Eight Amerindian Adages (A Nonsense Rhyme)

 
"When his arrow's too narrow," Apaches observe, 

"who's the brave who'll behave with the requisite nerve?"


"When our clans hatch no plans," the Comanches declare,

"each chief’s daughter courts slaughter -- and death without hair."*

 
Notwithstanding Elk’s* efforts with soothsayer's sticks,

ev'ry finely fletch’d feather wet weather predicts.

     * Not the more famous Black Elk but his fellow Oglala called simply Elk. Both men toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1887.


"Gitche Manitou gives us proportionate rope --

hemp to hang ourselves with," hold the Hopi. (They cope.)


"Building igloos takes ice," elder Inuits drawl;

Jemez* chiefs note, “Al fresco takes nothing at all.” 

    * Pronounced "HEY-mesh." 


"Our kayaks need keels," goes an ancient Kaw fable,

 "like lunch on the lawn needs a one-legged table." 


"March a mile in my moccasins," Mashpees assert,

lest you never know nowt 'bout the nature of hurt."



“Once bitten, twice shy,” pbserve Osage’s sages.

“Who’s bitten three times is a fool for the ages.”

"Discuss re Edgar Allan Poe..." LIt LIte: 101 Exam Questions (A Nonsense Rhyme)

1.    Discuss re Edgar Allan Poe:
may crypts be walled up sans merlot?

2.    Does Ms. Ralph Waldo Emerson
endorse but then condemn her son?

3.    Why must Harriet Stowe (nee Beecher)
write…though not to friends beseech her?

4.    Why does Henry David Thoreau
stumble after one Sapporo?

5.    Though long dead, why can’t Saul Bellow
please return my phone call? (Hello…?) 

6.    Why’s William’s brother, Henry James,
use (like his sibling) two first names?

7.    Pursues his muse, does Steinbeck (John)?
Where roams he? Whither? Thither? Yon?

8.    If novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne
sports a ‘stash, then why’s his jaw shorn?

9.    One “women’s lib”er Salinger’s
work censures: should he challenge hers?

10.  Who’d know if E. L. Doctorow’s
preeminence is knocked or grows?

11.  Which critics savaged Don DeLillo’s
Evening of the Armadillos?

12.  Cooper (Which? James Fenimore):
who cracks Jim’s novels anymore?

13.  True or false: Mark Twain (Sam Clemens)
authors flops, faux pas and lemons.

14.   Who overestimates Walt Whitman?
Be it he who terms Walt “Tit Man”?

15.  Is Washington, whose surname’s Irving,
of a Pulitzer deserving?

16.  Emily (Miss Dickinson):
which critic finds slim pickin’s in?

17.  Will not the child who’s William Faulkner’d
grow up poor white trash (post hoc) nerd?

18.  Which son of Ernest Hemingway
apes Papa in a lemming way?

19.  Do fans of Flannery O’Connor
foist false flattery upon her?

20.  For savorers of Scott Fitzgerald,
does his savoir seem imperiled?

21.  What’s worse: readin’ Willa Cather
or that bleedin’ Cotton Mather?

22.  Will sushi served by Herman Melville
render sev’ral score and twelve ill?

23.  Edward Bear and e. e. cummings:
brainless hums or freakish hummings?

24.  Who’d question T. S. Eliot,
“Excuse, please: where’s the deli at?”?

25.  “But, Dr. Seuss,” asks Edith Wharton,
“who’s the who who hears a Horton?”

26.  True or false: will John Dos Passos
not untie his knotted lassos?

27.  The taken road, to Robert Frost,
is fate. What happens when they’re crossed?

28.  Is he contented, Wallace Stevens,
making do with Whitman’s leavin’s?

29.  “Say ‘cheese,’” some plead of Ezra Pound.
Explain, then parse the man’s raw frown:

30.  Which critic rumored: Gertrude Stein
is issue of a curt, rude line?

31.  For what did Ann sue Arthur Miller –
dough he’d not the heart to will her?

32.  Who confuses Joseph Heller
with that Czechoslovak feller?

33.  Daguerreotypes show Stephen Crane
without his chinstrap beard. Explain.

34.  Why write (as Dreiser, Theodore
does) sordid stuff we all abhor?

35.  Of dramas by Eugene O’Neill
how come we make so big a deal?

36.  Critique Tom Williams (Tennessee)
and his The Glass Menagerie.

37.  Has one-track minded Henry Miller
more to say than “When d’we drill ‘er?”?

38.  Who, when pressed to pick James Agee’s
pizza topping choice, names “Eight-cheese!”?

39.  Why won’t novelist James Baldwin
just admit he wrote The Bald Twin?

40.  True or false: young Sinclair Lewis
posed for Herge’s “Ligne Clair Jewess.”

41.  Tourette’s Syndromed David Mamet:
what’s he blurt besides ‘god-dammit!”?

42.  Explain this quote of Dorothy Parker’s:
“Benchley, Robert’s rad when starkers!”

43.  True or False: did Edna Ferber
pose for dess’nateur James Thurber?

44.  Aren’t names the game of Edward Albee,
framing what each said word shall be?

45.  Re: fam’ly tree of Langston Hughes:
how many branches sang the blues?

46.  How’d Mrs. Sherwood Anderson
know lit’rature would brand her son?

47.  Did Buckley reckon Gore Vidal
his pen- (however horrid) -pal?

48.  Who imagines Harper Lee
shall prove Miss One-Trick Southern B?

49.  Whence pour the stories of John Updike?
(Surely not from one young-pup-like.)

50.  Who disillusioned August Wilson
with, “The master’s dog must kill, son!”?

51.  Name one book by Walker Percy
not displaying talk of mercy.

52.  When didn’t Peter (dubb’d De Vries)
compose in meters framed to please?

53.  Aren’t bookstores banning Norman Mailer’s
works mere pawns of Mormon ralers?

54.  Should Ray – s/f whiz Bradbury –
concoct a Martian Cadbury?

55.  When shooting hoops, will Dashiell Hammett
score…? (Pick one:  ___ He’ll crash. ___ He’ll slam it!)

56.  Which groups would screw Jack Kerouac?
Those groups which do lack care? H.U.A.C?

57.  The drug-soaked texts of William Burroughs:
who’d decipher and endure those?

58.  In gaberdine struts Philip Roth.
Why not in folds of Willa cloth?

59.  Depression-minded William Styron:
what’s preventing William’s tirin’?

60.  Why did author “Tru” Capote
claim he’d written Don Quixote?

61.  Do plays of dramatist Sam Shepard
come with cowboy lingo peppered?

62.  Which lines of Toni Morrison’s
resemble Black-church orisons?

63.  Why did activist Jack London
not receive more arts-group fundin’?

64.  True or False: author Vladimir Nabokov
pens novels which everyday life make a joke of.

65.  Why didn’t author Louisa May Alcott
allow her quartet of “small women” to “talk rot”?

66.  Critics enthuse over Sylvia Plath.
Which critic called her a sociopath?

67.  A femme fatale of Raymond Chandler:
how might Runyon (Damon) handl’ her?

68.  An author like Ralph Ellison:
what folk tales might he tell his son?

69.  Which children’s books did E. B. White,
while authoring a style guide, write?

70.  Why didn’t Joel Chandler Harris
publish Remus Goes to Paris?

71.  True or False: Kurt Vonnegut
displays the true Romani gut.

72.  Compare the style of L. Frank Baum
with those of stylist Some’set Maughm.

73.  In (Lula) Carson (Smith) McCullers,
find her recipe for crullers.

74.  Which characters in Pearl S. Buck
exclaim, in Chinese, “What the f**k?”

75.  Which three sibs of Thornton Wilder
scribbled much like him, though milder?

76.  Is it true that Hunter Thompson
was, in real life, Herbert Lom’s son?

77.  Was critic Warren (Robert Penn)
more niggling than he should have been?

78.  Who balked when Maya Angelou tea
poured for honkeys in Djibouti?

79.  Did “Genius Grant”ee Thomas Pynchon
pen his works with not a stitch on?

80.  Does Allen Ginsberg dis Ken Kesey
with his line, “Full beard too messy?”?

81.  Jerry Craft loved H. P. Lovecraft.
Why did H. P. push and shove Craft?

82.  Why’d confidants of Algren (Nelson)
label him “The Prince of Hell’s Son”?

83.  Explain why author Alice Walker
dropped the charge against her stalker?

84.  True or False: McCarthy (Cormac)
plans new novels even more black.

85.  Explain why author Stephen King
is planning rewrites of The Thing:

86.  Examine Hurston (Zora Neale)
and how injustice made her feel.

87.  What will placate Marg’ret Mitchell?
[Answer: Meg’s becoming rich’ll.]

88.  The poetry of Thomas Paine
he first cooks up prose. Explain:

89. If author Grey’s first name weren’t Zane,
Might he have proved a new Mark Twain?

90. Would Black Boy, penned by Richard Wright,
have sold had Richard’s Boy been white?

91. Which young adults read S. E Hinton?
Kids who cut their teeth on Tintin?

92. John Kennedy Toole (who attended Tulane):
did John's suicide leave an indelible stain?

93. House Speaker Ryan loves Ayn Rand.
Suggest why both should not be banned.

94. Ken Kesey’s widow, Norma Faye,
wed L. McMurtry. What the hey?

95. How’d Alex Haley’s novel Roots
beget no end of stranger fruits?

96. True or false: was Mario Puzo
writing Fools Die, high on ouzo?

97. Dr. Seuss and Dr. Seuss:
Which rhymes with ‘voice’? Which rhymes with ‘juice’?

98. Did visions viewed by Philip Dick
make Dick a frickin’ lunatic?

99. How come the dates of Ambrose Bierce
lap over those of Franklin Pierce?

100. True or false: did Frederick Douglass
live his long life Jitterbugless? 

101. James Higgins: just one work to date.
Did Jim bloom early? Or too late?

     List of Authors treated: 

Agee, James    x 

Albee, Edward   x 

Alcott, Louisa May   x 

Algren, Nelson   x 

Anderson, Sherwood   x 

Angelou, Maya   x 

Baldwin, James     x 

Baum, L. Frank   x 

Bellow, Saul   x 

Bierce, Ambrose   x 

Bradbury, Ray   x 

Buck, Pearl S   x. 

Buckley, William F.   x

Burroughs, William   x 

Capote, Truman   x

Cather, Willa   x 

Chandler, Raymond   x

Cooper, James Fennimore   x 

Craft, Jerry   x 

Crane, Stephen   x 

cummings, e. e   x

DeLillo, Don   x 

De Vries, Peter   x 

Dick, Philip   x 

Dickinson, Emily   x 

Doctorow, E. L.   x 

Dos Passos, John   x

Douglass, Frederick   x 

Dreiser, Theodore   x 

Eliot, T. S.   x 

Ellison, Ralph   x 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo   x 

Faulkner, William   x 

Ferber, Edna   x 

Fitzgerald, F. Scott   x 

Frost, Robert   x 

Ginsberg, Allan   x 

Grey, Zane   x 

Haley, Alex   x 

Hammett, Dashiel   x 

Harris, Joel Chandler   x 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel   x

Heller, Joseph   x 

Hemingway, Ernest   x 

Hinton, S. E.  x

Hughes, Langston   x 

Hurston, Zora Neale   x 

Irving, Washington   x 

James, Henry   x 

Kerouac, Jack   x 

Kesey, Ken   x 

King, Stephen   x 

Lee, Harper   x 

Lewis, Sinclair   x 

London, Jack   x 

Lovecraft, H. P.   x

Mailer, Norman   x 

Mamet, David   x 

Mather, Cotton   x 

Maughm, Somerset   x

McCarthy, Cormac   x

McCullers, Carson   x 

McMurtry, Larry   x 

Melville, Herman   x 

Miller, Arthur   x

Miller, Henry   x

Mitchell, Margaret   x 

Morrison, Toni   x

Nabokov, Vladimir   x

O’Connor, Flannery   x 

O’Neill, Eugene   x

Paine, Thomas   x 

Parker, Dorothy   x 

Percy, Walker   x 

Plath, Sylvia   x

Poe, Edgar Allan   x

Pound, Ezra   x  

Puzo, Mario   x 

Pynchon, Thomas   x 

Q 

Rand, Ayn   x 

Roth, Philip   x 

Runyon, Damon   x

Salinger. J. D.   x  

Seuss, Dr.   x 

Shepard, Sam   x

Stein. Gertrude   x 

Steinbeck, John   x

Stevens. Wallace   x 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher   x

Styron, William   x

Thoreau, Henry David   x

Thompson, Hunter   x 

Thurber, James   x 

Toole, John Kennedy   x 

Twain, Mark   x

Updike, John   x 

Vidal, Gore   x 

Vonnegut, Kurt   x 

Walker, Alice   x

Warren, Robert Penn   x

Wharton, Edith   x

White, E. B.   x 

Whitman, Walt   x

Wilder, Thornton   x 

Williams, Tennessee   x

Wilson, August   x

Wright, Richard   x

"This ABC treats of a number of things..." Buff! A Nonsense ABC

 

This ABC treats of a number of things, 

not merely mikados, kahns, kaisers and kings.

One's history tells one (and everyone knows):

one's rulers are frequently seen without clothes.

Sans clothing? One's president? Heaven forfend!

(Though who would not willingly witness his end?)

A’s an aal and an almond, not prunes and a pear,

and the Archduke’s appar’l ain’t (apparently) there.

B’s a flugel, no bugle, no dobro, no drum,

and the Brigidier’s bay window’s bare as his bum.

C’s a chug, not a jugful; no tipple, no tea.

‘Course the Caliph’s chimere’s worn…chimerically. 

D’s a den, not a henhouse; no cowshed, no croft.

Damn that Doge! He’s denuded: drei doublets he’s doffed. 

E’s an eaglet, no piglet; no boobie or beast.

El Effendi’s exuviae’s exited east.

F is a first finger. Curse finger (first)? Nope, nor thumb.

Fact: the Field Marshall’s finery’s faded. (Fo, fum!)

G’s a gown. Hand-me-down? No, nor half-hose, nor hood.

Granted, Guv’s gorgeous gaberdine’s gone. (Gone for good!)

H? Some hops. No herb crops, malabathrum or mint.

Hides His Highness his hide? Hardly (barely!) a hint.

I? Intoned (monophoned), no polyphonied psalm.

In his “au natural” is the idjit Imam.

J’s a jar. Samovar? Nyet! No flagon; no firkin.

Jee-e-eez! Jemadar’s jettisoned jack boots and jerkin. 

K’s a Krupp (a stick-up) gun, though not with a hilt,

while the Kaiser’s kicked free of both Keds and his kilt.

L is lard (soft, not hard). Butter? Not, nor Pashtun ghee.

The Liege Lord loved losing his loincloth (his lungi). 

M’s a minium: Delphinium (though possibly black).

Mais moi Monarch is missing much more than his mack.

N’s a nest (Angler’s Rest), not a hovel or hut,

and the Nabob’s now naked – no ‘if’s, ‘and’s…(one butt)

O’s O’Casey, not Gracie; not Dylan or Donne.

Of the Oligarch’s olive drabs? Oo-o-o-oops! Only one.

P’s pistou, not foudue, not a chili or chowder.

Plus, Pope Paul’s PJs? Paul’s pair (poof!) pulled a powder.

Q’s a quaff, no carafe, not a caldron or cask.

The Queen’s Consort has quit his Qiana (don’t ask).

R’s a red (fully keyed), not a musical saw.

Right! And Rajah runs rings ‘round and ‘round in the raw.

S is swing, buck-‘n’-wing, neither bebop or blues. 

So swings Shah, sans suits, sweats, socks, shirts, shorts…Shit! Sans shoes! 

T’s a tuppence, no thruppence, no dinar, drachm.

Then there’s Tsar taking trousers off – them and the tam.

U’s an urn, no epergne, neither sachels nor sacks.

Us the Ubermensch urges to “Ugh! Just unlax…”

V’s Vent’reno, Capeno, not Skagit nor Sioux.

Vay! The Vice-Viceroy’s vestments have vanished from view.

What a warhorse! (Not your horse: no mustang or mare).

While the Ward Boss Ward’s waltzing, Ward’s wardrobe waits. (Where?) 

X? An X-Ray: convex ray, no spyglass or specs.

The Xabandar’s “’xposed.” (Rating? Quadruplex X!)

Y’s a yak, not a finback; no duck or dugong.

(D’you think you’ll see Your Majesty’s yashmak? You’re wrong.)

Z’s a Zuni, no Sunni, no Pequot, no Paiute.

Zounds! Zupan’s sans supan: no zizith, no zoot suit.

And fin’lly, regarding King Donald the Trump,

though I haven’t the wish to examine his rump,

it’s with glee that I’d see Donald’s raiment ker-plop --

if such circumstance brought the man’s reign to a stop.