My book report: archy knew

 Don Marquis, The Best of Archy and Mehitabel, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011.  Illustrations by George Herriman, introduction by E.B. White (1950)

In 1916, when Tom Eliot was getting ready to publish Prufrock and Other Observations in London, a newspaperman named Don Marquis was writing a column, The Sun Dial, for the New York Evening Sun.  It was in that year that a cockroach named archy began to leave him poems -- light verse, not Mr. Eliot's kind -- by jumping on the keys of his manual typewriter, a tremendous undertaking.  Archy had been a poet in a prior existence and was unable to make use of the shift key so all his poems were in lower case, anticipating (inspiring?) e.e. cummings.  He introduced Marquis to a frowsy alley cat named Mehitabel, who believed she was the reincarnation of Cleopatra, and some of archy's poems relate her unending search for love.

I picked up this little Everyman reprint years ago, having been made aware of Marquis by the radio genius Jean Shepherd.  Writers like Marquis and George Ade and Robert W. Service are not taught in school, not even in the Before Times when high school students had to read Homer and Shakespeare.  Shep revealed them, even publishing an anthology of Ade's fables in slang.  He read the verses with appropriate music and deep love; I still hear them in his voice.

Light verse is poetry you can read without all the end notes and Latin tags, which often promise more profundity than they deliver.  You can read it on the subway and not miss anything.  Since we have all just celebrated the centenary of The Waste Land I wanted to share a poem of archy's written about the same time.  See if it doesn't have more relevance now than fisher kings and the voice of the thunder.

                                                    what the ants are saying

dear boss i was talking with an ant

the other day 

and he handed me a lot of

gossip which ants the world around

are chewing over among themselves

i pass it on to you

in the hope that you may relay it to other

human beings and hurt their feelings with it

no insect likes human beings

and if you think you can see why

the only reason i tolerate you is because

you seem less human to me than most of them

here is what the ants are saying

             ***

it wont be long now it wont be long

man is making deserts of the earth

it wont be long now

before man will have used it up

so that nothing but ants

and centipedes and scorpions

can find a living on it

man has oppressed us for a million years

but he goes on steadily

cutting the ground from under

his own feet making deserts deserts deserts

    ***

we ants remember

we have it all recorded

in our tribal lore

when gobi was a paradise

swarming with men and rich

in human prosperity

it is a desert now and the home

of scorpions ants and centipedes

   ***

what man calls civilization

always results in deserts

man is never on the square

he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth

each generation wastes a little more

of the future with greed and lust for riches

   ***

north africa was once a garden spot

and then came carthage and rome

and despoiled the storehouse

and now you have sahara

sahara ants and centipedes

   ***

toltecs and aztecs had a mighty

civilization on this continent

but they robbed the soil and wasted nature

and now you have deserts scorpions ants and centipedes

and the deserts of the near east

followed egypt and babylon and assyria

and persia and rome and the turk

the ant is the inheritor of tamerlane

and the scorpion succeeds the caesars

   ***

america was once a paradise

of timberland and streams

but it is dying because of the greed

and  money lust of a thousand little kings

who slashed the timber all to hell

and would not be controlled

and changed the climate

and stole the rainfall from posterity

and it wont be long now

it wont be long 

till everything is desert

from the alleghenies to the rockies

the deserts are coming

the deserts are spreading

the springs and streams are drying up

one day the mississippi itself

will be a bed of sand

ants and scorpions and centipedes

shall inherit the earth

   ***

men talk of money and industry

of hard times and recoveries

of finance and economics

but the ants wait and the scorpions wait

for while men talk they are making deserts all the time

getting the world ready for the conquering ant

drought and erosion and desert

because men cannot learn

   ***

rainfall passing off in flood and freshet

and carrying good soil with it

because there are no longer forests

to withhold the water in the

billion meticulations of the roots

   ***

it wont be long now it wont be long

till earth is barren as the moon

and sapless as a mumbled bone

   ***

dear boss i relay this information

without any fear that humanity

will take warning and reform

archy

I'm not making any money from this, so I don't think the copyright is violated.  Like archy, just passing it along.  

(George Herriman also created Krazy Kat.)