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What Rhymes with $100 million?

By Bysshe Collegiate

In 2002, pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly gave an unprecedented $100 million philanthropic donation to Poetry, one of the most-respected verse journals in the United States. T.S. Eliot would have corrected this statement, as he once said that Poetry was not a magazine, but rather an institution. Indeed it is both.

Poetry was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and in 1915 quickly achieved literary immortality by publishing Eliot’s first professional poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Other poetic titans to grace the pages of Poetry over the years include W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Years, Ezra Pound and Dylan Thomas. Poetry also published Ernest Hemingway’s first poem, “Chapter Heading,” in 1923.

(Odds are you didn’t know Ezra Pound once called Hemingway the world’s greatest living poet. Okay, so maybe Pound wasn’t the most clear-headed of critics.)

Following Lilly’s donation, the periodical’s advisory board reorganized itself into the Poetry Foundation. Poetry now exists off a modest, seven-figure annual endowment that guarantees the 12,000-circulation magazine will exist in perpetuity. One must admit it’s nice knowing that, in 2437, this little journal of verse will still be chugging along.

In periodical terms, Poetry is to printed verse what TIME is to weekly news rags. TIME, however, currently has 4 million-plus U.S. subscribers. Playboy has 3.1 subscribers; National Geographic 6.6. million. Even Michigan Livingdwarfs Poetry, with more than 1 million subscribers. Unfortunately, the readership of Poetry is more in the ballpark of such periodical stalwarts as European Tool & Mould Making, Houston Woman Magazine and the classic British nudist/naturalist monthly, Health & Efficiency.

Once upon a time, from Homer to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Byron, poetry occupied an pivotal place in Western culture and was indeed the cornerstone of the literary canon. Even vacuum cleaner salesmen used to quote Longfellow and John Donne.

Then something happened.

Some scholars claim that modernists like Eliot and Pound sent the genre of poetry into subterranean cabals, stripping verse of accessibility for the common man. Granted, “The Hollow Men” and “The Cantos” are a tad more cryptic than anything penned by the Lizard King or Art Garfunkel. But the stanzas of popular modern/contemporary poets such as Philip Larkin and Maya Angelou don’t exactly read like Ugaritic.

More likely, once the generation that followed Robert Frost and W.H. Auden started checking into nursing homes, the succeeding generation just stopped paying attention to what poets had to say—unless a worthy line was ensconced in a lyric by Neil Young or Bob Dylan. Because even accessible poetry takes time to process. And who has time on their hands these days? That, and with the few moments one has for bathroom reading, it’s simply more accommodating to flip through Cosmo or Golf Digest.

While the editors of Poetry are swimming in cash thanks to the company that brought the world Prozac (there’s a bit of irony!), I’m not sure what they can do to make the average person to pay more attention to verse. Perhaps the Poetry Foundation should lobby Washington and get the Food and Drug Administration to mandate that all USRDA labels be composed in dactylic hexameter. Or perhaps the IRS should start issuing tax manuals in the guise of chansons de geste.

In Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch-22, villain Milo Minderbinder finds himself in an eponymous bind. He monopolizes the market of Egyptian cotton but cannot move all of it into open industry. He turns the glut into (literal) cotton candy, as well as chocolate-covered cotton and attempts to force-feed the fibrous confection on Yossarian & Co. Those who eat it unwittingly of course become terribly ill.

I’m not trying to compare poetry to chocolate-covered cotton, but, then again, I sincerely doubt anyone can glucose-coat the ashes of the poetic phoenix so that a balladry bird resurrects to capture the attention of today’s A.D.D. consumer.

Perhaps the only way to save poetry is a return to the dirty verse. The only volume of poetry I own is The Merry Muses of Caledonia by Robert Burns. Over the course of his lifetime, the great Scots poet attempted to collect every naughty folk verse he could get his hands—and certain other appendage—on.

Here’s one of my favorite stanzas:

“Come rede me, dame, come tell me, dame, “My dame, come tell me truly, “What length o’ graith, when weel ca’d hame, “Will sair a woman duly?” The carlin clew her wanton tail, Her wanton tail sae ready— “I learn’d a sang in Annandale, Nine inch will please a lady.”

While the above may not eclipse the artistic excellence of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” one has to admit that even with its Gaelic road bumps, the punch line is a real zinger.

“There Was Twa Wives” is another of my favorites:

There was twa wives, and twa witty wives, As e’er play’d houghmagandie, And they coost out, upon a time, Out o’er a drink o’ brandy; Up Maggy rose, and forth she goes, And she leaved auld Mary flytin, And she farted by the bree-en’ For she was gaun a shiten.

She farted by the bree-en’ She farted by the stable; And thick and nimble were her steops As fast as she was able; Till at yon dyke-back the hurly brak, But raxin for some dockins, The beans and pease cam down her thighs, And she cacti a’ her stockins.

I think I’ve stumbled onto something here. Surely Ruth Lilly has a few extra million to spare for someone to start a new limerick rag.

Well, just in case she doesn’t, we’re willing to open up the Columbia City Paper coffers. Visit our Website at www.columbiacitypaper.com On the Radio Free COMMENTS LINK for this column, post your limerick devoted to the subject of poetry or email it to radiofree@columbiacitypaper.com. The CCP editors will choose the top limerick and print it in the following issue.

If we print your limerick, your next 12 issues of CCP are free! (Um, aren’t all issues of CCP free?) Good point. Never mind: Just post your limerick for the hell of it.)

Here’s mine for starters:

There once was an heiress named Ruth, who deemed poetry equated truth; she gave all her stock, to the Poetry hawks, who dumped it on crepes and on booze.

Mr. Collegiate is filling in for columnist Harry S. Iarch, who is on assignment this week exhuming the remains of Ozymandias.