Once Recited, Now Benighted
Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate, is one of the more celebrated poets of our day and one of the wittiest. But Mella doesn’t see him as a writer of light verse. To Mella, light verse is poetry you both want to memorize and can. It probably rhymes. In his view, there was a “silver age” of light verse that began around the turn of the last century, and English poets such as Chesterton and Belloc and Americans such as Nash and Dorothy Parker figured prominently in it. In 1961 a light poet, Phyllis McGinley, actually won a Pulitzer Prize for the collection Times Three.
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Light verse is still around if you know where to look. Charles Osgood does it on CBS, Calvin Trillin in the Nation. Light regularly publishes X.J. Kennedy, a well-known poet who likes to be a wise guy, and John Updike, William Stafford, John Frederick Nims, and W.D. Snodgrass have shown up in its pages. On its Web site Light claims that it “discards what is obscure and dreary, and restores lightness, understandability, and pleasure to the reading of poems. It seeks, in short, to resurrect the literary milieu (if not the time) of”–and goes on to list Nash, Parker, James Thurber, E.B. White, Peter De Vries, and others.
Says Collins of Mella’s journal, “It keeps light verse alive, but it also creates a kind of mausoleum for it.”
Solemnity has a lot to answer for.
“People blame T.S. Eliot,” says Mella. “What I like in Eliot is not what he liked in himself–some portentous expression of modern angst. It was his poems of atmosphere. The yellow fog. It’s marvelous stuff. His cat poems are wonderful.”
Poetry finally began shaking off that muck, but a renaissance of light verse isn’t what did it. “Poetry slams simulate Light Verse in their utter rejection of academic obscurantism,” Mella allows via e-mail. “The difference comes in the way each worships the Goddess Claritas. Light Verse does it through polished lenses, and through a kind of delicate approach that would be destroyed by the smoke, cymbals, war dances, of slams.”
