Hey, hey, it's National Poetry Day! And there you have it, a rhyming one-line poem to kick off the column.


John Donne.

Sure, it's not the longest or most profound poem in the world. But neither is it the shortest. I believe the world's shortest rhyming poem – and I could well be completely wrong about this so if you're telling anyone make sure to sound especially confident – is the one commonly known as ‘Fleas', which is credited variously to American humourist Ogden Nash, Dr Hook songwriter Shel Silverstein and others (but not, as many people think, Spike Milligan).

It actually has an older title and was first aired in the 1920s. ‘Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes', as it was called, was written by American poet Strickland Gillilan. It runs, in full, 'Adam/Had ‘em”.

To give him his due, Ogden Nash did pen a bunch of really short poems, but not quite that short. The most modestly-sized one I've found is his immortal ‘Parsley/Is gharsley'.

We are, of course, big fans of poetry here at the Watusi Country Club and this being a music column (albeit a free-roaming one) we are happily aware that poems are really just songs nobody has bothered to write music for yet. So they're pretty much part of our musical beat here in Watusiville.

I was lucky enough to grow up in England at a time when the silly amongst us were in the thrall of ‘Monty Python' and the ‘Goon Show'. So nonsense poetry was the way most young lads discovered poetry and what with the legacy of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear there were rich pickings.

Incidentally – and completely tangentially – I always thought the one big negative of Yoko Ono's relationship with John Lennon and its impact on his music was that she clearly thought the bold English tradition of nonsense verse, so loved by Lennon as evidenced in his books ‘In His Own Write' and ‘A Spaniard In The Works', was rubbish.
That playful, absurd side of his writing (cropping up in such songs as ‘In Am The Walrus') was quickly stamped out in favour of more 'serious” art.

For me the humorous aphorisms ('Love is like a pineapple/Sweet and undefinable”) soon gave way to the rigours of England's greatest poet. At school there you learn Shakespeare. We certainly did. A favourite punishment was to be given a set number of Shakespeare lines to learn. Since the alternative was to be beaten (slipper and cane were both popular) we had regular debates on which was the 'best” punishment – the one that took more time but was painless or the one that was quick but hurt? (I always picked the poetry and am now very glad of it).

But it was the realisation that many of the things we look upon as being part and parcel of the popular song actually originated in poetry, and not recent poetry, that really blew us budding songwriters away.

Who first coined the term ‘Catch a falling star'? Some tin-pan alley writer in the early 20th Century? Try John Donne, another of England's greatest poets. It was written around 1600, slightly before Shakespeare, in a poem that he simply – and ironically in this context – titled ‘Song'.

John Donne rocked. He taught me a lot about poetry and a lot about songs.

If he had been a songwriter he would have left Lennon, McCartney and probably even old Uncle Bob in his dust. Perhaps you think I'm exaggerating. As supporting evidence here are the first four lines from a poem of his (its name is the first line), in which he manages to perfectly encapsulate the sentiment of every song of regretful leaving, every song where the singer is going but wants to stay, from ‘The Last Farewell' to ‘Don't Think Twice it's Alright'. And he did it about 400 years earlier.

'Sweetest love I do not go/For weariness of thee/Nor in the hope the world can show/A fitter love for me.”

Isn't that magic? Nothing else you can say; nailed it.

Happy National Poetry Day y'all – have a fun one.

watusi@thesun.co.nz