Perhaps it's March's perfectly pitched tone of bewildered innocence curdled into worldly cyncism that resonates so well in our nineties. March died in 1977, his two major works underappreciated, despite a cult following that includes William Burroughs, who credits 'The Wild Party' with having made him want to become a writer. The poem was considered too hot to publish until 1928, when a limited edition of 750 copies was released by Covici. The 26-year-old March improvised 'The Wild Party,' a few lines a day, over the summer of 1926, soon after quitting the New Yorker. It fires, killing Burrs, and the poem hurtles at bullet speed into the wall of its abrupt last lines. ('Some love is fire: some love is rust:/But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.') Burrs staggers in and a scuffle ensues.

Black falls for Queenie, and they end up in the back room. They patch it up by tossing a drunken party for their low-life pals, one of whom brings along Black, an innocent young uptown swell. Art Spiegelmans sinister and witty black-and-white drawings give charged new life to Joseph.

It has the mmnemonic tenacity, if not the wholesomeness, of a nursery rhyme, and to read it once is to get large shards of it permanently lodged in the brain: 'Queenie was a blonde and her age stood still,/And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.' Queenie and Burrs, her man of the moment, have a violent spat. Buy a cheap copy of The Wild Party book by Art Spiegelman. March's 'The Wild Party'-the first part of which follows-is a hardboiled Jazz Age tragedy told in syncopating rhyming couplets. ART AND VERSE with excerpts from Joseph Moncure March's poem 'The Wild Party' with illustrations by Art Spiegelman.

The wild party spiegelman