Stepping willingly into a fool's paradise...

As if it were not enough that so many of us get taken for a ride every day, we had to discover a day to honour it, too. I am talking about the sometimes-painful tradition of ‘celebrating’ All Fools’ Day on April 1.

I am not going into any detail about how or why this day came about. Today, I just want to talk about the rich tradition of fools and poetry. And before you think about it, no, I am not talking about poets being foolish — in her April Fools’ post, Julie Carr says, “All poets are fools.” I might also add that when a friend calls me nefelibata or cloud-dweller, he isn’t wrong. I am speaking about how noticed and celebrated the fool is in poetry. Who better than William Shakespeare and his numerous references to the wise fool in his plays? In the ink of Shakespeare’s writing instrument, the fool became a symbol — telling the truth about larger issues, albeit in a lighter vein. So, while the fool’s role was primarily to provide comic relief, there was something more substantial at play here. This is one of the reasons why we remember the Fool from King Lear (Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise) and Feste in Twelfth Night (Why, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.) The ability to speak truth to power and to do it with humour and some tact was at the heart of medieval court jesters. They were exalted for this very reason. Even John Donne, the metaphysical poet, speaks of fools in his work, including The Triple Fool, where he says, “I am two fools, I know, / For loving, and for saying so/In whining poetry.” To add to the two fools, the third fool sets his writing to music. The fool and foolishness continue to feature prominently in literature. I will go out on a limb here and say that E E Cummings, with his experimentation with form and innovation with structures, created poems that follow the spirit of April Fools. If the idea is to prank, then prank he does. Look at the syntax or lack thereof in his work, Just. Or in i thank You God for most this amazing where he writes, “how should tasting touching hearing seeing/breathing any — lifted from the no/of all nothing — human merely being/doubt unimaginable You?”

For me, this playfulness is at the centre of April Fools.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/The frumious Bandersnatch!” These iconic nonsense lines from Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky are immortalised, I suspect, also because we are tickled pink by the idea of memorising lines that don’t make sense at all! In a poem about different ways to pull pranks on the teacher, including a ‘purple gummy worm’ and a ‘whoopie cushion,’ Kenn Nesbitt ends with this sweet warning: ‘These April Fool’s Day pranks/are ones that you could use in class./Before you go and try them, though,/there’s something I should mention:/The teacher wasn’t fooling/when she put us in detention.” A good warning, wouldn’t you say?

Billy Collins connects wisdom to humour, leaving us with much to think about. In The Breather (the pun in the title is fantastic), he talks about the foolish and memorable pursuit of unrequited love. ‘Just as in the horror movies/when someone discovers that the phone calls/are coming from inside the house/so too, I realised/that our tender overlapping/has been taking place only inside me./All that sweetness, the love and desire—/it’s just been me dialing myself/then following the ringing to another room (…)’

April Fools’ Day takes on a new dimension in this age of fake news and all sorts of digital manipulations and deceptions. I like to think they send out a gentle warning that there is much difference between wisdom and vice and truth and post-truth. And what better than poetry to explore this uniquely modern challenge?

World in Verse is a monthly column on the best of new (and old) poetry.

The writer is a poet, teacher, voice actor and speaker. She has published two collections of poetry. Send your thoughts to her at [e-mail]