Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, October 1921 · page 6 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #25 — page 6: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page mocks the pretentiousness of modernist poetry, specifically targeting Carl Sandburg's abstract work. The magazine's character "Gus" dismisses a poem called "Shadowy—Under My Window" as incomprehensibly highbrow, but the editors reveal that *neither* poem is actually sophisticated literature—one is literally titled "Ode to a Jackass." The satire centers on Sandburg's published poem about a shirt as a "token," "symbol," and "signal" of the soul. The editors ridicule this as meaningless pseudo-intellectual drivel, comparing it unfavorably to actually understanding nature. They mock readers who pretend to comprehend such work, while they themselves claim bewilderment at what constitutes "real highbrow poetry." The joke: modernist poetry's obscurity and self-importance deserve mockery. The editors present themselves as regular people baffled by elitist literary pretense, appealing to working-class readers skeptical of highbrow culture.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
4 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang alley cat—a thing sobbing in the backyard to the remembering stars. And so the mystery thickens like onion jelly. * * * WE LET Gus read both these poems—the “Ode to a Jackass” and “Shadowy—Un- der My Window”—and Gus called the Shadowy stuff too highbrow. But Gus doesn’t know “highbrow” poetry when he reads it. Neither one is regular, lollypop highbrow liter- ature. We have before us a recent copy of “Current Opinion” containing the following how! from the highbrow poet, Carl Sandburg: My shirt is a token and a symbol More than a lover for sun and rain, My shirt is a signal And a teller of souls. I can take off my shirt and tear it And so make a ripping, razzly noise, And the people will say, “Look at him tear his shirt.” I can keep my shirt on; I can sit around and sing like a little bird, And look ’em all in the eye and never be fazed. I can keep my shirt on. If we hadn’t happened across this copy of Current Opinion enroute home from the Atlan- tic City tea party we would have been just as ignorant as Gus as to what constitutes real highbrow poetry. We have known dames who could translate the languages of their Mexican hairless puppies. We have seen dumb-bells try- ing to get a prescription from an ouija board. Most poets—even the cuckoo who wrote the “Ode to a Jackass”—are familiar with the “voices of nature.” But unless we have been