I can keep my shirt on;
I can sit around and sing like a little bird,
And look ’em all in the eye and never be fazed.
I can keep my shirt on.
If we hadn’t happened across this copy of Current Opinion enroute home from the Atlantic City tea party we would have been just as ignorant as Gus as to what constitutes real highbrow poetry. We have known dames who could translate the languages of their Mexican hairless puppies. We have seen dumb-bells trying to get a prescription from an ouija board. Most poets—even the cuckoo who wrote the “Ode to a Jackass”—are familiar with the “voices of nature.” But unless we have been eating a wagon load of evaporated apples smothered in bootleg without any flavor—especially without vanilla flavor—Sandburg is shadow-boxing with nut sundaes when he is not writing poetry.
Sandburg is beyond all surgery.
But that is highbrow, Gus, granting the shirt was clean, which we very much doubt.
* * *
When Gus was back East with me where they use the sign language—sign here and sign there—we took in a New York production and one of the comic lyrics handed over the footlights went something like this:
Oh, the Vamp, Vamp, Vamp, Vamp, Vamp,