Anniversary

    Earl the Squirrel's Rule #32

    Half a century ago a bawdy limerick about a man from Nantucket appeared in Playboy magazine.  No one could have guessed that this was the most significant event in the history of poetry.  Barring song lyrics and Dr. Seuss nursery rhymes, it was the last iconic English language poem for fifty years.  And counting.  Is this how a popular poetry tradition that included Chaucer, Shakespeare, Byron, and Frost will end?

    What other culture in history could envision, let alone produce, such a lull?  Who among us could imagine a similar drought in any other art form?  Five decades without an iconic painting, book, film, play or song?  Unthinkable.

    An entire mode of speech, of which we have but two, currently finds no audience beyond song lovers and sleepy children.  The only thing more amazing than this obsolescence is the apathy it generates, even among the overproducers.

    Very strange.

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