Bunkering With Books

LIGHT, BRIGHT VERSE

BY CONNIE CRONLEY

I’m a sucker for light verse. I don’t care much for puns, but I adore doggerel, limericks, and funny rhymes. Write some words that gambol and play on the page and I’m in love.

“ARCHY AND MEHITABEL”

I’m particularly fond of Don Marquis’s “Archy and Mehitabel” pieces, and they don’t rhyme at all. Marquis was a popular newspaper columnist and book author in the 1920s who created Archy, a literary cockroach who wrote free verse. Archy didn’t capitalize, neither did he bother with punctuation, but he was a sophistical city cockroach and wry observer of human, feline, and insect nature as noted in “The Flattered Lightning Bug.” The freespirited alley cat Mehitabel was his best friend. “a lightning bug got in here the other night a regular hick from the country… who got so vain of himself i had to take him down a peg you’ve made lightning for two hours little bug i told him but i don’t hear any claps of thunder there are some men like that when he wore himself out mehitabel the cat ate him.”

“BEASTLY POETRY”

Ogden Nash wrote playful verse full of puns and humorous spellings from 1931-1972. He was so popular that in 2002, on the centennial of his birth, the U.S. Postal Department issued a postage stamp featuring him and six of his verses including “The Cow:” “The cow is of bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk.”

“YOU TOOK THE LAST BUS HOME”

Now I have discovered a new poet of light verse. Brian Bilston, the pseudonym of Paul Millicheap, has burst into social media popularity as the Poet Laureate of Twitter. I first saw his short, droll verses as they popped up on Facebook, then I bought his two books of poems, “You Took the Last Bus Home” and “Alexa, what is there to know about love?”

As a former academic publisher from Oxford, he writes often about language, such as “And Now for the Weather” which begins: “Today is set to be agreeably alliterative Across an assortment of areas Although the occasional metaphor May cause some faces to cloud.”

Skillful with word play, he lists “My Year in Diets:” “Vaganuary, Fibreuary, Starch, Cakepril…”

He writes “Haiku Horoscopes” including this one for Pisceans, “nightclub visit fails you find there is no one to pick up the Pisces.”

“ALEXA, WHAT IS THERE TO KNOW ABOUT LOVE?”

Much of Bilston's verse is delightful pudding, but some are Beef Wellington – red meat inside the puff pastry. One critic compares him to satirical poets like Dorothy Parker. In 2016 he wrote, “America is a Gun.” Here are the first two verses: “England is a cup of tea. France, a wheel of ripened brie. Greece, a short, squat olive tree. America is a gun. Holland is a wooden shoe. Hungry, a goulash stew. Australia, a kangaroo. America is a gun.”

As a devoted fan and inquisitive journalist, I contacted Mr. Bilston by email. From his home in England, where he prefers a quiet life and anonymity; he did an online interview with me for this book column.

“Can a person make a living writing poetry?” I asked him. “You can if you’re Rupi Kaur,” he answered. “I am not, unfortunately. Like most other poets, I have to find other ways of earning money. There’s only so much sitting at a desk staring out of the window a poet can do. It’s far better to be out in the world — that’s where the ideas come.”

Because I had the chance, I asked him two silly questions. Because he’s polite, he answered. “What’s your favorite word?” “Plectrum,” he replied. “Your least favorite?" “Productize.”

He told me he has two new cats and a new book, “Days Like These: An Alternative Guide to the Year in 366 Poems.” The book can be preordered, he said, “from your local, friendly book shop.” The publication date is October, “just before tea time.”