In her younger years, but then as a cat, she was also an actress in the theater. In a previous life, Mehitabel was not a simple cat either, but Queen Cleopatra. The second main character of the poems is the street cat Mehitabel, of whose experiences and thoughts Archy often reports. When Don Marquis wrote about his cockroach, he used the correct capitalization - which is why there are both forms - archy and archy, since the shift key was available to him as a human. That is also the reason why the title of the poem is given in lower case as archy and mehable. Archy poems therefore have to do without capital letters and special characters such as exclamation marks, question marks or quotation marks. Since, as a cockroach, he can only type by climbing onto the typewriter's cart and jumping from there onto the respective key, it is impossible for him to use characters that require the shift key. Archy writes his poems on Don Marquis' typewriter. Archy is a cockroach who was a Vers libre- Poet in a previous life who was unfortunate enough to be reborn in this form. For that matter neither the teacher nor the student teacher had any idea that this poem had not actually been written by a poet named archy.ĭon Marquis would probably be laughing his ass off.In 1916, Don Marquis introduced the character Archy to his column.
ARCHY AND MEHITABEL POEMS FREE
I didn't bother to tell her that, while certainly having certain poetic qualities, that it better fit the definition of parody because, in actuality, it Marquis was making fun of this new form called free verse, not to mention writers in general and how they suffer for their art.Īnyway, I love Don Marquis and I love the fact that people who have been to college have no idea who he is and don't bother to do a little background work on him. She had no idea what I was talking about. I then explained that the Mehitabel was a cat who had been Cleopatra in a past life and now found herself living on the streets of New York. I explained that Archy was the soul of a free verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach and that every night Archy would crawl up onto Marquis' typewriter and hurl himself into the keys one by one and leave Marquis a column for the next day and, because he couldn't manipulate the shift or enter keys, the column would end up looking like a free verse poem.
I explained how Don Marquis was a very popular columnist from after WWI and that he had created this character, Archy the cockroach, as a part of his weekly newspaper column. I asked her if she knew the origin of this "poem." Not a clue.
She said, "Oh yes, I love poetry too"-not having the slightest idea what I was talking about. I approached the teacher and said, "I'm a big fan of Archy and Mehitabel. Used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves A student teacher was discussing "poetry." She had a "poem" on the screen, the following selection from Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel:įire is beautiful and we know that if we get Today, I walked into another teacher's classroom to borrow a USB cable for my digital camera. Every once in awhile, I walk into a situation that makes it hard for me to defend the public school system.
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