CANDY IS DANDY,BUT LIQUOR IS QUICKER! (Part One)

The British always believed they had the monopoly to humor. This belief lasted right until Ogden Nash appeared as a tiny blip that grew into a massive blot on the literary radar. An American writer and poet( with a city Nashville already named after an ancestor of his) ,who first started his career as a journalist, Ogden Nash took the world by storm with his writings which were at first read hilarious-second,insightful about the vagaries of daily life.
Take for example this,

The Lord in His wisdom made the fly,
And then forgot to tell us why.

Celebrating Leos. Nash was born on August 19, 1902.



One day radio director Tom Carlson found to his dismay that his dog had destroyed an autographed copy of one of Ogden Nash's books. Although the book was out of print, Carlson managed to find another, which he duly sent to Nash with an explanation - and a request for another autograph.
The book was soon returned, with an inscription from the author: "To Tom Carlson or his dog, depending on whose taste it best suits."

Ogden Nash never got to graduate from college. His first published work was a pretty good poem titled ‘Spring comes to Murray Hill’ which was published in the ‘New Yorker’.

Nash, not just wrote amazing poetry, but also wrote books for children. Famous among these are ‘Cricket of Caradon’ (his first) and ‘Custard the Dragon’. Children loved his books because it addresses them as equal to adults. Quite an appeal isn’t that? I can remember when I was young; I used to find it extremely irritating when adults would take that sing song tone and utter quite nonsensical nothings when speaking to me. Did you find that as irritating as I did?

Enough about his life story. Let me get onto why I find Ogden Nash so fascinating. Apart from the humor in his writings, what is really quite remarkable is the way he managed to make a parody out of the most mundane things in life. From Christmas, to wealth, to husbands and wives, to animals, visits to the doctor, children standing on his feet, he succeeded in deriving amusement out of the simplest instances in life. And if you scraped below the surfaces of humor, you would find that his writings had hidden depths. A unique perception to all things mundane.

Any poet would admit that getting those words to rhyme is one of the most difficult tasks unless one is quite practiced at it. The most enviable trait in Nash is that he never broke his head over getting his words to rhyme! He simply created new words or altered the spelling, pronunciation,- the everything of existing words to make them fit his sentences.
And I think he must be one of the only poets who not just got away with it, but was also appreciated for it! A classic example of this would be a poem which he wrote about ‘rhyming his poetry’.

English is a language than which none is sublimer,
But it presents certain difficulties for the rhymer.
There are no rhymes for orange or silver
Unless liberties you pilfer.
I was once slapped by a young lady named Miss Goringe,
And the only reason I was looking at her that way,she represented a rhyme for orange.
I suggest that some painter do a tormented mural
On the perversity of the English plural

Isn’t that atrocious, yet at the same time marvelous?