Gavin Callaghan Wrote:hey Gavin, thanks for this - my estimation goes up with anyone who duels with limericks - I once had such an evening with John Ciardi (best translation of Dante), his best: As Mozart composed a Sonata,
His maid bent to straighten her garter,
He wrote down with sighs
as he glanced up her thighs,
"Un poco piu appassionata!" -
My response:
When Bach was a lad of just twenty,
The women that he knew were plenty,
E'en if they were Gorgons,
He'd play on their organs,
Staccato, Adagio, then Lenti -
I think he won - but then we were friends - Hmmm wonder why Barlow didn't like old Louie?
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> Speaking of Barlow, I picked up an old copy of
> Katunob(No. 16, 1981, University of Northern
> Colorado), a Mexican anthropology journal, which
> deals with him. It has a pic of Barlow from 1950
> taken by James Forster
> [
www.facebook.com]
> 7633&set=a.289312334520972.66984.100003266238530&t
> ype=3 , and some amusing anecdotes about him
> during his Activist poet/pre-anthropology-period,
> by poetess Jeanne Hart:
>
> "Since I was one of the three original Activists,
> and Barlow joined us not long after, I knew him
> very well, and have many memories of a Barlow
> possibly quite different from the Barlow that you
> knew: Barlow rattling a popcorn sack to show
> disapproval of what was being said in the first
> class he wandered into: coming back next time with
> a very funny burlesque of modernist work: coming
> back yet again with a serious poem done with much
> wilder romantic imagery than any he had
> disapproved of: Barlow being driven home from a
> class, pretending he couldn't find his apartment,
> and taking us over half of San Francisco hunting:
> coming to my house in Oakland with a friend,
> claiming they had invented a new dance routine,
> and performing it--under my living room rug:
> Barlow proposing, before a party, to bite a
> particularly pompous antagonist on the leg, and
> then horrifying everybody by doing it: Barlow and
> poet-anthologist Louis Untermeyer (deadly enemies
> at sight) fighting a duel in somebody's kitchen
> with an exchange of increasingly bawdy
> limericks--he could be outrageously funny in those
> days (but--he was very young then.)"