I’d long been familiar with the clever wit of Ogden Nash’s limericks and other humorous poems, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have written more serious verses.

Throughout most of my high school days, I had believed that “real” poetry was serious meaning-of-life stuff. (What could I possibly have known about life back when I was seventeen!) I thought that poems had to rhyme and have perfect, rigorous rhythm, all the while reflecting beautiful visions, lofty values and noble sentiments. I wrote a lot of boring, stilted, unrealistic hogwash.

I would later discover Nash’s poems, bursting with fun as he remodeled and combined words, created new ones for the sake of meter, rhyme, truth and giggles. Sometime in the early 1970’s, with no more tempting choices offered by my monthly book club, I ordered his book “I Wouldn’t Have Missed It” and learned a lot about poetry and the joy to be found in writing it. Ogden Nash gave me permission and incentive to enjoy writing light verse without apology or guilt.

Nash’s poems appeared in newspapers and magazines for years, including Harper’s, Life, Vogue the New Yorker and The New York Times. People remembered and quoted his quips, often without remembering his name but always appreciating his aptness and wit. And some of us began to appreciate the truths and values expressed in the less gleeful things he penned. Who couldn’t appreciate the tenderness and patience that went into a verse about his two young daughters fraught with winter head colds and childhood ailments in the poem that describes the seemingly endless burden of having “one girl in school and one girl in bed.” And what wife wouldn’t melt with love if her husband wrote a poem for her birthday enumerating the joys described in “Always Marry An April Girl.” (Being an April girl, I tend to claim a right to imagine myself in that admirable and lovingly described category.)

Nash began publishing his poems in 1930, a time when it was important to be able to laugh at oneself. Seeing the humorous side of hard times was a great help in weathering the Great Depression. People were reassured by knowing that almost everyone was being forced to grit their teeth, tighten their belts and paddle the same rickety, sinking boat that they were in.  Somehow, turning the miseries into silly, rhyming ditties magically made it all more bearable.

In junior high school, I had a minor role in one of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operas. It was either “Pirates of Penzance” or “HMS Pinafore” – time and similarities  have blurred them in my memory. I do, however, remember being enchanted by the clever lyrics and unexpected rhymes in the song lyrics. Such outrageous combinations as ‘man’s affection’ and ‘bad complexion’ or ‘felonious little crimes’ and ‘merry village chimes’ left me gasping with surprise and amusement. It’s not surprising that I found a certain delight in coming across similar outrageous rhymes in Nash’s works all those years later. I’m still seduced by a little piece about the role and usefulness of husbands who ‘…tell you when you have on too much lipstick and help you with your girdle when your hips stick’! I haven’t yet been bold enough to be quite so absurd, but I did manage these lines about the freedoms that I enjoy in poetry since Ogden Nash liberated me; IT’S GREAT BEING A POET

We have permission to ignore those rigid punctuation rules and strictures that we heard before when we were kids in grammar schools. We needn’t ponder case and tense, for all things written by a poet needn’t always make good sense, it isn’t critical to know it. The organized approach is out. Forget outlines and annotations. Mainly, rhyme and meter count and footnotes are abominations.

Spelling skills aren’t worth a lot. Abbreviations and contractions work if they express the thought and get us the desired reactions. Ignore that English 101, to be grammatical is a trap. To play around with words is fun. To be a poet is a snap!

Just for fun, give it a try, with my blessing and, possibly W.S. Gilbert’s and Ogden Nash’s too.