NONFICTION - April 10, 1994

DEADLINE POET: Or, My Life as a Doggerelist by Calvin Trillin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18; 196 pp.) Imagine persuading your boss (in Trillin’s case, the “wily and parsimonious” Victor S. Navasky, editor of the Nation magazine) to let you write a poem a week on whatever piece of current events finds itself stuck in your craw. Sure, it took Trillin’s agent, Robert (Slowly) Lescher, to work Navasky up to 100 bucks a poem, only because they were written on Sunday--time and a half--and only if Trillin promised not to “tell any of the real poets that he was getting that much.” Since 1990, we the public have been blessed with Trillin’s wisdom, beginning with the now-famous poem, “If You Knew What Sununu,” moving on to David Duke (It’s funny who you meet/By peeking ‘neath the sheet.), to Clarence Thomas in “The Supremes”: Well, first they found a woman who’s really not/so sure/Abortion’s for a woman to decide./And then they got a black man who thinks that/Special help/For black folks should be canceled/countrywide./They’re looking for a Jewish judge who really/sees the point/Of keeping jews away from one’s resort./And then a smart Latino who’d like the border/closed./At last we’ll have a truly balanced Court. Republicans are, in general, funnier to Trillin than the Democrats, and at times he seems to long for the Reagan era, or even Bush and Quayle (“In 1988 my suggestion that we pass a constitutional amendment making a C average a requirement for the presidency was widely viewed as an attack on Dan Quayle”). Democrats he finds a little bland and ordinary: Clinton and Gore, Clinton and Gore--/Both of them born since the war!/ . . . Baby boomers, baby boomers, yes, yes, yes./Both these guys know how to dress. But perhaps the most useful tool for measuring history that Trillin has given us thus far is the ML--a unit of measurement equal to the combined theorizing of one panel discussion of specialists on the “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.”