I speculate I am the first person to read this book in forty years. If anyone looking at the present article knows different, I beg you to email me. Go to my website. In fact, if any of you have any images of Paul Waterman, or knowledge about his life, your assistance would be cordially appreciated.

Not that Paul Waterman, by the way. Not the CEO of whatever. I’m talking about Paul Waterman, the author of:

And don’t misunderstand. I would not have you think my attachment to Waterman is owing to the merit, properly so-called, of his limericks. His limericks, and really only this one book of them, which is all I have, are the reason for my attachment—but it isn’t about merit.

What’s it about then. It’s about some random dude who was cuckoo—perfectly, utterly cuckoo—in the same way Christopher Smart and John Clare and William Cowper were. I’m saying: Waterman was mad, but his poetic talent operated unhindered by his madness.

Do you know that bit in Apocalypse Now where Dennis Hopper says of Marlon Brando, “The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad”? Well, with Waterman, both mind and soul are mad—but his prosody is sane.

How do I know he was mad? I don’t. Maybe he wasn’t. But I defy anyone who reads these limericks to think he was merely weird. The word weird is insufficient. Quite insufficient.

Consider: Edward Lear’s limericks are called “nonsense,” but they’re not really that. They make sense; they’re just perverse.

It’s not that that doesn’t make sense. It’s just deliberately pointless. Indeed, the humor partly depends on the reader’s recognizing the effect is deliberate. Whereas, Waterman’s limericks really are nonsense. Which is to say: they are unintelligible. Not all of them—but most. Just to give you an idea:

It should be noted I’ve retained Waterman’s punctuation exactly. I’m only going to say this once: Every Waterman original I quote in this piece is reproduced with molecular accuracy, from my copy’s text.

But wait. Is the above limerick unintelligible? A teenager hijacks a freight elevator—got that. I guess he plummets to his demise—which, for some reason, is figured as the deflation of a football. Pretty much following. The parts I don’t get are the title and the construction “sank to red horns.”

This is a very common problem for me, as I go through the hundred limericks in this book. I keep thinking maybe Waterman was from Australia or something, and all these bizarre constructions are idioms from twenties Canberra. The principal weakness of that theory is the effect comes up way too often. Poem after poem, you read the thing and go, What. No question mark, just: What.

What.

What.

What.

What.

When I was reading the book for the first time, in the airport on the way back to Texas (and neglecting Kierkegaard, ’cuz I thought he would be too difficult), I believed for the longest time I was simply distracted. I kept saying to myself “Wake up, man. Pay attention!” because page after page was delivering precisely the sensation of reading something easy but not understanding it ’cuz you’re not paying attention.

I have no doubt someone reading these words will think he or she understands one or more of the above-quoted specimens. And maybe you do, pal. Maybe you’re a hundred and one years old, born in Canberra. Or maybe—and I want you to think hard about this before you email me—maybe you’re simply as nuts as Waterman. Explain these:

In every one of these cases, Waterman demonstrates excellent control of his sound palette. There’s hardly a limerick in the whole book with any kind of prosodic fault. Awkwardness and what Samuel Johnson called “uncertain meter” are almost unknown here. Everything is rhythmically limpid; one can sight-read the stuff with complete confidence. Yet it’s like these poems are fantastic creatures whose only habitat is your peripheral vision. You can see something moving there, but if it holds up some fingers and says “How many?” you can’t tell. You turn to look—and the limerick’s gone.

Oh Waterman, where are you? Where are your grandchildren? Why did you write these pieces? Would that I had been there in Worcester, New York when you read them aloud. I would not have seen you, Waterman. I would have been facing the audience the whole time, for I am dying to know how they took it.

By the way, this essay is the first of two on Waterman. Part II will let you know all I learn from Waterman’s other books, which are in the mail, headed my way, even as I write this. I am particularly interested to see if his earliest books are like what I’ve described here. I shall also create an anthology of annihilating prose snippets, written (no doubt) in the haughty style of Vladimir Nabokov and hurled at me by Australian code-breakers. Meanwhile, the overstimulated should be warned: Waterman’s books are surprisingly expensive. The copy of Five Lines to Limerick I’m looking at, on an open tab in front of me, is thirty-five dollars. “About that I know not what to make.”

I close, though, with a limerick wherein Waterman uncharacteristically mentions himself. Here, too, he leaves you squinting:

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is Try Never. He is a correspondent for the Daily.