Don Marquis — Archy & Mehitabel
I first came across the pipe smoking, cigar chewing poet, Don Marquis, forty-eight years, when Faber & Faber published Archy & Mehitabel. I loved them then and love them now, especially ‘certain maxims of archy’. Here’s a taster, and remember these first saw the light of day at about the same time that prohibition came in:
don t cuss the climate
it probably doesn t like you
any better
than you like it
prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into
i once heard the survivors
of a colony of ants
that had been partially
obliterated by a cow s foot
seriously debating
the intention of the gods
toward their civilization
We have to remember that Archy is a cockroach who writes his free verse by jumping onto the keys of Don’s typewriter one at a time while the journalist and novelist is asleep: hard work, made even harder by the fact that he can’t operate the shift mechanism, or use capital letters, or punctuation, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Don…
