more parody

And that may also make it a good time to repost the parody of Rilke’s style in The Book of Hours, written by a droll critic shortly after the book was published:

You are the mouth,
but we are only nose.
We are thumbs only;
you are hand.

We are the flowers in a pot,
which once a distant cousin got,
and gave to Mary’s friend.

Your father is a purple lily;
your mother is the lovely moon.
And we are but the family,
that, like so much wilted parsley
is found amid the cities’ gloom.

In general, I think we need less critique and more parody today. Parody shows both the limits and the positive features of something simultaneously. In the present example, the “Rilke” poem is on one level utterly ridiculous, but it does capture his style nicely (despite the absurdity of the content) and you don’t actually like Rilke less after reading it, do you? I like Rilke just as much or even more, even though the parody nails him.

My two greatest literary achievements in high school were both parodies. One was of the great witch scene in MacBeth, with villains from my high school plugged into the scene and speaking their coarse 1980’s vulgarities rather than witch-speak. It’s probably buried in a cardboard box somewhere.

The other I still have partly memorized, and was a parody of Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It began like this (and Dan Gable was a famous Iowa wrestler, if that helps):

Dan Gable
dancing on an academic’s ass.
Copulating with Gretagarbo
in a coin-operated laundry machine.

Richard M Nixon
sleeping in a subway,
wailing for his mother.
Shut up.

I am a piece of filth
sitting in a graveyard
decomposing to the beat of butterflies’ wings.

And I also enjoyed writing the Lovecraft parody section of my Lovecraft/Husserl article. They sometimes say that you don’t understand authors before teaching them. I’d say instead that you don’t understand an author unless you can parody them.