To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Aside from the (then) complete works of Emily Dickinson that I started to read in 1994, this might have been the book that took me the longest to read from beginning to end. I started this book probably nine years ago, back when I read other Ogden Nash collections and other poetry to my toddlers […]
This is a later volume from Nash, and it shows. His preoccupation with his children has passed onto his preoccupation with his grandchildren. His poetry is more gloomy amid the humor as he recognizes he’s aging and won’t be the young man again. Hence, it really doesn’t exhibit the playful nature of his earlier works […]
This book collects some of Nash’s work in an around the World War II era, complete with mocking tones about Mussolini and Germany. However, it includes some gems of zingers and whatnot and amusing enough poetry to read aloud to a couple of children who don’t get the point but like to chant when they […]
Many Long Years Ago by Ogden Nash (1945) Reflections on Our Friendship by American Greetings Corporation (1975) Old Possum’s Practical Book of Cats by T.S. Eliot (1939, 1982) If laddie reckons himself to be a poet, laddie really ought to read diverse styles of poetry and, yes, sometimes even poetry that is not very good. […]
It took me some time to read this book, because I’m reading poetry volumes aloud these days and although one child cannot flee from the poetry, the other one can, so it has been slow going. Still, they like Ogden Nash. Or perhaps I like reading Ogden Nash to them. Nash’s silly verses are laden […]
Ogden Nash didn’t take poetry too seriously; the verses are light things with rhymes and runon lines used to comedic effect. I don’t know what else to say about it; they were fun to read aloud and amusing, which is what Nash was no doubt going for. He tortures spellings to get rhymes and tacks […]
I bought this book fourteen years ago during an especially gluttonous trip to a book sale not long after my youngest was born. It would have been the autumn after my mother’s diagnosis and but, what, four months before her death? Eleven months before our move to Springfield? A long time ago, to be sure, […]
As you might know, gentle reader, I used to sit and read poems to my child and then children while they played. This book, along with Ogden Nash’s I’m A Stranger Here Myself, represent probably the last two I started to read with them before they were resigned to the nightstand book accumulation point. So […]
My first exposure to Baxter Black was a folksy column that ran weekly in the Republic Monitor, the weekly paper in the next town over, when I first moved to southwest Missouri. He talked about being a cowboy and humorous anecdotes about the same. However, the paper dropped the column some years ago, likely as […]
This is a chapbook from a little old lady who wrote poems about her home, her friends, and her family in the 1970s and 1980s. Its pages are typewritten (and, in some places, corrected with correction fluid and hand printing), and it’s bound by a comb binder, probably something provided by Kinko’s or the like […]
This is a Dover thrift edition that collects a pile of sonnets that had fallen into the public domain. It collects them from a large number of authors, chiefly British and American, and includes a lot of favorites from Shakespeare, Millay, Whittier, Tennyson, Poe, Swinburne, and so on. It’s like a good sampler album of […]
This is a collection from one of those poetry contests that makes everyone a winner and then puts all the winners into a book and then sells the winners copies of the book for $50. Full disclosure: I appeared in one of these books in 1984, and my sainted mother bought a copy. I probably […]
This book collects two previous volumes’ worth of one liners and insults, meaning it’s 416 pages of quips and acid tongue baths. Most of the stuff is dated and not very good, but the book has enough amusing clips and whatnot that it rivals an Ogden Nash volume in the number of potential IM statuses […]
This book is a collection of lighthearted verses about the business world. It falls somewhere between an Ogden Nash volume and The Complete Geek (An Owner’s Manual). The verses are light-hearted but sometimes pointed, and unfortunately they’re not very poetic. I mean, Ogden Nash isn’t the most poetic of authors, but he can turn a […]
This chapbook, published by the St. Louis Writer’s Center, was J2‘s first volume of poetry. Unlike his elder, he did not receive the Rod McKuen treatment fresh from the womb. As I was active in the poetry scene in St. Louis at that time, I thought perhaps I might know of her. However, she’s a […]
I might have mentioned in my recent book reports that I’m working my way through the stack of books beside my sofa that I’ve stacked up to browse during football games. Some of them prove to be harder to browse than others, and they will sort of fall to the bottom of the stack and […]