The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March and Art Spiegelman

Wow, such a wholesome, rhythmic, totally jazzed-up poem from the roaring twenties, a true gem by Joseph Moncure March, then managing editor of the recently established The New Yorker magazine, spiced up with Art Spiegelman’s black and white drawings of 1994.

First published in 1926, two years before Bertolt Brecht’s similarly tuned Three-Penny Opera hit the stage, in those careless final years of laugher and prosperity before the Great Depression and War, this short barely a hundred-page long smashed up, sexed up, and cocked up narrative drama of a lovers’ fight, seduction, jealousy and vengeance in a bubbling new New York apartment, propped against a totally Gatsbian wild party atmosphere, is definitely the best piece of frivolous poetry I’ve read in a while.

Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still,

And she danced twice a day in a vaudeville.

Lip-smacking, invigorating, well ahead of its time, and quite contemporary today.