive to compose, and generally when you start, you keep coming up with more.

I wrote a handful of raunchy ones for this blog, but I can’t publish most of them here, because we try to run a family-friendly blog. Still, I’ll push the limits with three of the cleanest of my naughty limericks, just to demonstrate and play with the form. These are my R-rated ones, not my X-rated ones (feel free to send me an e-mail request for those.) Two of these use the punch-line approach, and the other uses the repeated last-line approach (with a twist): 

There was an unsatisfied suitor

Who returned to the girl’s house to shoot her, 

But his crime proved a botch

When SHE aimed at HIS crotch

And inquired, “Is it better to spay or to neuter?”

There was a young man of Hong Kong

Who was oppressed by his over-sized schlong,

‘Til he sliced off his testes, 

Took hormones, grew breast-ies, 

Now he is a young girl of Hong Kong. 

Two Sisters from down around Natchez

Turned tricks with their tongues and their snatches,

And sometimes for fun

They’d charge 2-for-1

And bang all the Brothers in batches. 

Hallmarks of the limerick include a general sense of irreverence, caricature, and a mockery of more serious academic devices. Many limericks play fast and loose with geography and place names, for instance. Rather than telling us anything about the place, however, the place name is usually just there for rhyming purposes. Thus we have the classic limerick parody line, “There was a young man of Nantucket. . .”, which tells us nothing about Nantucket, but the place name is in the poem mostly just to rhyme with a variety of really vulgar phrases that can be used to end the next line. The word-play of the limerick, and the fact that random things must be plucked out of the air and plunked down in the poem just to fit the rhyme scheme, lends the form to nonsense content. Once you get into the idiom, it’s just as easy to write silly limericks as dirty ones. With apologies to the Japanese, here is one of my silly (non-filthy) limericks:

Drunk wrestler of sumo on saké

Ate way too much teriyaki, 

Kept feeding and feeding, 

Just wouldn’t stop eating—

And that’s how he got so damn stocky.

---

Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) improved on the nonsense poetry model that Lear established in poems like “The Jumblies.” Carroll’s work incorporates mathematical puzzles, political allegory, and mysterious in-jokes into a more fully realized fantasy landscape. Lewis Carroll’s “portmanteau words” are a lot like some of Lear’s nonsense words (e.g. “runcible spoon”), only with a more complex etymology. 

poem by limerick poet Edward Lear

Not quite sure what it is about nonsense poetry and beavers, but the opening lines go like this:

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree

The Quangle Wangle sat,

But his face you could not see,

On account of his Beaver Hat.

Edward Lear’s influence can be felt far beyond Carroll, however. With his simple line drawings, he is a precursor to more modern author-illustrators of childrens’ books, such as Dr. Seuss. In fact, Seuss’s Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose is a fleshed-out retelling of Edward Lear’s poem “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,” with a twist.

In the Lear poem, a creature called the Quangle Wangle wears a beaver hat that is a hundred and two feet wide, and numerous animals come to live on the brim of the hat. In the Lear version they all have a grand old time, and the Quangle Wangle is perfectly happy to have guests.

But Dr. Seuss takes the material in a different direction as the animals take advantage of Thidwick’s good nature and become freeloader guests over-staying their welcome. Lear’s emphasis is on nonsense. That is also Dr. Seuss’s emphasis, even though Seuss usually tells a story with a moral—he just doesn’t lay it on too thick.

The moral is there in Thidwick—something like “don’t allow yourself to be a pushover and get taken advantage of by freeloader ‘friends’”—but the emphasis is still on the silly story, the whimsical illustrations, and the word-play.

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10 of the Best Nonsense Poems in English Literature

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Are these the best examples of nonsense verse in English?

Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

Nonsense literature is one of the great subsets of English literature, and for many of us a piece of nonsense verse is our first entry into the world of poetry. In this post, we’ve selected ten of the greatest works of nonsense poetry. We’ve omitted several names from this list, including Dr Seuss (because his best nonsense verse, whilst brilliant, is longer than the short-poem form, often comprising book-length narratives), Hilaire Belloc (whose best work is best-understood as part of the ‘cautionary verse’ tradition, which isn’t as nonsensical as bona fide nonsense verse), and Ogden Nash, whose work seems to be less in the nonsense verse tradition than more straightforward comic verse.

Some of these suggestions come courtesy of Quentin Blake’s The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse (Puffin Poetry), which we’d recommend to any fans of nonsense verse looking for an anthology of beautiful nonsense.

1. Anonymous, ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’.

Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

We tend to associate nonsense verse with those great nineteenth-century practitioners, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, forgetting that many of the best nursery rhymes are also classic examples of nonsense literature. ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’, with its bovine athletics and eloping cutlery and crockery, certainly qualifies as nonsense.

‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ may have been the rhyme referred to in Thomas Preston’s 1569 play, "A lamentable tragedy mixed ful of pleasant mirth, conteyning the life of Cambises King of Percia: ‘They be at hand Sir with stick and fiddle; / They can play a new dance called hey-didle-didle.’" If so, this poem is much older than Victorian nonsense verse!

What does this intriguing nursery rhyme mean, if anything? What are its origins? We explore the history of this classic piece of nonsense verse for children in the link to the nursery rhyme provided above.

2. Anonymous, ‘I Saw a Peacock’.

I Saw a Peacock, with a fiery tail,

I saw a Blazing Comet, drop down hail,

I saw a Cloud, with Ivy circled round,

I saw a sturdy Oak, creep on the ground,

I saw a Pismire, swallow up a Whale,

I saw a raging Sea, brim full of Ale …

Included in Quentin Blake’s anthology, this poem dates from the seventeenth century: ‘I Saw a Peacock, with a fiery tail, / I saw a Blazing Comet, drop down hail, / I saw a Cloud, with Ivy circled round, / I saw a sturdy Oak, creep on the ground …’

This is sometimes known as a ‘trick’ poem: look at how the second clause of each line describes the following object as well as the previous one, so that, for instance, ‘with a fiery tail’ could refer back to the peacock but also forwards to the ‘Blazing Comet’. We delve into the poem and its history in more detail in the link above.

3. Samuel Foote, ‘The Great Panjandrum Himself’.

So she went into the garden

to cut a cabbage-leaf

to make an apple-pie;

and at the same time

a great she-bear, coming down the street,

pops its head into the shop.

What! no soap?

So he died …

So begins this piece of ‘nonsense verse’. Although Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear are the names that immediately spring to mind, several eighteenth-century writers should get a mention in the history of nonsense writing. One is Henry Carey, who among other things coined the phrase ‘namby-pamby’ in his lambasting of the infantile verses of his contemporary, Ambrose Philips; another is the playwright Samuel Foote, known as the ‘English Aristophanes’, who lost one of his legs in an accident but took it good-humouredly, and often made jokes about it.

It was Samuel Foote who gave us ‘The Great Panjandrum’, a piece of writing whose influence arguably stretches to Carroll and Lear in the nineteenth century, and Spike Milligan in the twentieth. In the eighteenth century, Foote penned this piece of nonsense – later turned into verse simply by introducing line-breaks – as a challenge to the actor Charles Macklin, who boasted that he could memorise and recite any speech, after hearing it just once.

Click on the link above to read both the prose and verse version, and learn more about the origins of this piece of nonsense.

4. Lewis Carroll, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Were walking close at hand;

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of sand:

‘If this were only cleared away,’

They said, ‘it would be grand!’

‘If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,

‘That they could get it clear?’

‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,

And shed a bitter tear …

Perhaps, of all Lewis Carroll’s poems, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ has attracted the most commentary and speculation concerning its ultimate ‘meaning’. Some commentators have interpreted the predatory walrus and carpenter as representing, respectively, Buddha (because the walrus is large) and Jesus (the carpenter being the trade Jesus was raised in). It’s unlikely that this was Carroll’s intention, not least because the carpenter could easily have been a butterfly or a baronet instead: he actually gave his illustrator, John Tenniel, the choice, so it was Tenniel who selected ‘carpenter’.

In the poem, the two title characters, while walking along a beach, find a bed of oysters and proceed to eat the lot. But we’re clearly in a nonsense-world here, a world of fantasy: the sun and the moon are both out on this night. The oysters can walk and even wear shoes, even though they don’t have any feet. No, they don’t have feet, but they do have ‘heads’, and are described as being in their beds – with ‘bed’ here going beyond the meaning of ‘sea bed’ and instead conjuring up the absurdly comical idea of the oysters tucked up in bed asleep.

5. Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!’ …

Another classic poem by Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’ is perhaps the most famous piece of nonsense verse in the English language. And the English language here is made to do some remarkable things, thanks to Carroll’s memorable coinages: it was this poem that gave the world the useful words ‘chortle’ and ‘galumph’, both examples of ‘blending’ or ‘portmanteau words’.

As we explain in the summary of the poem provided in the above link, ‘Jabberwocky’ may be nonsense verse but it also tells one of the oldest and most established stories in literature: the ‘overcoming the monster’ narrative and the ‘voyage and return’ plot. We also include a handy glossary of the nonsense words Carroll used in – and invented for – the poem.

6. Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note …

This is probably Edward Lear’s most famous poem, and a fine example of Victorian nonsense verse. It was published in Lear’s 1871 collection Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, and tells of the love between the owl and the pussycat and their subsequent marriage, with the turkey presiding over the wedding.

Edward Lear wrote ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ for a friend’s daughter, Janet Symonds (daughter of the poet John Addington Symonds), who was born in 1865 and was three years old when Lear wrote the poem.

7. Edward Lear, ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’.

Long years ago

The Dong was happy and gay,

Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl

Who came to those shores one day.

For the Jumblies came in a sieve, they did, —

Landing at eve near the Zemmery Fidd

Where the Oblong Oysters grow,

And the rocks are smooth and gray …

One of the things which differentiates some of Lear’s nonsense verse from Lewis Carroll’s is the poignant strain of melancholy found in some of his finest poems. This nonsense poem is also a story of lost love, involving the titular Dong, a creature with a long glow-in-the-dark nose (fashioned from tree-bark and a lamp), who falls in love with the Jumbly girl, only to be abandoned by her.

 

8. A. E. Housman, ‘The Crocodile’.

Though some at my aversion smile,

I cannot love the crocodile.

Its conduct does not seem to me

Consistent with sincerity …

A. E. Housman, the poet best-known for A Shropshire Lad (1896), wrote poems about death and hopeless love. What [most don't know is] that A. E. Housman wrote nonsense verse [too]. In fact, Housman was an accomplished writer of light verse for children, and ‘The Crocodile’, subtitled ‘Public Decency’, is probably his finest piece of nonsense verse, with a cruel and macabre turn.

 

Mervyn Peake and Trees

9. Meryn Peake, ‘The Trouble with Geraniums’.

Although he’s more famous for writing fiction – notably the Gothic fantasy trilogy Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake was also a writer of nonsense verse. The link above will take you to several of Peake’s nonsense poems, but here we’ve chosen ‘The Trouble with Geraniums’ – which isn’t entirely about geraniums, but rather ‘the trouble with’ all sorts of things, from toast to diamonds to the poet’s looking-glass…

10. Spike Milligan, ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’.

When he wasn’t entertaining millions as part of the comedy troupe the Goons, Spike Milligan was a talented author of nonsense verse, with this poem, first published in his 1959 collection Silly Verse for Kids, being perhaps his most celebrated example of the form. Indeed, in 2007 In December 2007 OFSTED reported that it was one of the ten most commonly taught poems in primary schools in the UK!

For a good anthology of nonsense poetry, we recommend The Everyman Book of Nonsense Verse.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.