Oh, Lord, Now it’s Duelling Limericks!
One morning, David Yezzi sent me this limerick, written by Robert Conquest about that “c**t” (K. Amis’s word) Sir Philip Toynbee (experimental verse novelist, son of the famous historian):
You cannot when dealing with Toynbee,
Just pay him back in his own coin be—
Cause talking such piss
Would seem rather a miss;
So how would a kick in the groin be?
I proposed that we battle it out in a contest of timed limericks, like timed chess, in Washington Square Park. I got the ball rolling:
When engaging the poet named Yezzi,
You must, from the first, mention his “fee.”
If one’s not direct
He feels it neglect:
“Famous bards don’t versify for free!”
[32 secs]
He came back with this:
When addressing the poet Hilburtius,
First expound on how handsome his shirt is,
And the cut of his slacks,
For the one thing he lacks
Is the power to resist someone courteous.
[23 secs]
So I hit him with a similarly Roman start:
Proconsul Yezzius Davidus
Doesn’t like to make much of a fuss.
He’s fine with khaki
And cut-rate brandy,
Though a tux and good booze are a plus.
[13 secs]
So he went musical and international on me:
Senor Hilbert, the maestro Ernesto,
Conducts all his symphonies “presto,”Except for Bee’s Fifth
Which he crams full of pith:
Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?
[36 secs]
So I hit him where it hurts:
Big boss David Yezzi, I have found,
Drives many a firm into the ground.
When the stocks drop
And PR’s a flop,
You can bet that he won’t be around!
[35 secs]
He hit back with this acrostic limerick (my name is spelled by the initial letters of each line):
Ernest Hilbert will often compose
Righteous verses while thumbing his nose
Now and then at a poets’Inner feeling although it’s
Exploring their own qeuelquechose.
[64 secs]
So I decided to get artistic on him:
Daveeeeed, like Napoleon’s gifted clown,
Always groveling before the crown:
Contempt he breeds,
Whenever he succeeds,
Cause his feats leave his nose a bit brown.
[48 secs]
And he replied:
Ernie Hilbert’s employers are pissed
At the number of hours he’s missed
Composing light verses,
And the only thing worse is
He e-mails them out to his list.
[28 secs]
I finally managed an acrostic zinger of my own:
Yowch, he’s diggin’ De Kooning.
Even Pollock has him swooning.
Zealous as all hell,
Zany for Motherwell
I think his tastes need some tuning!
[65 secs]
So he got harsh:
E. Hilbert, rare book antiquarian,
Has some traits that he shares with Yossarian:
He’s an awfully nice fellow,
If a little bit yellow.
His idealism’s pure prelapsarian.
[59 secs]
And I went and got beat on him:
This cat Yezzi, I will submit,
Had better learn to cool it.
His verses go fast
And draw on the past
But that alone don’t make ‘em legit!
[28 secs]
He cried “Uncle!” and we called it a day. Send in your own limericks!
Number 91: Rabbit, Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit is Rich (1981); Rabbit at Rest (1990), John Updike. This is my second quaternary, and it might seem like I’m cheating, but as with the Ford, these are four unified novels of comparable length (and increasingly sophisticated prose style) covering the tragicomic lives of characters over three generations. Set in the imaginary eastern Pennsylvania town of Brewster, the novels chronicle the endless dreary shortcomings of lower- and eventually upper-middle class families. The central character, Rabbit Angstrom, is the perfect WASP antihero: self-centered, lazy, impulsive, irresponsible, but ultimately irresistible to the women in his life. As much as he may try, he is unable to ruin his life, as he is repeatedly saved by family, friends, and well wishers. Suburban, unimaginative, anti-intellectual, un-self-conscious, and utterly unambitious, Rabbit emerges as the antithesis of Updike’s other great creation, Henry Bech, the striving urban, Jewish novelist more famous for his writer’s block, dwindling royalties checks, and disastrous sexual obsessions than his writing. Each novel in the Rabbit quaternary traces the contours of an American decade’s achievements, passions, and fixations, from the 1950s through the end of the 1980s, providing a strangely satisfying history of larger trends in American life as they trickle out to the suburbs, from wife swapping to cocaine parties. Particularly noxious to several generations of feminists, the Rabbit books offer a rare, authentic glimpse into the sometimes off-putting thoughts and desires of the “average” white suburban male. The four books should be read in order, altogether, and as soon as possible.
Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, a New York artist-directed theatre company, announces that the American premiere of Glyn Maxwell’s remarkable drama The Lifeblood. The dramatic telling of the last days of Mary Stuart begins performances on Friday, February 1 and plays through Saturday, February 23 at The Connelly Theatre, 220 East 4th Street, in New York. The Lifeblood first premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004, where it was hailed as the British Theatre Guide’s “Best Play on the Fringe.” Produced in London in 2005, it tells the story of Mary Stuart’s last days. London’s The Stage said, “Glyn Maxwell’s script somehow manages to suggest the rhythm and structure of Shakespearean language while keeping it in a modern context. It feels like the history play Shakespeare never wrote.” The Lifeblood, centers around the last days of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. A devout Catholic Mary was imprisoned for nearly two decades by her cousin Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth eventually signs the execution decree and she was eventually executed. Craig Smith, one of the Phoenix Ensemble Directors, states “This is an exquisitely written play. The government intrigues and plots leading to Mary’s persecution both political and religious, make Mr. Maxwell’s play extremely relevant and the ending has a remarkable and sobering twist. The Phoenix is proud to bring this beautiful play to American audiences.”
Glyn Maxwell is a poet and playwright from Hertfordshire, England. This will be a very busy year for Maxwell. Along with The Lifeblood in New York, “The Only Girl in the World” will open at the Arcola Studio in London, in April 2008, “Mimi and the Stalker” will open in London this spring and later this summer “Liberty” will have its world premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, prior to a UK tour. He is also developing a version of Hecabe/Women of Troy, called The Ruins for Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). His novel The Girl Who Was Going To Die is to be published in March 2008 by Jonathan Cape. His last poetry book was The Sugar Mile (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) and hew new book of poetry Hide Now will publish in the fall of 2008 (Houghton Mifflin). He graduated from Oxford and studied poetry under Derek Walcott at Boston University. He has published several books of verse, including The Breakage (1998) Time’s Fool (2000), and The Nerve (2002), all of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In 1997 he was awarded the E.M.Forster Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2004 the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, for The Nerve. Several of his plays have been performed in Britain, including highly praised productions of Broken Journey (a Time Out Critics’ Choice in 1999; Phoenix Theatre Ensemble in New York 2005), Wolfpit (Phoenix New York 2006) and Anyroad. His libretto for Elena Langer’s The Girl of Sand premiered at the Almeida in London in 2003, and his libretto for Edward Dudley Hughes’s version of Aristophanes’ Birds will premiere in June 2005. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Amherst, and the New School, and is currently the Poetry Editor of The New Republic and teaches at New York University. The Lifeblood under the direction of Robert Hupp, features a 8-member cast headed by Elise Stone as Mary. Others in the cast include Brian Costello, Jolie Garrett, Douglas McKeown, Joe Menino, Jason O’Connell, Craig Smith, and Mark Waterman. Tickets for The Lifeblood are $20 each (TDF Vouchers accepted) and can be obtained by calling 212-352-3101 or by visiting 
The Hilbertian sonnet is the name sardonically given by Daniel Nester to a type of sonnet I devised for my book Sixty Sonnets. As a departure, or, as some have suggested, an “Americanization,” of the traditional sonnet forms (Petrarchan, Sheakespearean, Spenserian), it employs the rhyme scheme ABCABC DEFDEF GG. This allows me to dust off of the Italian “little song” and modernize the Elizabethan love poem. The creation of double sestets owes merely and only to my affection for the number six. However, the spreading of the rhymes allows me to develop more internal rhyme than a traditional sonnet might successfully sustain.
