Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker
by Stuart Y. Silverstein
List Price:
Our Price: $4.79
You Save: $11.21 (70%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.99 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Stuart Y. SilversteinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-07-10
ISBN: 0743211480
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker
Book Review: She called them 'verses' -- but they're more potent than verse
Summary: 4 Stars
She was a Rothschild --- just not the right kind. Her mother died a month before her fifth birthday, her hated stepmother died when she was nine, her father died when she was 20.
Born lucky, you might say.
It should be no surprise that Dorothy Parker had a close relationship with alcohol (great quantities, taken in small sips, so she was always drinking but never completely smashed). Or that she had bad luck in love (two husbands committed suicide). Or that she'd fail at suicide on four separate occasions (once she slashed her wrists, but only after ordering dinner to be delivered, thus guaranteeing that she'd be found alive).
Dorothy Parker was one of the most celebrated writers of her time, but she's much better remembered for her big mouth. Day after day, she sat with America's greatest wits at the Round Table in the bar of New York's Algonquin Hotel and quietly devastated the all-male group with her one-liners. She was as much a symbol of the 1920s as the flapper, the flivver and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Or so the legend has it.
The fact is, Dorothy Parker had no trust fund. She was a working writer. And much of her work involved --- try imagining a career like this now --- poetry. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1915 for $12, a tidy sum back then. And she wrote about 330 more during her life; over thirty years, that's a poem every other week.
She downplayed her poetry. She said she wrote "verses" --- not poems. And they weren't, she noted, original: "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers."
Her poetry was collected at the peak of her fame. It has since languished. A decade ago, "Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker" appeared. As with many things Parker, don't believe the title.
Is Parker a great poet? By no means. But she was one of the first American women to speak her mind --- her smart, contrarian, troubled mind --- openly on the page, and that gives her a certain historical import. And, setting aside all serious considerations, she's just plain fun. Fun and funny.
The book opens with a poem about...bridge. ("Didn't you hear what I bid?") It moves on to "Any Porch," a pastiche of overheard conversations. ("I really look thinner, you say?") She decries "the lady in back," who invariably ruins her night at the theater. She touches on every popular subject, even psychotherapy: "Where a Freud in need is a Freud indeed/we'll always be Jung together."
Parker's stock in trade is the last line that dramatically reverses the energy of the poem --- and slaps the reader in the face. Thus, a poem about Hollywood ends: "The streets are paved with Goldwyn." Well, how else?
And there are many poems that are just droll jokes:
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
And:
Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live
If Parker were only cleverness and verve, she'd be worth a paragraph in a chapter on the `20s. What makes her poems interesting is that her pain shows through the wit. In a great poet, this is no big deal; when the poet in question is paying her rent with her poems, it means something that she goes beyond froth. As, here:
When all the world was younger.
When petals lay as snow.
What recked I of the hunger
An empty heart can know?
For love was young and cheery,
And love was quick and free;
Tomorrow might be weary,
But when was that to me?
But now the world is older,
And now tomorrow's come.
The winds are rushing colder,
And all the birds are dumb.
And icy shackles fetter
The brooklet's sunny blue--
And I was never better;
But what is that to you?
"I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true," Parker once said. But in addition to poems that tell more than she may have intended, "Not Much Fun" includes an introduction, by Stuart Y. Silverstein, that's so amusingly annotated it's almost a biography. Together, they give a rollicking and touching picture of a woman you'd never want to be --- but would surely want to know.
Summary of Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker
During the early years of her career, while struggling to "keep body and soul apart" (as she ruefully put it later), Dorothy Parker wrote more than three hundred poems and verses for a variety of popular magazines and newspapers. Between 1926 and 1933 she collected most of these pieces in three volumes of poetry: Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. The remaining poems and verses from America's most renowned cynic make up this volume. Eclectic and exuberant, these 122 once-forgotten gems display Parker's distinctive wit, irony, and precision, as she dissects early-twentieth-century American urban life and gleefully skewers a rich array of targets that range from personal foible to popular culture. With an authoritative, immensely entertaining, and critically acclaimed introduction by Stuart Y. Silverstein, Not Much Fun is an essential addition to the Dorothy Parker library and a welcome gift to her many admirers and devoted fans.
A succinct, yet enlightening introduction and footnotes with quintessential Dorothy Parker anecdotes and quotes serve as brilliant foundation for this collection of "lost" poems. In fact, they are pieces that Parker discarded as not fit for publication, and Parker enthusiasts will notice that many foreshadow more-polished later versions. Though Parker once described her verse as "horribly outdated--anything once fashionable is dreadful now," it's clear that even her "unfit" works are far from dreadful.
General Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in My Psychosis: Poetry Books I own
Love Poems of Karl Marxby Karl Marx
City Lights Books; Published: 1977; Paperback; Book
The Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2006-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.05
Price in other shops:
Phenomenal Womanby Maya Angelou
Random House; Published: 2000-02-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $7.87
Price in other shops:
And Still I Riseby Maya Angelou
Random House; Published: 1978-08-12; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $8.56
Price in other shops:
Selected Poems of Langston Hughesby Langston Hughes
Vintage; Published: 1990-09-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughesby Langston Hughes
Vintage; Published: 1995-10-31; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.74
Price in other shops:
The Best of Dorothy Parkerby Dorothy Parker
Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd; Published: 2000-07-20; Paperback; Book
Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parkerby Stuart Y. Silverstein
Scribner; Published: 2001-07-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.79
Price in other shops:
Angels & Visitationsby Neil Gaiman
Dreamhaven Books; Published: 1993-10-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $62.82
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wondersby Neil Gaiman
William Morrow; Published: 2006-10-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.95
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
The Dorothy Parker Audio Collectionby Dorothy Parker
Caedmon; Published: 2004-06-01; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $5.24
Price in other shops:
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twentiesby Marion Meade
Harvest Books; Published: 2005-06-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.86
Price in other shops:
The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (Modern Library)by Dorothy Parker
Modern Library; Published: 1994-08-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $106.24
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious CircleImage Entertainment; Release date: 2006-09-05; DVD
Best price: $7.83
Price in other shops:
Dorothy Parker: In Her Own Wordsby Barry Day
Taylor Trade Publishing; Published: 2004-06-25; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.36
Price in other shops:
A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York (ArtPlace series)by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick
Roaring Forties Press; Published: 2005-12-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.95
Price in other shops:
The Algonquin Wits: Bon Mots, Wisecracks, Epigrams and GagsCitadel; Published: 2002-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.95
Price in other shops:
Complete Storiesby Dorothy Parker
Penguin Classics; Published: 2002-12-31; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.38
Price in other shops:
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?by Marion Meade
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1989-03-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.64
Price in other shops:
The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)by Dorothy Parker
Penguin Classics; Published: 2006-03-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.11
Price in other shops: