Jiggery-Pokery Semicentennial

Jiggery-Pokery Semicentennial

Think of ‘light verse’ not as mere triviality but as a special form of illumination. The double dactyl makes its own claims, and does its own work. It has grown over time. Take a look at [Jiggery-Pokery Semicentennial]: you will find God’s plenty, wittily miniaturized. The new double dactyls collected by Messrs. Groves and Williamson prove individually and collectively that having once ‘learned’ the rules of the form, a poet may produce a learnèd work, a poem both ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate’ (Milton’s desideratum) and playful, witty, even intellectual … The poets in these pages have extended the boundaries of Hecht and Hollander’s original definitions, and of their anthology of half a century ago. One hopes that the old masters would have approved … Contained in this slim volume, readers will find poems that are didactic, secular, witty, and ironic, as well as illuminating: often sensuous and passionate, perhaps even simple. Their illumination comes, in fact, from their didactic wit. — from Willard Spiegelman’s introduction

Jiggery-Pokery Semicentennial is the successor to the 1967 anthology, edited by Anthony Hecht and John Hollander. Published by Atheneum, the original Jiggery Pokery collected examples of a new poetic form that made its publishing debut the previous year in Esquire magazine. Setting something of a craze for those younger poets still seduced by the pleasures of formalism, the double dactyl was devised over a long lunch at the American Academy in Rome, 1951. Attendant on the scene were Anthony Hecht, the classical scholar Paul Pascal, and Pascal’s wife, Naomi. … The Semicentennial’s editors, Daniel Groves and Greg Williamson, are to be praised for bringing so many fine poets together in one volume. It is particularly pleasing to see a contribution from Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who also contributed to Hecht and Hollander’s anthology. I will close with one final double dactyl, by the late J. D. McClatchy, which rather beautifully manages to pay tribute to a Romantic writer without abandoning the essential mischievousness of the form:

Von Hofmannsthal

Higgledy-Piggledy
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Wrote hushed libretti for
Noisy Herr Strauss,

Radiant fables that
Incomprehensibly
Lifted the spirit and
Brought down the house.

As it happens, those last two lines are also a fair descriptor for reading Jiggery-Pokery Semicentennial itself. — Andrew Neilson, The Hopkins Review, 12:2, Spring 2019