The Subversive Scribbler
Spring, 2019
Remembering Shel Silverstein, Playboy’s beloved “Proto-Punk” Poet and cartoonistIt was a poem about a girl who wanted a pony that first landed Shel Silverstein in trouble. Published in his 1981 collection of illustrated children’s poetry, A Light in the Attic, “Little Abigail and the Beautiful Pony” angered parents for its supposed glorification of suicide: Horse-obsessed Abigail stops eating and sleeping and eventually dies, “All because of a pony / That her parents wouldn’t buy.” Or maybe it w...
