Collection of examples of an amusing then-new ligh verse for, the double dactyl, which is still occasionally practiced. ( )

I had intended to post on Naguib Mahfouz's Palace of Desire today, but it sometimes seems that we live in a brilliant, unpredictable universe. And one support for that impression is that David and I received in the mail from a friend of ours who is a big proponent doggerel verse, a package containing Anthony Hecht's and John Hollander's Jiggery Pokery: a Compendium of Double Dactyls. Previously familiar with Hecht only as the author of the Matthew Arnold satire "Dover Bitch," I was pleasantly and hilariously surprised to make his acquaintance and that of Hollander in such verses as the following (by Hollander):

HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS



Higgledy-piggledy,

Benjamin Harrison,

Twenty-third President,

Was, and, as such,



Served between Clevelands, and

Save for this trivial

Idiosyncrasy,

Didn't do much.

Or this one (by Hecht):

FIRMNESS



Higgledy-piggledy

Mme. de Maintenon

Shouted, "Up yours!" when ap-

Proached for the rent,



And, in her anger, pro-

Ceeded to demonstrate,

Iconographically,

Just what she meant.

Double dactyls have the following rules, as outlined by Hecht and Hollander (a dactyl, for those who don't know, is a three-syllable poetic foot with the first syllable stressed and the second two unstressed):

• The poem is composed of two stanzas, each with three lines of two dactyls each followed by a fourth line that ends in a dactyl;


• The first line must be a double dactyl of nonsense language;


• The second line must be the name of the subject;


• The final lines of the two stanzas must rhyme;


• Somewhere in the second stanza there must be a line made up entirely of a single, double-dactylic word ("iconographically," for example).

Hecht and Hollander also argue that any six-syllable word, once used in a double dactyl, can never be used in a different one, although Wikipedia maintains that only hardcore double-dactyl purists still hold to this requirement. This seems like a lot of rules, but once you start reading these little gems your brain begins to incorporate them almost unconsciously; the double-dactyl line is extremely catchy.

And in fact, between the uproarious Introduction, the delightfully tongue-in-cheek footnotes, and the addictive poems themselves, Jiggery Pokery unexpectedly comandeered my entire afternoon. Of course, the side effect of reading sing-song dactylic verse for hours at a time is that the meter gets horribly stuck in one's head, and one starts noticing double dactyls all over the house and in one's normal speech. In the shower I found myself chanting "Birch bark and chammomile, / Deep Cleansing Wash," and both David and I keep bursting out with examples of promising six-syllable words apropos of nothing in particular. ("Sesquicentennial!" "Homogeneity!") Needless to say, the next stage was to begin composing our own examples; also needless to say, mine were all about books.

THE MOONSTONE



Fletteridge metteridge

Gabriel Betteridge

tells a romance with the

aid of Defoe;



The diamond's locational

Discontinuity's

somewhat assuaged by his

pipe and Bordeaux.

I imagine "discontinuity" has already been used, by someone somewhere in a double dactyl, but I don't specifically remember it from the book. Here's one on my recent reading:

MONTAIGNE



Hop-a-lide, pop-a-lide,

Mike of the Mountainside

'way from his wife, to his

tower confined,



Erstwhile Bordelais

Parliamentarian

Aired his opinions, and

then changed his mind.

They are very addictive! And also surprisingly difficult. It's hard to find a good use for that single-word line when you have so few syllables to work with. Very fun, though. This last one is just about the dorkiest joke ever; the first time my friend Alan started talking about Austrian educational and agricultural innovator Rudolph Steiner (which Alan went through a phase of doing quite frequently), I mis-heard him with funny results.

RUDOLPH'S DINER



Old Donji Kraljevec,

Kingdom of Hungary,

Offers a breakfast that's

truly advanced:



All of the produce grown

Biodynamically;

Waldorf school day care on

hand for the staff.

It's time for a comic break, don't you think?

Titus Andronicus
Mother Superior
Mr. America
Katherine Patterson
somebody’s Congressman
Abraham Lincoln (well,

almost)

What do these names, except Abe’s, have in common?

Eminence? Energy? Gravity? Potency?

Maybe. But that’s not what I had in mind.

They’re all double dactyls.

What’s a dactyl? Remember your introduction to poetics in tenth-grade English? A dactyl consists of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables. Each of the following words, by the way, is an example of a dactyl: eminence, energy, gravity, potency.

So a word that consists of two dactyls is a double dactyl. Get it? Like superintelligence, hyperacidity, pronounceability. A person’s name or designation may consist of a double dactyl. That’s what all the folks listed above have in common. Well, all except Abe, of course: ham would have to be unaccented to make his first name a dactyl, and a ham never likes to go unaccented; and Lincoln needs one more unaccented syllable, as in Lincolnesque, to make it the second part of a double dactyl.

But a double dactyl is also a poetic form. One that in the late 1960s got a lot of attention in USAmerican popular magazines, beginning with Esquire. Here’s an example. You’ll see how it relates to the words and names we’ve been looking at.

Jiggery-pokery
President Kennedy
Chose, in the White House,
A Canopied bed—

One that was used by his
Philoprogenitive
Grandfather Bobby and
Great-uncle Ted.

This is taken from what its editors at one time considered the legitimate canon of double-dactyls, Jiggery Pokery, edited by Anthony Hecht and John Hollander (Atheneum, 1983). In fact, they gave it the subtitle, A Compendium of Double Dactyls.

Writing the introduction with tongue firmly in cheek and ironically but authoritatively emitting manifestations of their polysyllabic erudition, they spelled out some finer points of the history, rationale, and definition of the genre. For example, they predicted despondently, “Debates among future scholiasts about the heart of the matter may, alas, be all too easily envisaged—about whether the proper disposition of the syllables or the crucial face of the proper name in the second line constitutes the substance, essence, haeccity, quiddity, inscape or whatever of the whole genre.” (Yes, indeed!)

But they do deign to give one simple, clear definition of the form. Check it out against the example I’ve copied above.

“The form itself . . . is composed of two quatrains of which the last line of the first rhymes with the last line of the second. All the lines except the rhyming ones, which are truncated, are composed of two dactylic feet. The first line of the poem must be a double dactylic nonsense line, like ‘Higgledy-piggledy,’ or ‘Pocketa-pocketa’ . . . . The second line must be a double dactylic name. And then, somewhere in the poem, though preferably in the second stanza, and ideally in the antepenultimate line, there must be at least one double dactylic line which is one word long (italicized for emphasis).”

The rest of the introduction consists of supercilious shenanigans about the development of and need for the genre with a ton of subtle and not-so-subtle allusions (as you might expect). Obviously, however, the two most difficult, and therefore delightful, features of the genre are (1) the double dactylic name and (2) the single line composed of one double dactylic word. Of course, these editors quibble with details. They would never have accepted “somebody’s Congressman,” for it is not a proper name, and they probably would have rejected both Mother Superior and Mr. America, as not referring to specific individuals (unless, of course, something else clever in the poem persuaded them to retain it). But even they occasionally took liberties: line 3 in the poem I quoted, by Hollander, is not double dactylic, the second foot being a two-syllable trochee or spondee, depending on your way of pronouncing it. But enough of their quibbles. Let me share one more of Hollander’s efforts. Notice how he makes a double dactyl of the two editors’ names by making them into one fictitious poet:

Higgledy-piggledy
Anthony Hollander,
Two-bards-in-one, worked their
Brains to a storm,

Seeking out words for the
Antepenultimate
Line of this dismally
Difficult form.

I discovered the form, not in this book, but when it first began to be published in 1966. I was asked by my department chair to substitute-teach for him in his high-school class in creative writing. Because he was much more interested in fiction and other prose forms than in poetry and because he knew of my interest in the latter, he asked me to help teach a week or so of that unit. Because he preferred traditional poetry to modern poetry and formal verse to free verse, I was asked to introduce a new form each day and guide the students in giving each of them a try; for example, the heroic couplet, villanelle, terza rima, ottava rima, sestina, sonnet, and the like. Personally, I prefer to teach poetic forms in exactly the opposite way, beginning with “found” poems and imagistic free forms, proceeding into formal types with syllabic genres, such as haiku and hexagrams. Of course, I followed my department chair’s instructions, but I began the exercises with the double dactyl. These were bright and creative kids, so we were off and running.

Theodore Roosevelt
rose at his century’s
outset and dauntlessly
enacted reforms

Relative Franklin D.
biogenetic’ly
outdistanced his uncle,
winning four terms.

(OK, so I permitted casual pronunciation and consonantal half rhymes; we free versifiers do that.)

I wish I could remember which double dactyls I used with the class to inspire their enthusiasm. Probably my favorite from this book, one by E. William Seaman, appears only in a footnote:

Higgledy-piggledy
Ludwig van Beethoven
Bored by requests for some
Music to hum,

Finally answered with
Oversimplicity,
“Here’s my Fifth Symphony:
Duh, duh, duh, DUM!”

I love poetry and remember when this book came out. It created much competition for who could come up with the wittiest use of double dactyls:
Here's just one example:

Paradise Lost Book 5: An Epitome

Higgledy piggeldy
Archangel Rafael,
Speaking of Satan's re-
Bellion from God:

"Chap was decidedly
Turgiversational,
Given to lewdness and
Rodomontade."

Anthony Hecht ( )