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  • Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma
  • David Stanford Burr (bio)
Run Out of Prose
Marvin Cohen
Sagging Meniscus Press
www.saggingmeniscus.com
236 Pages; Print, $15.00
Women, and Tom Gervasi
Marvin Cohen
Sagging Meniscus Press
www.saggingmeniscus.com
276 Pages; Print, $22.00
Inside the World: As Al Lehman
Marvin Cohen
Sagging Meniscus Press
www.saggingmeniscus.com
240 Pages; Print, $22.00

Marvin Cohen was born in Brooklyn in 1931 and developed partial deafness as a child that lead to him dropping out of Cooper Union’s art curriculum to pursue the writing life, supporting himself with various odd jobs including a stint at City College in NYC as a writing instructor. He is a poet, essayist, short fiction writer, and novelist with a decidedly humorous and surrealist bent, who enjoyed success in the sixties and seventies after his debut novel The Self-Devoted Friend came out from New Directions in 1967, and was hailed by The New York Times as a “tour de force of serio-comedy.” His ninth book was published in 1982, but due to poor sales, all nine books fell out of print. He turned primarily to playwriting, authoring five plays, the best known being his first, The Don Juan and the Non-Don Juan. Mr. Cohen continued writing, and the mounting store of genre-bending manuscripts languished, but that changed beginning in 2016 when six new books and two anniversary reissues became available. His has been a remarkable life from college dropout to hailed literary genius to publication banishment to this recent resurrection, which comes at a good time as he is now eighty-seven.

Recently, Cohen was asked why he was writing only poetry, and he replied that he had “run out of prose,” which became the title of the first of the three Cohen books I will review. Run Out of Prose is a small poetry offering, small in its physical dimensions (4.5 × 6 inches), but at 165 poems, is a bit of a mini-epic, and represents his recent musings on life as an octogenarian. The themes range from “post-sex old-age” (“My old cock is docile in its cage”) to “longevity’s survivor” (“A little care can assure a lot of future”) to insomnia (“Insomnia challenges my sleeplessness to a drowsy duel, but the victor is too tired to crawl off with the prize of the sudden unconscious jolt of sleep, recognized upon awakening as something that should have prolonged itself if only it had been alert enough”) to memory/dementia (“dementia: with its swift entry to death-rehearsing obliviousness”) to youthful lusty pursuits (“Though I was such a he-man, / girls don’t magnetize my semen”) to love for his wife (“She fills the vacuum, which she displaces / with being the sweetheart of my heart / That you can’t just buy in any mart”) to time/death (“escort doleful woes to a necessary death / and put misery out of its own misery”), with a few oddities thrown in: half a dozen poems on Darwin/evolution and three on the fear of being the target of a bird strike. His poems—six are prose poems—are usually end-rhymed, and he notes in one poem his “inspirations to rhyme.” Never to miss an opportunity for “linguistic literary mayhem,” in one poem, “Contemplating the Quintessential Essence,” Cohen word-builds [End Page 18] seven successive end rhymes: brutal, futile, suit all, Music Hall, brawl, fall, and ball, leaving this reader to cry “Uncle,” before the poem ends on the last rhyme. He tortures some end-line rhymes to his will: “eligible bachelor” and on the next line “matter of factueler.” He likes long, convoluted poem titles in all caps such as, “LIFE AT ITS EXCESS POINTS, WHERE CORRELATIVES COME INTO PLAY, TO PRODUCE A SANITY-CONDUCIVE BLUEPRINT.” Then there are the puns: “paraphrase along with Yeats; / and modern-eyes his tune.” A good number of first lines are either a declarative sentence or an interrogative, e.g., the promising philosophical musing, “What is the essence of life?” that is followed by matter-of-fact statements and ends with, “Who said that...

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