Don Marquis — Forgotten Genius

Sometime in my very early twenties, near the beginning of the 1970s, someone turned me on to Don Marquis and his 1910s/1920s stories about Archy the cockroach, a writer of free verse, and Mehitabel the alley cat who thought she was a reincarnation of Cleopatra.

Archy would supposedly leave poems on Marquis’ desk that the cockroach typed by jumping up and down on the keys. There were never any capital letters or punctuation because he couldn’t use the shift key.  Here is a typical poem “The Wisdom of Archy“:

as a representative

of the insect world

i have often wondered

on what man bases his claims

to superiority

everything he knows he has had

to learn whereas we insects are born

knowing everything we need to know

a louse i

used to know

told me that

millionaires and

bums tasted

about alike

to him

In “Archy Hears from Mars,” extraterrestrials reach out to the roach by radio because humans proved too hard to contact. Upon their request that he tell them about his planet, Archy explains:

[… ] it is

round like an orange

or a ball

and it is all cluttered

up with automobiles

and politicians

it doesn t know where it is

going nor why

but it is in a hurry

it is in charge of a

two legged animal called

man who is genuinely

puzzled as to whether

his grandfather was a god

or a monkey

.

I was reminded to re-read these wonderful works by an article in the Poetry Foundation by Kathleen Rooney who tells the story of Marquis far better than I ever could.

.

It would be marvelous if another generation of young readers could be captivated  by this brilliant writer.

 

 

Image: Negative Space