Saturday, December 20: Mississippi Mud
LIGHTEN UP A LITTLE
by John M. Floyd
Some of what follows is a shortened version of an essay I wrote several years ago for a zine called Laughter Loaf. Deborah’s and Jeff’s comments last week about Ogden Nash (one of my favorite writers) gave me the idea to dust it off and include it here.
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Light verse. The term itself sounds good, doesn’t it? Easygoing, lively, happy-go-lucky. And its simple rhythm (usually rhyming) makes it easy to read, and pleasing to the eye and the ear. What I like most about it, though, is its humor. Light verse makes me smile.
What Is It, Exactly?
The Encyclopaedia Britannica says light verse is “poetry on trivial or playful themes that is written primarily to amuse and entertain and that often involves the use of nonsense and wordplay.” I love that. Anything that amuses and entertains can’t be bad, nonsense or not.
But I think the most honest way to define light verse is to define what it isn’t. What’s the opposite of light verse? Heavy verse? Dark verse? If so, working backward, light verse is not heavy, and it’s not dark. It’s carefree and cheerful and lighthearted. Does that mean it’s also lightweight?
Many poets think so. They feel it’s the annoying little stepchild of the poetic family.
A True-Life Example
Not long ago I went to our local Books-A-Million to buy my yearly copy of Poet’s Market. While I was waiting in the checkout line behind some woman with an armload of children’s books, the lady in line behind me noticed the book in my hand. She was short and prunefaced and had fire-exit red hair. “You’re a poet?” she said. “So am I!”
In hindsight, I should probably have informed her that I’m not really a poet, and I noet. Most of my output is short mystery stories, and although I like to write rhyming verse, I think of poets as intelligent but rather strange folks who think in five-syllable words about the meaning of life or the droplets on a dewy rose. But did I say this, to that lady? Did I deny my membership in this universal group?
No, I just smiled and nodded, and checked — from the corner of my eye — the progress of the woman in front of me, with the Dr. Seuss books. She had now reached the counter, and was fishing around in a purse the size of a laundry hamper.
Meanwhile my new acquaintance, no doubt encouraged by my stupid grin, asked me, “What kind of poetry do you write?”
I cleared my throat. “Actually,” I said, “I mostly write light verse.”
The change in the lady’s face was fascinating. Her brow creased into a thousand new wrinkles, her cheeks flushed as red as her hair, and her mouth dropped open in a little O of disbelief. She looked as if she might have just found a toad squatting in the middle of her breakfast plate. Mercifully, the woman ahead of me picked that moment to discover her Discover card, and the salesclerk completed the transaction and turned to me with a may-I-help-you smile.
I produced my own payment in record time and beat a trail out of the store. The short lady might, for all I know, still be standing there with her mouth open in horror. I wish now that I’d handled things differently. I wish I’d asked her what kind of poetry she wrote (although I have a pretty good idea). I also wish I’d asked her how many poems she’d published recently. I have a pretty good idea of that, too.
Selling Short
In fact, marketability is one argument in favor of light verse. If your humorous poetry is good enough, there are quite a few places it can be published, including some of the better-paying magazines. My poems have even appeared in mystery markets like EQMM (but that’s a topic of its own, and maybe a future column). The thing to remember is, readers see light verse as a refreshing little break, like a good joke told during a sermon, and its brevity makes it easy for editors to fit it in.
Light verse doesn’t even have to rhyme, although it usually does. I think the rhyming is part of its charm. We’ve grown up with rhymes, mostly in songs, and we’re comfortable around them. How many times have you repeated to a friend a little rhyming ditty that you’ve read or heard? (One that comes to mind is Ogden Nash’s “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”) Now consider this: How many times have you repeated to a friend a segment of a serious, contemporary, free-verse poem? If you have, I salute you.
A View From the Cheap Seats
Actually, I don’t much like free verse. I sometimes enjoy the beauty of the language itself, or its message, but I just don’t appreciate the form as much as I should. I probably would if I were smarter. Maybe it’s like classical music — I don’t give it a fair chance. (My wife loves Mozart, Bach, and company, but I’m more of a Johnny Cash/Willie Nelson/ Simon & Garfunkel kind of guy.) And I can’t help recalling what Robert Frost once said about free verse: “Writing poetry with no rhyme or meter is like playing tennis with the net down.” But hey, what do I know? I once dozed off in the movie theatre during Hamlet, but went to see Blazing Saddles five times.
For the record, light verse (when done well) does require talent. Writers like Lewis Carroll, E. B. White, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, and Ralph Waldo Emerson created some memorable pieces, and others — Dorothy Parker, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash — were particularly suited to the form.
What Makes Nash’s Poetry So Good?
There are a few essentials, I think, when writing light verse: At the very least, the rhymes should be unforced, the rhythm smooth, the vocabulary simple and natural. And the ending should be clever, or at least satisfying. Consider Nash’s “The Panther”:
The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn’t been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say Ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don’t anther.
As I said, it makes you smile.
A Boy and His Doggerel
The bottom line is, this kind of writing is fun. Between stories or novels, give light verse a try. Contrary to what many editors and critics (and stuffy ladies in bookstore checkout lines) believe, poetry doesn’t have to be complex in order to be good, or popular. And it doesn’t always have to examine the depths of the human condition. Sometimes readers just want to be entertained.
One of my little ditties goes like this:
Elevators are places
Where mutes with stone faces
Stare blankly ahead at the doors;
Just once, I would like
To ride in on my bike
And stand up on the seat between floors.
The message there isn’t anything deep or profound. It’s simple. It’s also the title of this particular poem:
“Lighten Up a Little.”
Loved the elevators – how true it is – and can still picture you squirming in the checkout line.
Most of my knowledge of poetry was picked up by reading verses on latrine walls, so I wonder if limericks qualify as light verse or are they in a class of their own? Isaac Asimov once wrote a really raunchy limerick on a cocktail napkin for and about my wife, the sort of thing that would have been cause for fisticuffs had it not been written by Asimov.
I (of course) love Nash! And your title “A Boy and His Doggerel” should be the title of a collection. Interestingly enough, Nash never considered a poem finished and revised many of them, adding to the “Candy” poem the closing lines “Pot is not.” sometime around the sixties…
Dick, I think limericks are indeed light verse, and I love them as well. Wish I could read (or hear) the one Asimov wrote. Mine are more along the lines of “There once was a hermit named Dave . . .”
Jeff, I didn’t know that about Nash’s “Candy” poem — but I can certainly believe it. I think he would have been a delightful person to meet and talk with.
John, here is proof that even Asimov had his bad days. The punctuation is his:
There was a young woman named Jackie
who seems just so roundy and stacky
she inspires me to think
to bring her to the brink
and bed her in private, by cracky.
This gem written on a stained cocktail napkin was dated 5 Mar 80.
If nothing else, it show there is hope for all of us.
Dick — That’s wonderful! And it’s fun to know that the great Asimov had that side to his personality.
Continue to save that napkin.
Many years ago the poetry columnist in Writers Digest asked readers to send in their favorite examples of humorous poetry. He was trying to make the point that comic poetry depended on clever rhymes and precise rhythms. But he admitted one exception that was sent in. This is a complete poem by Leonard Cohen:
“Marita
please find me
I am almost 30.”
Does anybody remember the Ogden Nash stamp from a few years back? Behind his picture it had at least eight complete poems of his…
Here you are:
I swear, Jeff, your memory’s sure better’n mine. Thanks for the info about the stamp, and thanks to JLW for the photo.
John, I’m going out on a limb here, but wasn’t there an IBM training manual, perhaps a CMS tutorial, that used Nash poems?
Leigh, I think you’ve been taking the same memory course that Jeff has–I’d completely forgotten about that. There was indeed an IBM reference manual some years ago that excerpted several poems from one of Nash’s collections.
I don’t, however, remember the manual (I think it was a macro reference guide) or the name of Nash’s book.
For the record, I once bought some memory pills but then I forgot where I put them.
James, thanks for the stamp pic! John, thanks for the compliments ! As to both, I bought a book of the Nash stamps, intending to save one and used them all! (“I forgot!!)