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Mr. Hecht finds it a creative challenge to write in forms
that other poets, some from other centuries, have used. But
he says that many poets today-including some who regard
themselves as highly original-avoid that challenge.
"It's risky to do what somebody else has done, and if you
want to avoid comparison, you play it safe," he says. "But
you don't necessarily write the better poetry.
"One of the great pleasures in reading John Donne or
George Herbert is surely admiring the skill of their prosodic
technique. There are few poets as eminently deft as
they are, and I would be happy if I could do what they
succeeded in doing so skillfully. "
Not content with being a practitioner of verse forms, Mr.
Hecht actually invented one. With John Hollander, a poet
and professor of English at Y ale University, he devised a
comic form, in the tradition of the limerick, called the
"double dactyl."
The inventors published a compendium of double dactyls
under the titleJiggery-Pokery, a second edition of which
was published last year.
A double dactyl is composed of two four-line stanzas
written in dactylic feet-one stressed syllable, followed by
two unstressed. It must begin with a nonsense line-for
example, "Jiggery-pokery" -followed by a proper name in
the second line, and, somewhere later in the verse, a line
made up of but a single word. A sample, composed by Mr.
Hecht:
From the Grove Press
Higgledy-piggledy
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wroth at Bostonian
Cowardly hints)
Wrote an unprintable
Epithalamion
Based on a volume of
Japanese prints.
Anthony Hecht andJohn Hollander) ((From the Grove Press"
from Jiggery-Pokery. Copyright ©1966 by Anthony Hecht and
John Hollander. Reprinted with the permission of Atheneum
Publishers) Inc.
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