The Re-Echo Club

The Re-Echo Club turns literary one-upmanship into a gleeful game, challenging poets to outdo one another by recasting tiny, familiar subjects in grand styles. A purple cow, a tiger-riding limerick, a little girl with a little curl, and Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater all become excuses for mock-anthologies in which Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Poe, Kipling, Browning, Swinburne, Longfellow, Wilde, and many others are hilariously imitated. The result is a comic parade of inflated voices, where nursery rhymes and nonsense verses are treated as if they were major works of art. That same mischievous spirit carries into holiday verse, then on to a sharp satire of modernism, as Cubism and the famous Nude Descending a Staircase are translated into wildly distorted poetic treatments. The collection closes by parodying Omar Khayyam to lampoon Wall Street speculation and investor folly. Affectionate, erudite, and irreverent, this is a lively celebration of parody, poetic style, and the pleasures of literary wit. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.