Sherry Chandler » 2007 » March » 09
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Billy Collins on Ogden Nash in Poetry Speaks (Sourcebooks, 2001):
Robert Frost said whenever he read a poem that rhymed, he always looked down the right side of the page to see who had won, the poet or the rhyme scheme. Usually we want to poet to win by controlling the rhymes; bad poetry is the place where rhymes tend to dominate. But much of the surprise and joy in Nash’s poems comes from the poet’s willilngness to allow the rhymes to win.
Here’s a short example, with cat, of the Ogden Nash strategy:
Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man
It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is jut the opposite and is called a sin of ommission and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
Well, there are more ways than one to kill a cat,
And offhand you’d think there were more kinds of sin than that…
— Ogden Nash, text from Poetry Speaks (Sourcebooks)
This post was written by sherry
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