That’s not great, but not bad for a literary magazine with absolutely no funding but my retirement check from the post office.” As Mella told the Chicago Reader in 2004, “My subscribers are very faithful. The journal also boasted a small but devoted following. Among those who contributed to Light during Mella’s tenure were Richard Wilbur, John Updike, Dana Gioia, Tom Disch, Dick Davis, Wendy Cope, and Timothy Steele. A Roman Catholic seminary dropout, he published Transformations (1975), an alternate-history sci-fi novel about a crossdressing actor that one reviewer described as “proto-steampunk” and another praised for its erudition and “dazzling prose.” His favorite book was Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, about which he once wrote, “Although not chiefly somber, the brightly amusing parodic exaggerations are nibbled at by incursions of inky sorrows,” which sounds a lot like light verse. When he started the journal in 1992, one of Mella’s goals was to salvage verse from what he called the “cheerless, obscure, and finally forgettable muck” of poetry written by and for academics. Dialect poems, which were also popular in the first half of the 20th century, went almost immediately from funny to the elite to offensive to everyone.” (Which brings to mind the recent brouhaha over Anders Carlson-Wee’s dialect poem, which is certainly not light verse, in The Nation.) Light verse must judge itself and be judged as poetry, not as some second-rate imitation.įor more than a quarter-century, light verse has found a sympathetic home in Light, the biannual journal founded by a retired Chicago postal worker named John Mella. Just wordplay and/or inside jokes on the issues of the day doesn’t last. When starting out as a poet in the 1980s, Juster decided to “no longer be solemn all the time,” while also resolving not to descend into nonsense or “cheap political jokes.” According to him, “Light verse has to deal with the timeless issues the way that Martial, Horace, Swift, Byron, Dorothy Parker at her best, and Wendy Cope do, to have any longevity at all. Juster, a poet and translator of poetry from Latin, takes the comic seriously. Haven’t been herded, shipped to death camps, gassed.Ĭan verse address the Holocaust and similar weighty matters and still retain its light credentials? Tom Disch, who titled one of his volumes Dark Verses and Light (1991), thought so, as do other light versifiers. Nest in my hungry mouth like home sweet home. But meat a rabbi’s blade makes pure,Ĭhopped chicken liver, challah, macaroons Uncircumcised as I’m, born far from folks In “Jews,” Kennedy, an Irish-American and a lapsed Roman Catholic, writes: I hope that’s all right with you.” Kennedy’s cocky taunt says it all. For the sake of clarity, I call funny things that rhyme and scan ‘comic verse.’ Maybe some are heavy enough to call poems. In his introduction to Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008, Kennedy takes a stab at defining the genre: “ suggests negligible froth, like the pitiful head you get on light beer. Kennedy, for example, the éminence grise of American light verse. Connoisseurs and detractors alike defer to US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s threshold test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” As to the charge of frivolity, the poet Bruce Bennett notes that the best writers of light verse “not only verge on seriousness at times they embrace it.” Definitions of light verse are notoriously slippery. It’s kids’ stuff, doggerel, greeting-card fodder, unhappy echoes of Richard Armour, whose whimsical riffs appeared in Sunday newspaper supplements starting in the Great Depression. Still, some readers and critics maintain that light verse isn’t real poetry. Kingsley Amis, himself an enthusiast and practitioner of the form, described the highest aspirations of light verse as “genial, memorable, enlivening and funny.” Millions of non-poetry readers can still quote him: “Candy / Is dandy, / But liquor / Is quicker.” Phyllis McGinley, one of the best-known light verse writers of her day, published in Ladies Home Journal (and The New Yorker), and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. The New Yorker featured it for decades, making Ogden Nash a household name.
But only in the last half-century or so has light verse become less than respectable among readers, poets, and critics, and less ubiquitous in popular culture. Some of us never outgrow our childhood pleasures, guilty or otherwise. No kid asks for Charles Olson at bedtime. As readers and writers, children favor rhymes, sing-song rhythms, and silliness. IT’S AMUSING TO THINK of light verse as the gateway drug to poetry, something to sample before moving on to the hard stuff.
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