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Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker

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How we live in a world where this book was at one time remaindered and now out of print is simply beyond me. Dorothy Parker is not only one of the finest poets who ever ran pen across page, but a wit and a charm as well. This collection of works that fell through the cracks (mostly because Dottie didn't like them) is a gem fit for anyone's library. The obligatory biography is peppered with footnotes of a more informal and personal nature, giving many of her scathing witticisms in given situations. The verses collected are also quite good, even though viewed as rejects by the author. Scathing, sarcastic, brilliant and at times, very personal, your Dorothy Parker collection isn't complete without them. The conclusion of the book are the "Hymns of Hate" not collected anywhere else and are wildly funny and pertinent even in our modern world. Don't miss this fun and fine book which has, hopefully, not seen its last visit to the printing press.

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.

A friend allowed me to borrow this book as he happened to buy it the same day I happened to be reading a short story written by Dorothy Parker. This book of Dorothy Parker's lost poems is completely amazing. Her wit is remarkable and I love the unexpected turns that hit you right at the end of her poems. The footnotes are fantastic and as I read about her life I became even more fascinated by her. I would recommend this amazingly witty and fun book to anyone.

If you are a Dorothy Parker fan, this is a great book. It has the seiries of "I Hate...." poems, which is not collected anywhere else, as well as other gems Dottie deemed not worthy of being republished elsewhere. Mr Silverstein's excellent use of footnotes helps explain what was going on with Dottie when various poems were written. I have always admired Dorothy Parker but I definitely wouldn't want the pain and anguish of her life.

So if you are a Dorothy Parker fan, get this book for the lost poems so you can have a full collection of this underrated literay star. I recommend it highly.

Awesome collection of many of Dorothy Parker's orphan verses as well as her witty remarks throughout the years. The book does not overlap much with other Dorothy Parker collections -- and therefore likely a great addition for some even avid Parker fans. The introduction attempts to present the life story of Dorothy Parker, although I find the comical rendition sometimes a bit too harsh to laugh about. Overall, an easy read that is easy to pick up but hard to put aside!

Dottie is my fave poet and my literary hero. Wouldn't model my life after hers, but I sure wish I could sharpen my tongue to match hers sometimes. Loved reading this.

As a lover of the late Dorothy Parker, this collection is thorough and enjoyable. So many of her poems are lost in old magazines and this book collects them all in one place

The introduction and ancedotes were what really drew me to this book. The footnotes are wonderful!

The book consists of a 73-page Introduction (with 120 footnotes) and 169 pages of poetry containing approximately 129 "lost" poems, each one usually not more than a page or two long. The footnotes are funny because, largely, they contain they situational wisecracks of Dorothy Parker which liven up the generally lackluster recounting of the major events of Dorothy Parker's life.

The wisecracks in the Introduction bring such chuckles of delight, they instantly raise the evaluation of the whole book -- momentarily, like a seductive tease. Easily, Parker's wisecracks could have been substituted for the Introduction if laughter was the primary purpose of the book.

The remarkable thing about the Introduction that is worth noting is Stuart Y. Silverstein's assertion that Dorothy Parker was a Stalinist and that she signed Stalin's petition to put millions of his own people to death. Unmistakably, and (for me) very disappointingly, Dorothy Parker, as the Introduction makes clear, was "not a personal friend of the multitudes." She was a "grand dame" all right, but in the meanest and most anti-human sense. (If you also just think of the various genocidal movements going on through various nefarious charitable organizations or non-governmental organizations today in the name of "world governance" (i.e., World Communism), through WHO or Social Services in the UK just to name two, then Dorothy Parker's signature on Stalin's petition in the Thirties (again, for the eradication of the multitudes) makes reading her poems and wisecrackings seem a pleasureless, wrongheaded straining for depth and gratification that is not much fun, not much fun at all, at all.)

The poems in this collection are inaptly name as "lost." They were not ever lost, only forgotten, at least for the most part. They do bring a certain pleasure and do provide a few guffaws. At least, this is true for the first third of them. The middle portion of the collection, however, is actually dull and repetitive, and the not-much-fun reading of them seems endless and unrelieved until the last third of the collection where the reader discovers "The Hate Verses." These late, contrarian poems do return lift and light to the reader's soul-seeking pleasures and unlock a few more unexpected giggles.

The Introduction quotes a Wyatt Cooper saying "If you didn't know Dorothy Parker, whatever you think she was like, she wasn't. Even if you did know her, whatever you thought she was like, she probably wasn't." What Mr. Cooper made of Dorothy Parker as a human being, I think can equally be made of the poems found in this collection. While the compiler, Mr. Silverstein, thinks these poems are eclectic, breezy, and unself-conscious, the carefully cultivated image and personality Dorothy Parker crafted for herself through her books of poetry (and through careful editing) is nowhere to be found, is totally abandoned or "lost" such that, for me, these poems seem written either by a completely different person or by an adolescent version of that "modern woman" Dorothy Parker fans have already come to know and love. Having read now all the poems in this collection, I think I (still) prefer the "aesthetic profile Dorothy Parker had hoped to project" and succeeded in projecting - that is, succeeded well before encountering this book. Having learned how bad some of the poems in this collection are while also discovering what a life-hating Communist she turned out to be, I find the book ironically titled. Reading it was, aptly, not much fun.

Dorothy Parker's "Not Much Fun" is so much fun! There's no one quite like Ms. Parker--witty and wonderful with her words that get her point across with no doubt on the reader's part of how she really feels. She says it like no other, with a style that is all her own. And all that fabulous opinion set to the beautiful music of poetry's rhythm and rhyme. I look forward to her "Complete Poems" coming back in print!