Political Clinkers and Cultural Slag

Felicia Lamport lives in Cambridge. She has published Scrap Irony, a volume of light verse, and Mink on Weekdays, an account of her childhood in New York. Some of the pieces below have appeared in Harper's and McCall's, and will be included in another book of verse to be published soon by Houghton-Mifflin.

The illustration is by Edward Gorey.

Literary Survey

When the first rays of dawn on a Somerset Maugham

Make the Frost-laden atmosphere mellow,

We can welcome the day in a new Hemingway

With a perfectly glorious Bellow.

How pleasant the soiree we spend in Le Carre

Where spies are too cold to be randy,

But the blackest of humor afflicts the consumer

Who gulps Southern comfort like candy.

As the novelist pegs existentialist eggs

That explode in our Burroughs and hit us

Like Becketts of blood, we, in deep Malamud

Try O'Hara the doggy that bit us.

The lady who, in pique,

Determines to forsake

The feminine mystique

Is likeliest to make

The masculine mystaque.

Moscow Transfer for 1961 (All out With the Fallout)

When a comrade met a coffin

Leaving Lenin's tomb,

Though it might have sent him off in

Panic or in gloom,

"Twas not lost or strayed--just Stalin

Moving with the times,

Posthumously perpetrating

Retroactive crimes.

Diagnosis by the Yard

How strange that the Harvard parietal stir

Should have caused such anxietal flying of fur

When it wasn't alarming, outre or berserk,

But just the co-edipus complex at work.

General Alarm

I am the very model of the modern Major-General,

In mufti at the moment, for in Washington those men are all

Subversive Kremlin agents, commy-symps, and un-American,

Which means a patriot must shout his message when and where he can;

I taught my soldiers politics, I helped them with their balloting;

I gave those sluggish unwashed minds some badly needed valeting;

I told the world the facts about the communist conspiracy--

An educated man like I can make such matters clearer, see?

You'd think my country'd thank me in some large or even puny form--

A medal and a few more stars to ornament my uniform--

But when the pinko press attacked, with arguments that puzzled me,

The highest brass turned chicken and immediately muzzled me.

I had a blow from which I know I never will recover nor

Forget: my fellow Texans failed to choose me as their governor,

But when Ole Miss. displayed abysmal cowardice by quieting,

I rallied kids and hooligans and birched them into rioting.

Then just when decent citizens were hailing me as savior

Some loony bastards jugged me claiming psycho-type behavior,

But not for long. I'm still the D.A.Rling havoc wreaker who

Exposes all those phonies playing N.A.A.C.Peekaboo.

You think I'm just a splinter whittled off from Barry's 2-b-four

But me I've got some plans the likes of which you never knew before

And legions are behind me with the strength to make that splinter great

So just relax--we're going to make America dis-integrate.

Unpaid Advertisement for the Post Office Department

We grow number by the numbers

As each agency encumbers

Us with figures to replace our natal names,

And we fidget with the digits

Feeling quite prodigious idjits

As we stumble through those rigid numbers games.

You might liefer be a lifer

Than confined within a cipher,

But the pressures, ever rifer, intervene

To reduce your rage to umbrage

And identity to umbrage

So that mankind can be managed by machine.

Every alphabet's archaic--

Roman, Arabic, Hebraic--

Full of kinks that goad computors to explode;

Though your sentimental nature

Tends to cling to nomenclature

Up-to-date yourself and zip into a code.

Look Back in Wonder

Whom was it wise to eulogize

And Prudent to endorse?

Whose ratiocinations put

McCart before McHorse?

Who made our state wisconsolate

And tarnished army brass?

Whose puseyanimosity

Made egg-heads roll enmasse?

Who used advanced roycohnaissance

And arrant monkeyschines?

Whose merry "point of order!" chants

Could curl the stiffest spines?

Who managed to command a spread

With every news release?

Whose use of propaganda bred

A million proper geese?