W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden!
His gist...? To embroaden
his listing of homo-erotical
mates.
So Wyst trysts: “Ta, UK! Ah-ha-a-aah: 48
states!”
James Art’ur Baldwin
blames Harlem (“’T’sno Walden!”),
claims Paris as home. James, we wish you
“bone
chance!”
as you emigrate (ooh-la-la!) to (la-la!)
France.
Joseph Conrad,
early on, had
shipp’d for shores foreign o’er oceans
exotic,
thus aug’ring Joe’s heroes’ endeavors
aquatic.
Dante!
Why can’t he
lie low in his most-favor’d
nest
(Florence)...?
‘Cuz revenge-fill’d Black Guelphs post
ar-
rest warrants.
T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
bagg'd a Nobel. He at-
tain’d, more’s the pit, British
citizen-
ship.
Critics (Kenner, for one) think Tom’s “Cool
(as a)
Whip.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
l’hot Jazz Age’s herald,
logs too many knights on the French
Rivi-
era,
though just as straight Yank, he, as L.
“Yogi”
Berra.
(Wait, wait! We’ve swapp’d ‘F’s: for F. Scott, F.
O’-
Hara!)
Wave to Rob Graves!
Robert’s writing rates raves,
of which wit most be writ on the isle of
Ma-
jorca.
To hear his wives tell it. Bob’s short
of ka-
vorka.
(Wait, wait! We've switch’d Graves with F. Garcia
Lorca.)
Heil,
Heinrich Heine!
(Hein’s no Freund of meine.)
“Du
sagst mir Heimlich ein leises
Wort
Ich
wach auf, (ya!) und der Strauss ist
fort.”
(Or, “Breathe in me shell-like da
secretive
woid.
I awake, but it’s gone: da chimera,
she’s
bloid.”)
Eugene Ionesco
digs scenics al fresco.
Gene’s change of address, from Slatina
to
Paris,
occasions his dramas’ deft “noms de la
terrace.”
(“The Chairs” isn’t one, but “A Stroll in
the
Air” is.)
Will Dublin’s James Joyce
err in finding a voice
there in Erin...? (One he’ll pot while in
Rome, one in
Brest,
although Zurich’s the spot where Jim’s
tongue’s laid to
rest.)
Hear that wretch Milan Kundera
kvetch: “Living under a
Czechoslovakian rule’s
far from fun.”
(Milan’s migrated westward by late
’81.)
So swore D. H. Lawrence,
so tortur’d ‘neath torrents
of World War I Britain’s belligerent
ways:
“I’ll embark on a ‘pilgrimage savage.’”
(His
phrase.)
Mein
Herr Thomas Mann,
raining cat-calls upon
Adolf
Hitler and ‘dolf’s diabolical
band,
quits the Reichstag. (Herr’s splitting for Schwyz:
Switzer-
land!)
IgNobelist Naipaul,
the novelist I call
Sir Bloody V(idiadhar) S(irajpra-
sad),
call'd Tobago his home. (Or was that
Trini-
dad...?)
Ovid (P. Naso),
whose odic sargasso –
Remed’
Amores, Metamorphoses, Ars Amatori-
a, Fasti
(plus “gaffes”) get Nas banish’d.
(Whatever his “errors,” they’re bound to’ve
been ”Nas”ty.)
Petrarch (Petrarca)
post
donning his parka,
ascends Mt. Ventoux, though the first to
its summit he’s
not,
nor is Petrarch an exile; this Itie just
“iters” a
lot.
Horacio Quiroga
hails not from Shimoga
but Salto in Uruguay (bred there
to
boot),
though it’s Buenos Aires’ans who boost
his
repute.
Salman Rushdie
eschews being shush’d. He
was born in Mumbai, better known as
Bom-
bay.
Fatwas, filed, fail’d to find him,
although one yet
may.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
best pals all will tell: “He’s
more partial to straying than staying at
home.”
Bysshe is batty 'bout ‘bye,’ ‘ciao,’ ‘adieu’ and ‘sha-
lom.’
Thucidides!
Admitted: he’s
no wa-a-ay
just your garden-variety, Athens-born mine owner, exiled
unfairly.
Thuci’s War in the Peloponnesus remains fundamental, though read all
too rarely.
Unamuno!
Spain’s jejune “No
Turnos” coup ships M. de U to off-beat-track Canary
Isles.
Today, such round-trips, via France, would earn big
frequent-flyer
miles.
Monsieur
Voltaire
in exile’s aware:
a star’s mononymity ramps up his
fame:
Liberace, Cantinflas, Moliere,
Tintoretto, Machito, Madon-...ah:
that’s what’s in a name!
Oscar Wilde,
who pedophiled
and was judg’d to have sinn’d, was from
Britain de-isled after 24 months in an old Reading
gaol.
[Note: the sprite who once grinn’d on
his tomb has been filed, losing formerly
full genetalia
(male).]
Xenophon,
exiled upon
a damning discov’ry (he’d fought for the
Spartans!)
starts humming: “Ennui! That’s the part that
dis-
heartens.”
Yevtushenko
censures, then co-
operates with Russian politbureaucratic
folk.
Is he in exile...? Nope, although he does reside in Tulsa,
OK!
Stefan Zweig! A-
djourns he my ga-
zette of pan-global exilit’ra-
teurs.
You’d dis mine...? Where (for clerihew’s sake) reside
yours...?
PlaysWellWithLetters is a blogorrheal notebook of Nonsense in rhyming metres accompanying often-inconsequential sequencial graphics all issuing from the hands and/or minds of Sgt. N. ("Jim") Smithe-Magee, amateur author/illustrator whose several books are available online from Politics & Prose Bookstore under the nom de charade Ulysses Poe.
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