The Happy Poet

...In the best of Nash we find a haiku of hilarity, a profound explication of the human condition...

...Nerve-wracking as his choice was, Nash had a nice little living with a commodious house in James P. Lucier is a writer living in Leesburg, Virginia...

...He was the co-creator with composer Kurt Weil of the successful Broadway musical, One Touch of Venus...

...A while ago Gioia wrote a sharp-elbowed essay in the Atlantic castigating his fellow poets for retreating from communication with the outside world...

...Were all those poems simply "good bad poetry...

...Why were his poems so deeply appreciated by the demographic that read them in the Saturday Evening Post as much as by the readers of the supposedly more sophisticated New Yorker...

...It may be hard to imagine, but he actually wrote poetry for a living during the Depression...

...Why was his work so strongly supported by the "serious" poets whose work is deconstructed today in graduate seminars at our most pretentious universities...

...Lower courts directed that the company be dissolved and the assets sold, bankrupting Nash's father...

...through Groton and Harvard and the New York business world was derailed...

...Was Nash, as Parker's subtitle implies, just a writer of "light verse...

...Only Nash woke up each day with the financial need to face the tyranny of a typewriter with a blank sheet of paper, slinging out the lariat of his imagination to pluck exactly the right words out of the air that would bring a postman to his door with a check...

...Supreme Court reversed the decision, completely exonerating Nash's father...

...It's a workmanlike book, written with full access to Nash's papers and the reminiscences of family and friends...

...Reality seems, after reading this book, or leafing through it, more solid, more abundant, and more complex...

...Gioia says, "His rhymes were not merely amusing but often revelatory—playing on the differences between speech and writing or brilliantly contrasting levels of diction, shades of etymology, or arbitrary features of English like the inconsistency of our language's spelling and pronunciation...

...But mostly he wrote poetry without being on anyone's payroll...

...Parker has given us a level-headed explanation of where Nash was coming from...

...If so, why is it 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2005 as great a pleasure to read his verse now as when it first appeared...

...Eliot, who had experience both in business management and literature, held on as a director and editor at Faber and Faber, and only became a multimillionaire posthumously with the staging of Cats...

...His destined career path that should have taken him Perhaps because Nash was a working man who actually worked at writing poetry, he was able to write about things that touched real people, while at the same time dazzling professionals with his word art...

...He got a job in New York writing street-car advertising, while living in a cold-water flat under the El...

...It was then that he decided that it was not necessary to be a good poet to be successful...

...It was a defining moment for young Ogden that taught him how to deal with tough times...

...The irony of that phrase is never satisfactorily resolved by Parker...

...Was he merely another Edgar Guest or Joyce Kilmer...

...He decided that anyone with a competent knowledge of rhyme and meter should be able, as he put it, "to write good bad poetry...

...Above these things it deserves our praise for bringing into circulation names and texts that are usually kept hidden...

...Perhaps because Nash was a working man who actually worked at writing poetry, he was able to write about things that touched real people, while at the same time dazzling professionals with his word art...

...He also lasted 30 days as the assistant to the irascible, impossible Harold Ross at the New Yorker, but managed to depart on good terms...

...By that time it was too late...

...Unfortunately his company became the target of ambitious federal prosecutors looking to make an example of someone with the new Sherman Anti-Trust Act...

...Despite his poetry's becoming one of the defining elements of the New Yorker's style in the '40s and '50s and despite his hanging out with a wild literary and theatre crowd, he lived in happy, lifelong domesticity with his beloved wife Frances and his two literary daughters, Linell and Isabel...

...He took an unsuccessful detour to Hollywood as a screenwriter...

...However, there was only one living poet in her repertoire—Ogden Nash...

...Whatever one's opinions about the authors included, simply bringing them into the open expands our space of knowledge and thus of freedom in our minds...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW in the end, perhaps Christopher Blum was justified in choosing his line of implicit argument, against which I was just grumbling...

...1...

...Such poems are printed in poetry magazines that nobody interested in literature would ever think of reading...

...Nash's own father was a successful businessman, who put together a group of companies selling tar and naval stores in OCTOBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse by Douglas M. Parker, with a foreword by Dana Gioia (IvAN R. DEE, 336 PAGES, $27.50) Reviewed by James P. Lucier BOOKS IN REVIEW East Coast ports...

...By a stroke of luck, he was able to move to Doubleday, then the largest publisher, editing crime novels and having to read for rejection reams and reams of bad poetry by bad poets...

...Then, in a move strikingly similar to the recent federal case against the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, the U.S...

...And so, over the next 40 years, he wrote and published more than 1,000 poems, the last one appearing in the New Yorker a few days after his death in 1971...

...True, it was nothing extravagant, providing a kind of shabby-chic existence interspersed with long, exhausting book tours to promote sales, but it also included a few ocean-steamer trips to Europe, and a group of loyal family retainers, one of whom followed him to the family grave plot at Little Boar's Head...

...Furthermore, the governor's brother, Nash's great-great-granduncle, was a military hero who died in battle, and gave his name to the settlement in Tennessee now called Nashville...

...The objective reader will feel inevitably relieved and strengthened, certainly better able to make future informed judgments...

...the company was gone and the Nash family was broke...

...He wrote the incidental verses to the orchestral music for Saint- Saens' Carnival of the Animals...

...However, grantseekers that they are, they shut up when President George W. Bush appointed Gioia to be head of the National Endowment for the Arts...

...Indeed, the fatherly advice he gave to his daughters growing up was much more sage than the wicked wit of his bachelor days...

...Gioia points out that his mother, a working-class woman of Mexican descent, never went beyond high school, but was a great lover of poetry who frequently recited verses appropriate to what was happening in the daily chores of raising her family...

...All of this is well recounted in Douglas M. Parker's new biography, Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse...

...He pointed out that poets today do not write for a living, but have sinecures in universities teaching students to write poems that only other professional poets living in universities will read...

...The book is well translated, has a decent index, few typos...

...STRONG CLUE MAY BE FOUND in the fact that the foreword to the Nash biography is written by ana Gioia, no mean practitioner in the poetry business himself...

...Baltimore, an apartment in Manhattan, and a summer place at Little Boar's Head in New Hampshire...

...The Happy Poet 0 GDEN NASH WAS THAT RARE BIRD in the 20th century, a poet who lived by his wit...

...Robert Frost lived on a farm with good fences in New Hampshire, although he taught at Amherst for over 20 years...

...Instead he was home-schooled, and later managed one year at Harvard...

...With a roar like the roar of pachyderms trumpeting a last trump in the elephant graveyard, the professional poets objected...

...Be that as it may, there is no doubt in my mind that the young scholar from Christendom College will take his place with this work in the respected company of serious English and American students of the French opposition, in the ranks of Beik, Elbow, McClelland, and others of the same caliber...

...William Carlos Williams, a physician and head of the local hospital, delivered some 2,000 babies over 40 years to support his poetry habit...

...Nash's career included a stint with the Doubleday publishing house in New York...

...It tells us that his great-great-grandfather was governor of North Carolina during the American Revolution, and a member of the Continental Congress...