[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Steve Bucknell

Does anyone know any more?

Nope. Except The Questing Beast must be a joke at Malory's expense...

And there's this:

LAMENT OF AN IDLE DEMON
R.P. Lister (1914- )
It's quiet in Hell just now, it's very tame.
The devils and the damned alike like snoring.
Just a faint smell of sulphur, not much flame;
The human souls come here and find it boring.

Satan, the poor old Puritan, sits there
Emitting mocking laughter once a minute.
Idly he scans a page of Baudelaire
And wonders how he once saw evil in it.

He sips his brimstone at the Demons' Club
(His one amusement now he's superseded)
And keeps complaining to Beelzebub
That men make hotter hells than ever he did.



Thanks,

Bill

[W.F. Lantry]

I Thought I Saw Stars
By: R.P. Lister

I thought I saw stars, when first I saw your eyes,
So luminous they were , and such an enormous size;
I fell on the floor and foamed at the mouth, with inconsequential cries
Now, when I look in your eyes, I do not flinch;
Heaven forgive me, I am not even tempted to lynch
The men who, standing beside you, display an inclination to pinch
For this insensitivity may I be pardoned,
I looked in your eyes too often, and in the end became hardened,
There came a day when Adam turned his back upon Eve, and gardened.

[Jerome Betts]

The tally of Lister pieces is mounting it seems. 'Defenestration' was included in J.M.Cohen's Yet More Comic And Curious Verse Penguin 1959, reprinted 1964, but there is no acknowledgement to the New Yorker, where it appeared in the issue for Sept 16th 1956.

'Taxidermy' was in Punch in April 1965, but I don't know the exact issue date.

His New Yorker heyday seems to have been the 1950s, with 58 poems in the decade. There were 12 in the 1960s up to 1966, and then a solitary straggler in 1973.

Those collections might be worth looking for.

[Steve Bucknell]

Thanks for all efforts. His poems seem fine light verse, at the very least, with some mysterious extra ingredient. I have found this copy of "Defenestration" in some student's dissertation on comic verse, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy. The name/character McIndoe seems oddly familiar. I will have to get back to more research. I can find no other reference to "Pauline Dorricott Books" as a publisher.

DEFENESTRATION

I once had the honour of meeting a philosopher called McIndoe
Who had once had the honour of being flung out of an upstairs window.
During his flight, he said, he commenced an interesting train of speculation
On why there happened to be such a word as defenestration.
There is not a special word for being rolled down a roof into a gutter;
There is no verb to describe the action of beating a man to death with a putter;
No adjective exists to qualify a man bound to the buffer of the 12.10 to Ealing,
No abstract noun to mollify a man hung upside down by his ankles from the ceiling.
Why, then, of all the possible offences so distressing to humanitarians,
Should this one alone have caught the attention of the verbarians?
I concluded (said McIndoe) that the incidence of logodaedaly was purely adventitious.
About a thirtieth of a second later, I landed in a bush that my great-aunt brought back from Mauritius.
I am aware (he said) that defenestration is not limited to the flinging of men through the window.
On this occasion, however, it was limited, the object defenestrated being, I, the philosopher, McIndoe.

R.P.Lister.

Logodaedaly! What a wonderful word! Steve.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

That is hilarious, Steve! I cannot stop laughing! This is wonderful stuff. I love the last line of "I thought I saw stars", too!

Amazing comic flair, this Mister Lister.

Cally

[Jerome Betts]

A couple of minor differences in the text I have:

L5 There is not, he said, a special word for being rolled down a roof into a gutter;

LL14 On this occasion, however, it was so limited, the object defenestrated being I, the philosopher, McIndoe.

I'll add to the rapidly-assembling corpus with 'Taxidermy' when I have more time.

[Jerome Betts]

TAXIDERMY

The trouble is with taxidermy
That creatures stuffed with loving care
Become, in future ages, wormy,
And fall to pieces in the air.


The most obese and lifelike beaver
Stuffed by Tim Pettigrew of Penge,
Will vanish like a passing fever
Compared with Byblos or Stonehenge.

The taxidermist's art is vagrant,
A fleeting thing that fades too soon,
Condemned to wither, like the fragrant
Roses beneath the summer moon.

Those moles and ferrets, elks and vipers,
Though stuffed apparently to stay
Are like the airs of distant pipers
That mercifully fade away.

Where are they now, the cunning foxes,
The lovebirds in their glassy case?
Turned rotten at the core, like Coxes
Kept in an injudicious place.

The leopards, tastefully engladed,
The coy koalas, short and stout -
Their fur is by the moth invaded,
Their beady little eyes drop out.

How fleet of Finnish foot was Nurmi!
How lissom Lenglen on the court!
And so it is with taxidermy;
Not only life, but art is short.


Punch April 1965

[Ed Shacklee]

Steve,

If you talk with R.P. Lister again, please let him know that people who found copies of The Idle Demon enjoyed it a great deal (one of them, anyway; people, I mean, not demons).

Ed


The Rhinoceros

I love to wallow in the mud
xxxThat borders on the stream;
I love to lie and cool my blood
xxxAnd meditate and dream.

Wrinkled and horny is my flesh,
xxxAngry my eye and wild,
And yet my soul is smooth and fresh
xxxLike that of any child.

Man looks upon me with a frown
xxxAnd holds me as a foe;
And yet I only knock him down
xxxBecause I love him so.

Many a human I have hurled
xxxTo earth, and trampled flat;
And is there, friends, in all the world
xxxA purer love than that?

xxxxx- R.P. Lister

[John Whitworth]

I like the verse of R.P. Lister,
Who well deserves the title Mr.
So thank you, thank you Mr. Lister.

[Orwn Acra]

That Judgement poem is just fantastic.