A crisis in literary criticism! (Making it new yet again...)

From "A crisis in literary criticism?" by Ellie Robins at the superb Melville House Books website: 

"Spain’s El País newspaper has pronounced a state of crisis in worldwide literary criticism. In an article on Saturday, Winston Manrique Sabogal interviewed some of the foremost names in literary journalism, including literary editor of The Guardian Claire Armitstead; essayist, editor and translator Eliot Weinberger; and Marie Arana, the former editor of The Washington Post's now-defunct Book World review section. The piece attributes the crisis to the economic crash and to the world’s dual advance: the split between print and digital. Commentators didn’t pull their punches, and revealed some true anxiety about this question.

A choice quotation: Eliot Weinberger

The United States doesn’t have the class of literary supplements that you find in Spain and many other countries. It only has one important periodical literary criticism publication: The New York Review of Books. There aren’t any powerful American critics any more, as there were up until the 1960s, writing in a prose that was understandable by anyone and introducing literature into the political, social and moral problems of the day. So-called ‘serious’ criticism has passed, for the main part, into the dominion of academics, who write in a specialist jargon, in the strange belief that the complex can only be presented by means of impenetrable phrases… Criticism, in the United States, has been reduced to ‘recommendations’, which arrive through reviews, blogs and Twitter. Prizes have become the standard validation of literary merit. I can’t think of a single American critic to whom one can turn in search of ideas …"

Still missing the good old days?  Then check out this piece by Jenifer Szalai on "Mac the Knife," aka Dwight Macdonald at The Nation.

If one were to point out that the wider authority of literary criticism is barely discernible today, one could hardly be accused of courting a controversy or kicking up a fuss. There certainly is a coterie of Americans for whom literature and its criticism is a matter of urgency or livelihood or both, but the notion of the literary critic as a cultural gatekeeper, whose judgments shape tastes and move units, sounds either fanciful or anachronistic, depending on whether you believe that such a creature ever really existed. [...]

More remarkable than Macdonald’s ire (unleashed in a magazine more typically associated with bloodlessness than with blood sport) is that the Great Books project, consisting of fifty-four volumes of “densely printed, poorly edited reading matter” by the likes of Epictetus and Hegel, was at one point selling more than 50,000 sets a year—this, despite a price tag that started at $298 and topped out at $1,175, the equivalent of $2,500 to $9,800 today. The stunning success of these extravagant book sets, as well as the 6,000 words of extravagant fury Macdonald lavished on them, are prime examples of what makes this essay collection so fascinating and strange. The criticism on offer is as much a testament to the exalted claims made for culture in midcentury America as it is a casualty of what has happened since.

Normal avant-garde intellectuals

Stephen Greenblatt, in The Swerve, a book about Lucretius's classic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) emphasizes, according to Anthony Grafton in the New York Review of Books

... the curial humanists' spite and jealousy, which found expression in everything from vicious written attacks on one another to actual scuffles.  After one of these, George of Trebizond, a fellow scholar, wrote to Poggio [Bracciolini, a 15th-century book-hunter and scholar who found the text of Lucretius's poem]: "I could have bitten off the fingers you stuck in my mouth; I did not.  Since I was seated and you were standing, I thought of squeezing your testicles with both hands and thus lay you out: I did not do it."  Greenblatt finds these quarrels "grotesque," evidence of "something rotten" in the humanists' lives. To me, these grumpy scholars look like normal avant-garde intellectuals, caught in a pressure-cooker environment that forced them to spend time together even as they fought to reach their patrons' ear trumpets: not so unlike the young playwrights of Elizabethan London, or, for that matter, the young New York writers of a few generations ago, who resorted to knives as well as fists at the sort of party where, in John Berryman's words, "Somebody slapped / Somebody's second wife somewhere."

-- NYRB, December 8, 2011

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Check out Ben Jonson's horribly corroded edition of De rerum along with other rare delights in this post at the Houghton Library blog!

Pictured: A few good old-fashioned intellectuals on the title page of De rerum...

H.D., filmmaker

How 'bout a movie for the holidays?

Did you know that H.D. was an avant-garde filmmaker?  She was part of the POOL Group, and also helped start an early journal devoted to film called Close Up, both with her lover Kenneth Macpherson; you can read about her involvement in the group here.

Perhaps the most intriguing film she worked on was the full-length film Borderline (1930), which featured Paul Robeson and Bryher; it explored matters of race and sexuality, employing then-revolutionary techniques like Russian-style montage.  Below is an example of a POOL film, "Monkey's Moon."

 

Wingbeat, Foothills, and the complete film Borderline may be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center in New York; it's also available on DVD from the British Film Institute.

A confidence man amok among the Anglo-American literati

Another piece pertaining to literary truthtelling (see also yesterday's post): Simon Morley's review, "Incurable Dodger," in the TLS of November 11, 2011.

Morley examines a book about an industrious and well-known literary figure - a con man and poetaster named Thomas Powell - who, as contemporary as it sounds, "made good use of the cultural capital" he picked up way back in the literary world of the nineteenth century by spreading made-up literary gossip, embellishing literary history, publishing an edition of a famous poet's work "with revisions in the author's (probably forged) handwriting," and persistently recycling these antics until his death.

Far from being a diabolical Melville-style confidence man (e.g., "able to inspire confidence in the most faithless of his compatriots") this fellow "was capable," Morley writes, "of inspiring some quite advanced levels of disbelief," which seems to have been part of the game; he had what the novelist Thomas Gunn called "superfluous ingenuity," which almost always ended up with his being found out.  "Realizing how little credit he had to draw on," our con man, when confronted, "took the line that if he wasn't trustworthy, then certainly he was a pathetic case, unworthy of punishment."

"His presence was tolerated," Morley writes, long after his antics had been unmasked, "although this has less to do with any devious manoeuvring than with his facility in churning out reams of ephemera."  In the end, Powell's "monomaniacal desire to suck up to people overwhelmed his gift for making suckers of them."  Although con men, literary and otherwise, thrive on distrust, "he must have written his creepy little exposés in the knowledge that they would only be consumed, not believed."


Quotations from Morley's review of The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man among the Anglo-American Literati, by Hershel Parker; pictured: manuscript material from Herman Melville's novel The Confidence Man

Why do poets think that they're truthtellers?

What is new since [nineteenth-century debates about poetry and theology] are theories of language that, in various ways, bypass Coleridgean questions about the truth of the imagination by asserting instead the truth of language.  Perhaps best known is Michael Polanyi's claim that languages have an innate bias towards the truth.  Clearly he did not mean that it is impossible to tell lies - he never disputed that much communication is intended to manipulate facts, or even to promulgate untruths - but, Polanyi argues, in the long run lies are usually seen to be just that.  This is not a bid for access to absolute truths: rather, it entails the claim that unlike Orwell's Newspeak, or various technical languages operating with precise definitions, the innate fuzziness of ordinary speech has a long-term self-correcting tendency to revert towards the truth.  Even though it may be possible to fool most of the people for most of the time, truth, like cheerfulness, will keep breaking through.  If emperors fail to wear clothes, sooner or later someone is going to notice.

Though many postmodernists echo Plato's Thrasymachus in claiming that there is no such thing as truth, most poets wilfully persist in the conviction that they are somehow in the truth-telling business.  Even the most scurrilous and cynical among them have usually insisted that they are exposing truths about human corruption and frailty.  Indeed, if the creators of "fictions," poetic or novelistic, really believed in a total separation of language and truth, they would soon be out of business...

But the idea that language has an inescapable bias towards truth does not, of course, necessarily offer any moral guarantees, still less theological ones.  It was Derrida, not Polanyi, who described the idea of innate textual meaning as "theological" - and it was hardly a compliment.

-- Stephen Prickett, "Religion Will Keep Breaking Through," TLS, November 11, 2011

Why They Did the Police in Different Voices

A common critical stance describes the [dramatic] monologue as an apprenticeship for young poets that was discarded at maturity, but it is based primarily on the careers of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and does not accurately represent their continued interest in the form or in the monologue experiments of such poets as Charlotte Mew, Amy Lowell, and H.D.  [...]  Dramatic monologues are imagined solo performances, but they also enabled poets to star in readings of their own work.  The cultural uses of genre can change; as Delsartean practices of recitation faded, the dramatic monologue's function as solo performance shifted, even as New Critics, partially in response to the interpretive techniques of expression, began to read every poem as a dramatic monologue...

Modernist doctrines of impersonality were partial rejections of the Delsartean emphasis on fashioning personality through recitation.  Other central modernist principles expanded ideas from expression: the objective correlative drew from the mask of the dramatic monologue; the mythical method reframed and updated typological hermeneutics; and polyphonic prose owes much to Delsarte-influenced elocutionary reforms...

Although elocution is no longer central to studies of literature, it had been a vital aspect of the classical education of elite men for centuries and was part of the pedagogical milieu that trained modernist poets.  In England, the so-called Elocution Movement of the eighteenth century attempted to elevate the English vernacular, establish a standard pronunciation, and explore the relationship between language and society.  Elocution was linked in the United States to the idea that democratic citizens would debate the problems of the nation and must develop their "powers of expression" and "individual character" to do so; [Samuel Silas] Curry claimed, "Freedom and oratory have ever gone hand in hand."  In the twentieth century, new disciplinary divisions dispersed skills once considered part of elocution to other fields, including the new English departments teaching composition, literature, and rhetoric... Departments of expression do not survive in the contemporary university, but the cultures of recitation and interpretive techniques they promoted were an important context for modernist poetry.

--- Carrie J. Preston, Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance

A Nest of Pipits, or: The Return of the Attack of the Difficult Poem

Graeme Richardson, in the TLS, says that behind John Fuller's...

"pedantry [in his book Who Is Ozymandias and other Puzzles in Poetry] is a John Bullish confidence that puzzles can be solved - and those that can't be solved aren't worth puzzling over. The book is 'intended to comfort readers who find poetry difficult by showing that everyone, including professional critics, can find it difficult.' What do we do, though, when it seems 'wilfully difficult?' 'My basic position is this: if a poem has not in the first place earned its claims on us in some way, by getting into our head and charming us, teasing us or impressing us, then we are hardly guilty of anything if we put it aside.' Once a poem has earned its reader's trust, it should then give up its secrets: 'we expect cognitive enlightenment from our reading.' Poems, ideally, are therefore like crossword puzzles or jokes one can 'get.' Naturally enough, Fuller's favored poets and critics are 'sensible' and 'down-to-earth' people. But sadly there are silly highfalutin' sorts of poetry in which 'unfathomed characteristics like obscurity become exaggerated, like concentrations of undesirable deposits in the frequently reboiled kettles of pensioners.' John Ashbery, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and 'members of the Cambridge school' suffer from this limescale build-up. 'The reader may well puzzle over their work, but since pretty much everything in it is a puzzle anyway, it does not really fall within my brief. Nor do surrealist poème-découpages, or Google-generated flarf. There is much that is inevitably eye-glazing about that sort of thing.'

Dedicated flarfists might counter that the same was being said by contemporary critics of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stevens and many of the poets Fuller now finds worthwhile. And there are obscurities in these now-accepted poets that ultimately baffle even the great puzzle-solver: what, for example, is Merlin doing in Auden's 'O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven?' After a long search for Eliot's Pipit, Fuller gives up, but 'it does not matter. Some puzzles can live with permanently delayed solutions.' If they can, why can't the puzzle itself be the thing that teases and impresses us, getting into our heads and charming us?"

-- full review in the Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 2011; see also Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems

Pictured: a nest of Pipits

On Veterans' Day / Remembrance Day

On the El not long ago, I met a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who is now a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.  We discussed what it means for a country to suffer from the deterioration of its ideals and infrastructure.  I dedicate this post to him.

Every Veteran's Day, I feature the following story, told by Katy Evans-Bush on her outstanding blog, Baroque in Hackney; this year, I'm posting it with gratitude to my seatmate, and to countless others like him who are doing, have done, work that few of us can imagine - but all of us can appreciate.

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In June 1918, a young poet called Eloise Robinson, touring the Front on behalf of the YMCA, was giving a poetry recital to an audience of American soldiers. Guy Davenport tells it: “Reciting poetry! It is all but unimaginable that in that hell of terror, gangrene, mustard gas, sleeplessness, lice, and fatigue, there were moments when bone-weary soldiers, for the most part mere boys, would sit in a circle around a lady poet in an ankle-length khaki skirt and a Boy Scout hat, to hear poems.”

I can’t find a picture of Eloise Robinson. But she was reciting poems, and in the middle of one poem, Davenport tells us, her memory flagged. “She apologized profusely, for the poem, as she explained, was immensely popular back home.” A hand went up, and a young sergeant offered to recite the poem. Here is what (in, as Davenport reminds us, “the hideously ravaged orchards and strafed woods of the valley of the Ourcq, where the fields were cratered and strewn with coils of barbed wire, fields that reeked of cordite and carrion”) the soldier recited:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree...

Eloise Robinson was surprised and impressed that he should know it. “Well, ma’am,” he told her. “I guess I wrote it.”

Joyce Kilmer was killed by a German sniper less than two months later, only three months before the Armistice. His most famous poem had been published in Poetry (Chicago) in 1913.

Eloise, for her part, continuing about her duties at the Front, wrote to Poetry that August: “I wish I might tell you of my visit to the French front, and how for two nights I slept in a ‘cave’ with seven Frenchmen and had a hundred bombs dropped on me. Not directly on top, of course. The nearest hit just in front of the house. And for five days and nights after that I was taking chocolate to advance batteries, to men who can never leave their guns.”

Davenport mentions how Kilmer’s Trees is in fact a self-reflective poem, about poetry itself. These days that’s a sort of no-no, a workshop cliché, but - even though the poem rates itself as second to a tree - the fact nevertheless gives us a clue to something ...

Please click here to read the rest of this wonderful post commemorating Remembrance Day/Veteran's Day, in which Katy moves forward to Tom Disch's reworking of the Kilmer poem (also published in Poetry), complete with a comment from the legendary Samuel R. Delaney!

As Katy sums up:

"Disch’s poem [which is called "Poems"!] also gets at something else, something important, that Kilmer – however conventional and pious – knew very well, and knew while he was writing Trees: the reason why he would bother to write a poem about a thing like a tree in the first place – and the reason Eloise Robinson was reciting poems to soldiers."

In appreciation for those who have served. 

Pictured above: The poet and solider, Joyce Kilmer.

Psst! Wanna see Emily Dickinson's snood?

Everyone's interest in Emily Dickinson's famous recipe for coconut cake has got me thinking that thanks to my wonderful former colleagues at Harvard's estimable Houghton Library, you can see Emily Dickinson's snood - you don't know what a snood is?? - and many other poignant artifacts of her existence off the page - by clicking here (scroll way down).

Her first book? The Herbarium, of course! To see it, click here.

One does continue to wonder what Emily Dickinson looked like. In addition to the famous daguerreotype, there are things like a silhouette, a painted family portrait (at Harvard), a lock of her hair. But relating to the so-called second daguerreotype, purchased on eBay (tm) by Philip Gura, click here and, regarding forensic evidence about its identification, see also here. An article about the image appeared in the May 22, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, which you can read here. I've never discussed this with the Houghton curatorial folks, but maybe I should!

Good advice

Write about China, Greence, Tibet or the Argentine pampas — anyplace you've never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your home town, or your home folks, or yourself.

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The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

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Every writer faces the problem of the person that he is writing for, and I think nobody has ever been able to imagine satisfactorily who this “homme moyen sensuel” will be. I try to aim at as wide an audience as I can so that as many people as possible will read my poetry. Therefore I depersonalize it, but in the same way personalize it, so that a person who is going to be different from me but is also going to resemble me just because he is different from me, since we are all different from each other, can see something in it. You know — I shot an arrow into the air but I could only aim it.

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Many writers who are no longer young claim, for various reasons, to read very little, indeed, to find reading and writing in some sense incompatible. Perhaps, for some writers, they are. It's not for me to judge. If the reason is anxiety about being influenced, then this seems to me a vain, shallow worry. If the reason is lack of time — there are only so many hours in the day, and those spent reading are evidently subtracted from those in which one could be writing — then this is an asceticism to which I don't aspire.

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A good writer should be so simple that he has no faults, only sins.

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As if I have to earn the right to write by being a good girl—all about me must be perfectly rinsed and dusted before I can start working.

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I sat in small room with Robert Lowell, then my teacher, and asked him how I might lift from its doldrums a particular poem. Lowell had spent about fifteen minutes showing me why this poem was horseshit, something I already knew, for I had come to him not for praise but for help. He had just paused in his steady assault on my poem, when I asked him how I might go about making it better. We sat in silence for over a minute. Then he looked at me, a little resigned smile on his face, and said, "You know, it's damned hard to make sense and keep the rhythm."

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Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that the earlier stages of life we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance...

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Every writer must have common sense. He must be sensitive and serious. But he must not grow solemn. He must not listen to himself. If he does, he might as well be under a tombstone. When he takes himself solemnly, he has no more to say. Yet he must despise nothing, not even solemn people.

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As we're no longer supposed to be capable of authentically altruistic feelings, we're not supposed to be capable of writing about anyone but ourselves.

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One writes what one can write. One writes up, though one man’s up is another man’s basement.


The foregoing is excerpted from an incredible anthology of writing advice, "How and Why to Write," online at This Recording, which features James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, W.B. Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, and Stanley Elkin.  See if you can match the bits above with the cited quotations in the full collection!  As far as the value of the good advice given therein, see the Allan Sherman video above.

The guts of the living

Auden famously said in his elegy to Yeats that "the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living," and like so much else Auden wrote and said, this was taken as an abstraction rather than actual poetry. There's no question that poets digest, in a really visceral way, the works of certain other poets who are special to them; Louise Gluck described this as "feeding" on the work of particular poets, then moving on. But some poets we never move on from; for me that list includes Auden, Yeats, Pound, Frank O'Hara, Frank Stanford, Robert Lowell, Milton, Hart Crane, J.H. Prynne, Hopkins, John Clare, Traherne, Delmore Schwartz, the best of Patrick Kavanagh, Bishop, Marianne Moore, May Swenson, Charlotte Mew, and lots of others. But the first poet I truly fell in love with was... archy, pictured here on the typewritter (to the astonishment of a cat named mehitabel). You can see that he's a cockroach, and he's quite literate, having literally digested a few works in his time. A cockroach, you exclaim? Well, let me explain. In 1916, the humorist Don Marquis, who had a daily newspaper column in The New York Sun, had an unusual experience at his typewriter, narrated here in the customary editorial first-person plural:

We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about on the keys. He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.

Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore
there is a rat here she should get without delay

most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then

dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i haven't had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste and leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy

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Talk about Lunch Poems!

Well, here we have the embodiment of modernist free verse: the end of the each line marks, as we know from the word "verse," a turn; the term originates in the Latin word versus, which denotes what you do when you are ploughing your field... you reach the end, turn around, and make another furrow! Here, archy struggles with the carriage return at the end of every line, and positions with exquisite care every letter (prefiguring E.E. Cummings) by using his own head - literally - to press the keys. Above all, archy's story is emblematic of the ur-trope of all modernism: a human being... a writer... wakes to find himself an insect.

Marquis invented many other things in his own writing career, but to his eventual dismay, archy and his Jezebel-like colleague, mehitabel, came to outlast them all. The archy poems, collected in book form in several volumes, have always been in print - and were even illustrated by the remarkable George Herriman, who is perhaps more famous for his own creation, Krazy Kat.

Many moons ago, I did some research on Don Marquis and compiled an annotated bibliography of previously uncollected archy and mehitabel pieces - quite a large number of them had appeared not only in newspapers, but in a variety of long-vanished popular magazines. That bibliography was duly supplied to a number of people who were then compiling work by and about Marquis, though my work was never acknowledged by any of them in print. This used to bug me, no pun intended - but as archy himself put it so laconically, fate is unfair. No matter: he will always be my first poet-love, and his example serves as a chastening warning to anybody trying to write his or her own verse: we run the risk of reincarnation, so... watch out!!

If this has whetted your, well, appetite, I recommend finding the lovely old Doubleday collections, found in many a used bookstore (if there still are any near you) - or the in-print Michael Sims' The Annotated archy and mehitabel and Everyman "best of" selection.

Anyway, here's my favorite archy poem:

freddy the rat perishes

listen to me there have
been some doings here since last
i wrote there has been a battle
behind that rusty typewriter cover
in the corner
you remember freddy the rat well
freddy is no more but
he died game the other
day a stranger with a lot of
legs came into our
little circle a tough looking kid
he was with a bad eye
who are you said a thousand legs
if i bite you once
said the stranger you won t ask
again he he little poison tongue said
the thousand legs who gave you hydrophobia
i got it by biting myself said
the stranger i m bad keep away
from me where i step a weed dies
if i was to walk on your forehead it would
raise measles and if
you give me any lip i ll do it
they mixed it then
and the thousand legs succumbed
well we found out this fellow
was a tarantula he had come up from
south america in a bunch of bananas
for days he bossed us life
was not worth living he would stand in
the middle of the floor and taunt
us ha ha he would say where i
step a weed dies do
you want any of my game i was
raised on red pepper and blood i am
so hot if you scratch me i will light
like a match you better
dodge me when i m feeling mean and
i don t feel any other way i was nursed
on a tabasco bottle if i was to slap
your wrist in kindness you
would boil over like job and heaven
help you if i get angry give me
room i feel a wicked spell coming on
last night he made a break at freddy
the rat keep your distance
little one said freddy i m not
feeling well myself somebody poisoned some
cheese for me im as full of
death as a drug store i
feel that i am going to die anyhow
come on little torpedo don t stop
to visit and search then they
went at it and both are no more please
throw a late edition on the floor i want to
keep up with china we dropped freddy
off the fire escape into the alley with
military honors

archy