MY MARTONARY - 1916 - AUX MES FRERES You daredevil dilettantes In vers libre. Amazing amateurs Why have y burned u Your rhyming dictionaries Behind you The one hope you had And gone in for angel treading IVhat do you cribbers of the classics Know About rag-time As its thumped out In a nigger joint. Go back to your pale Hermaphrodite gods, Sing about Circe And Amphahedalon The old Greek goose Who got talked about Because of his Pallid passion for Amorthorincus That great Greek goddess Whose sensitive nose was sprained By a passing whiff Of garlic. You wretched rhymsters Imaginary imagists Cut out your cant About cadences Go back to rhyming Dear with tear As you were born to do. To write free verse Youve got to Be Free verse. Robert Carlton Brown -- CONTENTS -- MY MARJONARY F I were not a practical workaday man with an ambition to make enough money to keep me continually moving about in comfort, I would rent a small store on a bookish New York street for thirty-eight dollars a month, and peddle second-hand books to all corners. In the rear of the shop I would have a curious little English living-room, and off that a conservatory devoted to four-leaf clovers. By careful selection, cul- tivation, and Burbanking, in the course of two or three years I would have a yearly crop of, say, ten pounds of four-leaf clovers. I would care- fully crystallize and candyize the entire ten pounds by some ingenious method I have not yet invented, so that, counting the sugar, I should have about fifteen pounds of my product to sell. My price would be ten dollars a pound, and I would stipulate with my confectioner customers that they put only one four-leaf clover in each pound box, so my lucky pieces wouldnever be- come common. My clover patch would yield one hundred and fifty dollars a year and I would not allow the business to increase too rapidly, though after forty or fifty years of work I wouldnt mind turning out twenty pounds each year, at twelve dollars a pound. 191 In a sunny little room behind the conservatory I would raise mules. Not the braying mule of commerce, but flower mules, bird mules, and fish mules. By some ingenious method which I would perhaps be compelled to originate, I would cross fan-tailed Japanese gold-fish, dwarf bronze marigolds, and liquid-throated canaries in such fashion that the resultant mule would blossom from a flower-stalk, as though it were a bird with a gold-fish tail in a little private tree of its own. here my rnarjonary would sit all day and sing, languidly waving her lacy fan-tail back and forth while proudly pluming her blazing feathers, scales, and petals. I would teach my marjonary to eat frommy hand and wear a cocked cap like a bold Spanish commandando. Marj should live on candied four-leaf clovers at ten dollars a pound and never know want. I would sell her seeds and eggs and roe to the highest bidders, bids being received only from spoiled babies, boyish bachelors, fond mothers, drearn-eyed maidens, and plain folk who have lived long and fully and learned to love every littlest thing. I would not expect to make much money from hlarjy, but my books would keep me, and my four-leaf clover patch would bring me luxury. Half a dollar a day to spend just as I wished, half a dollar to keep me in cigarettes, liqueurs, and -