Mordidu. This nickname comes from my need to pore through the obituary column in the newspaper. My sister gave me the title. Because being interested in death is morbid, isn’t it? And yet, I did. I still do. That’s why I took a strange kind of delight when I read Dorothy Parker’s poem, ‘Resumé’. “ Razors pain you/Rivers are damp/Acids stain you/And drugs cause cramp./Guns aren’t lawful/Nooses give/Gas smells awful/You might as well live .”
You might as well live; after you’ve thought to try everything else. The poet offers an interesting defence for each method before ending up with the almost weary words. It’s a strange sense of humour and one that appeals to me. My sister is rolling her eyes at me, I am sure.
Dorothy Parker (born on August 22, 1893) used humour extensively. Not just humour but sarcasm and a cutting wittiness that wounds as much as it amuses. After last week’s article on Ogden Nash, a reader wondered: “I wonder how he was as a person. I always suspect people who used humour so well are actually very melancholic inside.” I agree. Humour works great, especially as a self-preservation technique. Dorothy Parker’s sense of fun hid a long and solitary fight with depression.
Parker wrote for iconic magazines like Vanity Fair , The New Yorker and Vogue . She was also part of the Algonquin Circle, a literary group of major repute. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the verse; the rhyme and meter have a polish that shines through, burnished. She probably did what she wrote about: “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.” And she looked at the entire world through rather cynical, but honest, eyes.
Dorothy Parker wrote delicious verse about our own preoccupations. Love and loss, for instance. I first became familiar with Dorothy Parker from all her interesting quotes. She took a line, turned it around and made it completely her own: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie,” and “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.” According to her, “ Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses. ” I like the other, more modern, version though: “ Men don’t make passes/at a girl who surpasses. ”
With her choice of topics and the words she used to express them, she created a strong identity for herself, at odds with the portrait of a woman of those times. She was neither mawkish nor a prudish moralist. In fact, one of her poems says: “ The ladies men admire, I’ve heard/Would shudder at a wicked word./Their candle gives a single light/They’d rather stay at home at night./They do not keep awake till three/Nor read erotic poetry./They never sanction the impure/Nor recognize an overture./They shrink from powders and from paints .../So far, I’ve had no complaints ”(‘Interview’). In other poems too, one sees a strong feminist voice: “ But now I know the things I know/And do the things I do/And if you do not like me so/To hell, my love, with you. ”
There is a softer, gentler side to her writing too. You might take pleasure from the intriguingly titled ‘Song in a Minor Key’: “ There’s a place I know where the birds swing low/And wayward vines go roaming/Where the lilacs nod, and a marble god/Is pale, in scented gloaming./And at sunset there comes a lady fair/Whose eyes are deep with yearning./By an old, old gate does the lady wait/Her own true love’s returning./But the days go by, and the lilacs die/And trembling birds seek cover/Yet the lady stands, with her long white hands/Held out to greet her lover./And it’s there she’ll stay till the shadowy day/A monument they grave her. She will always wait by the same old gate, —/ The gate her true love gave her. ”
Dorothy Parker is a poet after my own heart. She says it like she sees it and sees it like she says it.
Srividya is a poet and teacher. Read her work at www.rumwrapt.blogspot.in
