New at IWP Books: Ethel Jacobson, 1952, Larks in My Hair. From the Preface by Richard Armour: “Light verse is so sharp and swift and streamlined that it has a modern look. Yet it is an ancient and honorable kind of poetry. It has been written by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Herrick and Pope and Byron, in fact by every poet who has had moments of playfulness and has not taken himself too seriously. At its best, light verse is a widely appealing and highly civilized form of writing. And here, certainly, is light verse at its best.”

The Unbent Twig

When Susie came to bless our home,
My full heart fashioned a joyful pome
Till Reason rasped, with an ugly leer,
“O.K., but where do we go from here?”

For I’d been taught, as a young girl is,
The principal exports of far Cadiz,
And French subjunctives and Saxon rimes
And all about Homer his life and times,
And Avogadro and Alcibiades,
But nothing of infantile diets and diades;
So, full of impatience and mother love,
I set out to master these last above.

There were books in rows, there were books in stacks,
On library shelves and reference racks,
And I read each expert and conned each system
And carefully set out to check and list ’em
From Dr. Watson to Dr. Holt
And the Mustn’t-Spank-ers, in one stiff jolt;
From cod-liver oil to Constructive Play,
From Z-is-for-Zebra to Vitamin A.

Yet, hard though I struggled to weigh and weed ’em,
New books came faster than I could read ’em,
Each blandly discrediting all the lore
I’d painfully managed to grasp before.
Oh, I studied madly till wan and woozy,
But I couldn’t decide how to bring up Susie.
 But while I grew groggy
 At Wisdom’s cup,
 What do you think?
 Susie grew up.

The Spitball Crowd

Surveys reveal large percentages of pupils in modern
grade and high schools who are ignorant of history,
sentence structure, simple addition, the months of the
year, and how to tell time. — News item.

Modern education
Has been dandy, has been ducky.
The current generation
Is deliriously lucky.
Its members have been spared the blight
Of bothering to read and write.

McGuffey’s Third
Got the bird,
And — long division?
How absurd.
They don’t study, they don’t mind,
But no one’s ever left behind.
They learn no lessons, thumb no books,
And they give Teacher dirty looks.

How virgin their mentalities,
Their wants uncurbed and candid,
And, my! their personalities
Are only too expanded.
Their social attitudes are dillies,
But syntax gives them the howling willies.

For Teacher was the damp-eared kind
Whose pedagogic frills
Left rude discipline behind
And all the prosy skills
The times demand of lass and lad
Who now must haply learn to add,
And ponder over 3 x 3,
Penmanship, and C-A-T.