™ BOOKMAN SSI -rb x ~ FREAK ENGLISH

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 381, 15 June 1928, Page 14

™ BOOKMAN SSI -rb x ~

FREAK ENGLISH

(Written for THE SUN)

QF the many queer cults that have succeeded for a season in perplexing and humbugging sad, civilised humanity, the vers libre or Free Verse cult is assuredly one of the greatest. It is one of the greatest as it is unquestionably the most asinine. How this cult of freak verbiage managed for such a length of time to get itself taken seriously by otherwise sensible people; how it succeeded in finding its way into otherwise intelligent reviews and magazines is a problem that only the Good Lord Himself can solve. I have read stacks of the crazy stufT in the last 10 years. I penitentially waded through the weary, dreary, tuneless balderdash from the first feeble fooleries of Ezra Pound to the final posthumous efforts of Amy Lowell; from the first discordant shrieks of Harriet Munroe to the latest inane vapourings of Edith Sitwell, and I have yet to find one single idea worth remembering, one single intelligible, original thought, one solitary line with the faintest suspicion of music in it. What I did find was murdered and mutilated common sense, racked and tortured rhythm and inane combinations of sounds that might well have dribbled from the pendulous lips of idiocy. The cult originated in France, we are told. Maybe, this is true. One thing is certaiif; however. It was never taken seriously save by nit-wits until it reached the land of the TrustStrangled Banner, and was taken in hand by certain soulful ladies in a lower stratum of the American intelligentsia; just as Mah Jongg originated iu China, but never found its feet until it was taken up by the wealthy widows of deceased dill-pickle manufacturers, in New York, Chicago and Council Bluffs. Free Verse is now American. As American as jazz, chewing gum and the Ku Klux Klan. Harriet Munroe and Ezra Pound were among the first to experiment with it, I believe. _ But neither Harriet nor Ezra had sufficient social prestige to make the esoteric whimwham respectable. The cult languished until Amy Lowell sat in and took a hand. Amy had the requisite amount of social pull. She was the sister of President Lowell, of Harvard University. And, moreover, Amy hailed from Boston . , , The land of the bean 2nd the cod , 'Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells, And the Lowells speak only to God.

As soon as Amy had made Free Verse American, that is to say, respectable, an army of herbivorous Homers and bucolic Blakes from the backblocks were storming the foothills of Parnassus. Bernard Shaw once said that his cat could write blank verse. Certainly, no intelligence higher than that of a sub normal earthworm is required to write vers libre. Talent is not liecessary. Skill is not necessary. Education is not necessary. All that is required is a judicious amount of .John Dewar or Black and White. I who have neither talent, skill nor education, have thrown together chunks of Free Verse as good as any that have been written in our time. You doubt me? Wife, fetch me my lute and pocket flask! I will write a Free Verse poem in the manner of Amy Lowell and Max Weber. How’s this?

Wlgger brown planetoids reeling westward J see them churning up the chromosomes. They flit and sit. *Tit Dandruff Week. On tempestuous whiskers that puff and thrill end stab the dusk with their marling spikes that tipple the claret and scream their salmon into the teeth of the hail-whipped blast. Where a nose and an eyebrow shrill as a flea on the bare backbone of the world -fights halitosis with Listerine. Ears shrill and shot through with saffron, universal, rime-ringed and apocryphal, obscenely blotting in the moonlight. Fair to middling, isn’t it? Or this. After the style of Alfred Kreyborg. a high calibre vers librist in the land of standardised parts. Wr have a one legged hen. yon have a two legged, three legged, four legged. IVe have a one legged hen. Because a one legged hen is all we have we have a one legged hen. Because a one legged hen cats all we have i re have a one legged hen. Because we do not want .1 tiro legged, three legged, four legged If wc had a tiro legged, three legged, four legged we i could need more than a one legged hen. 1V r e have a one legged hen. We like a one legged hen. I will now, while the going is good, repair to my accustomed place of worship and there give thanks to my own particular Gods, the Shining Ones of the High North, that the vers librists have shot their bolt and that their queer, freak cult is dying. After which I will go down to some lonely foreshore and there sacrifice pipis to Poseidon. S. ANDERSON. Horahora.