"True Paste, Four Takes": Poetic Tribute to Dorothy Parker's Birthday, August 22, 1893
To Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 -- June 7, 1967)
True Paste, Four Takes
1
True love show-cased,
its taste em-braced,
with hate mis-placed,
out-paced, re-placed,
and lust un-laced,
bare-faced, dis-graced.
For haste is waste
when chaste is paste.
2
Get ready, Do-ro-thy Par-ker,
I’m comin’ after you, darlin’,
and we will soon be a-parkin’!
We’ll watch the sun’s twilight darken,
while we cure pain with our writin’,
to see new morn when it’s startin’.
We cried so hard just a-waitin’,
but now I’m forced to my choosin’,
my wife and muse are both pushin’.
3
You cannot write such things
in vacuum by yourself.
They’re granted from above
when you allow yourself
perchance to fall in love
with any one or any thing,
with every one or every thing,
and let yourself avail yourself
of your ex-spear-ience with life,
the most rely-able re-source
avail-able to you in life.
4
Max Hav-lick eating break -fast May the eighth, Sun’s day
in Villa Park, a day to star -t, a -gain, his stray
tears reading Dor’thy Parker splashing salt on fiber’s meal
to seeds-on it with happy-ness, yet keep it somewhat real.
Current Bibliography on Dorothy Parker
Marion Meade, editor with excellent respectful introduction, The Portable Dorothy Parker, Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition, illustrated by Seth (Penquin Books, 2006), 626 pages of verse, stories, essays, and journalism. This second complete revision keeps all the work Dottie listed for the first edition of 1944. Paperback list price $20.00.
Stuart Y. Silverstein, editor with a breath-taking biographical introduction, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner, 1996), 256 pages.
Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? (Villard Books, Random House, 1988; Penguin 1989). Insightful biography.
The Wikipedia article on Dorothy Parker contains a ton of useful information with many references, and all of it accurate as far as I could tell.
The Dorothy Parker Society occasionally maintains the website www.dorothyparker.com.
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Copyright © June 2011 by Max J. Havlick, Writers Workshop, The Max Havlick School of Personal Creation and World Citizenship, a nonprofit project of New World Community Enterprises, Inc., 16 West Vermont St., Villa Park, IL 60181-1938 (30 min. from O’Hare Airport), all rights reserved. Permission granted here to make exact copies of this page that include the copyright notice.
