Thursday, July 21, 2005

Nonsense Verse

Everyman has issued a collection of nonsense verse. From a review of same:

No one does just nonsense: That would be inhuman. It works best as a hobby, a sideline. Lear was a painter, Carroll a clergyman and mathematician. Mervyn Peake, with all the mental tonnage of his Gormenghast novels installed and pressurized in his head, seems to have fired out brilliant squibs of nonsense for relief: “Of fallow-land and pasture / And skies both pink and grey, / I made my statement last year / And have no more to say.” Chesterton found the production of nonsense verse to be–literally–laughably easy: “To publish a book of my nonsense verses,” he wrote to his fiancĂ©, “seems to me exactly like summoning the whole of the people of Kensington to watch me smoke a cigarette.” And Stevens said of “The Emperor Of Ice Cream”: “I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go. This poem is an instance of letting myself go.”

Link to Book.

Link to Review.

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