For the whole sordid story, go here. Or:here i am ben says bill
nothing but a lousy playwright
and with anything like luck
in the breaks i might have been
a fairly decent sonnet writer
i might have been a poet
if i had kept away from the theatre
For the whole sordid story, go here. Or:here i am ben says bill
nothing but a lousy playwright
and with anything like luck
in the breaks i might have been
a fairly decent sonnet writer
i might have been a poet
if i had kept away from the theatre
3 comments:
What a God-awful reading of what is essentially one of the greatest tragicomic poems in the English language. Sounds to me like a Cary Grant imitator on Qualudes phoning it in. Marquis must be rolling in his grave.
But I guess any exposure is better than total oblivion. They're not reading Marquis much any more in the colleges these days. Too much focus on getting a place in the next Goldman Sachs freshman class after graduation. Mention Marquis to the average mutt and all you get a puzzled shrug. er
o wotthehell wotthehell.
Yours very crankily,
thenewyorkcrank.
Actually, I agree with you on the reading. Maybe I should do my own. But may I take this opportunity to thank you for introducing me to Marquis and this poem in particular, some 54 years ago give or take.
You are welcome and....
Hmm. That brings to mind a potential stage project. Six — or nine, or ten — great actors on a stage, each of them reading the same in a series of, say, a dozen Don Marquis archy poems including:
• The Shakespeare poem
• The one about a man on the subway who plucks his own eyeball from its socket and eats it. ("the consternation in the car can be imagined...")
•archy's interview with the pharoah's mummy at the Metropolitan Museum
•freddy the rat perishes
• warty bliggins the toad
• the interview with the moth who is trying to break into a lightbulb and fry himself on the wires
And of course, The Song of Mehitabel.
yours until my head explodes,
The New York Crank
Post a Comment