Twenty-four poems I love (and one of mine)

by David Benjamin

“‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/ The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/ Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/ The frumious Bandersnatch!’” 

― Lewis Carroll

MADISON, Wis. — For three years in high school, I carried around a dog-eared copy of Louis Untermeyer’s Great Poems anthology. In the course of this autodidactic exercise, I memorized a few dozen poems, among which were Robert Herrick’s four luscious lines of 17th-century erotica, “Whenas in silks my Julia goes/ Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes…”

Gradually, unconsciously, I became a collector of favored couplets and quatrains from sources that ranged from poetry books to Tin Pan Alley, from the Top Forty to the Book of Psalms. 

I memorized Wordsworth (“I wandered lonely as a cloud…”), and Byron (“She walks in beauty like the night…”), Shelley (“… My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings…”) and Coleridge (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree…”). It was Untermeyer who instigated my love affair with Ogden Nash by selecting for his anthology perhaps the funniest opening couplet in all of verse: “O Duty,/ Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?…”

It was Nash (in “Very Like a Whale”) who also followed “better for” with “metaphor” and sent me looking for similar brilliant, unexpected rhymes—which I found (thanks to a Mad magazine parody)—in Cole Porter, who in a dizzying tumble of allusive rhymes wrote: “… You’re the nimble tread/ Of the feet of Fred Astaire/ You’re an O’Neill drama/ You’re Whistler’s mama/ You’re camembert/ You’re a rose/ You’re Inferno’s Dante/ You’re the nose/ On the great Durante…” 

Among his million turns of astonishing phrase, Cole Porter somehow rhymed “gigolos” with “I propose” and, of course, “anything goes.”

Speak of gigolos and I think of Al Dubin’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”—not to be confused with the Green Day ditty that includes the word “fuck.” Part of Dubin’s haunting lyric (you should hear Marianne Faithfull sing it) goes: “… Here is where you’ll always find me,/ Always walking up and down,/ But I left my soul behind me/ In an old cathedral town./ The joy that you find here, you borrow,/ You cannot keep it long, it seems./ And gigolo and gigolette/ Still sing a song and dance along/ The boulevard of broken dreams…”

Inspired by Untermeyer and his fellow anthologist Oscar Williams, I bought whole books by poets from T.S. Eliot (“… Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,/ He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity…”) to Gregory Corso (“Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?/ Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries…”), cummings, of course, (“i sing of Olaf glad and big…”) and Sandburg, who offered me a Graduation Day valediction I’ve never forgotten: “The peace of great doors be for you./ Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs./ Wait for the great hinges…”

Prowling the bookstores of State Street, I discovered Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who only just died last year at 102 and who dared to versify with politics, in “One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro.” This led me, unfortunately, to a burst of angry, amateur mimicry: “One Thousand Fearful Words for LBJ.”

I briefly fancied myself a poet but outgrew the urge and settled for the occasional snatch of doggerel: “Hooray, excelsior and pow./ The ship of state is sunk and dead,/ And we the fools are at the prow/ From which the wise and good have fled.” See why I gave it up?

By and by, it dawned on me that poetry isn’t confined to anthologies and slim volumes. It was all around, infusing my life with a subliminal soundtrack, sometimes intoning, “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men…”,  but oftener, singing to me, “… My boyfriend’s back/ He’s gonna save my reputation/ Hey la, hey la…” Indeed, Keats offered no testament to shattered love more poignant than Joe Seneca’s lyric, sung heartrendingly by Brenda Lee, “Break it to me gently/ Let me down the easy way/ Make me feel that you still love me/ If it’s just, if it’s just for one more day…”  

And is there a final stanza in Milton or Longfellow more crisp and evocative than the words of Johnny Bond? “…Well, they arrested me and put me in jail/ I called my Pop, I said ‘Go my bail.’/ He said, ‘Son, you’re gonna drive me to drinkin’/ If you don’t stop drivin’ that hot. Rod. Lincoln.’”

While we’re at it, is that the best car poem of all time? Maybe, but I lean toward Chuck Berry’s wet dream of automotive validation for every down-and out wage slave, “No Money Down”: “… I want power steering and power brakes,/ And a powerful motor, Jack, with a jet offtake./ I want air conditioning and automatic heat/ And a full rollaway bed in my backseat,/ A shortwave radio, a TV and a phone./ Y’know, I gotta talk to my baby when I’m drivin’ alone…”

Mentors like Untermeyer, Williams, Chuck and Buddy (Holly) steered my curiosity toward Mississippi John Hurt, Sleep John Estes and Taj Mahal. The genius of the Blues was somehow making music from the cruelest of American heritages— slavery, lynching, Jim Crow and hymns of tragic prayer. I discovered  the incomparable Bessie Smith, whose poetry was voluminous, often funny and casually profound. She composed no better American poem than “Backwater Blues” (you should hear Dinah Washington sing it) about the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927. In the simplest of terms, Bessie evokes and laments the plight of the sharecropping poor at the mercy of nature:  “… I went and stood up on some high old lonesome hill/ Then looked down on the house where I used to live… Black water blues done called me to pack my things and go/ ’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more…”

From Bessie, it’s a short trip to the scatmen and divas of jazz, from Satchmo to Anita and Ella. Schooling them all, of course, Billie Holiday, whose pain was authentic, whose voice could take an Ellington tune and pierce all the way to your soul: “… I sit in my chair/ And filled with despair/ There’s no one could be so sad./ With gloom everywhere, I sit and I stare, / I know that I’ll soon go mad…”  

Purists of literature were surprised when Bob Dylan’s poetry won the Nobel Prize. I wasn’t. Nominally a “folk singer,” Dylan knew Yeats and Emily Dickinson. He had mastered the Blues. He could rock, he could roll. He had studied the American Songbook and he knew his Bible: “Well, God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’/ God said, ‘No.’ Abe said, ‘What?’/ God said, ‘You can do what you want, Abe/ But next time you see me coming, you better run’…”

Like Dylan, perhaps, it was poetry rather than dogma that endeared me to Bible study. For instance, my favorite version of the Good Book’s most singable, recitable poem, Song of Solomon, is the Revised Standard translation: “Your lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy mouth is lovely… Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle that feed among the lilies… You art all fair, my love; there is no flaw…”

However, a reflection on human frailty in I Corinthians sounds better in the language of King James. In free-verse, Paul cautions me that, though I grope to learn and understand, I’m ignorant and half-blind. Without a constant, humiliating search for the light, warns Paul, there’s little faith, scant hope and there ain’t much love out there: “… For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known…”

Irving Berlin couldn’t have said it better.