Hello all. To whoever
suggested light verse for next week . . . thank you!
I’ve purposely steered away from this topic for some time
now because, well, I don’t really have a good reason. I have a few bad reasons: light verse is not
serious poetry; light verse is facile; anybody can write light verse, it’s done
for greeting cards and Instagram all the time.
None of these is a good reason because none is exactly true. I’ll take the fallacies in order.
Fallacy: light verse is not
serious poetry
This is the most serious of the bad reasons, so to
speak. It signals what some might think
of as poetic snobbery, or high-brow-ism.[1] Much light verse isn’t serious, whatever
“serious” is in poetry, this is true, and we can all point to verse that
doesn’t set out to accomplish much poetically, doesn’t challenge the reader,
doesn’t stretch the poet, doesn’t seek to offend, dwells in the trivial, doesn’t
“take itself too seriously” as poetry.[2] However, just in the way that play can be
serious (and work can be a form of play), light verse can be a serious
undertaking. But since we often think of
seriousness in poetry as an instance of gravitas,
let me quote W.H. Auden at length about what constitutes light verse:
Light verse can be serious. It has only come to mean vers de société, triolets, smoke-room limericks,
because . . . it has been only in trivial matters that poets have felt in
sufficient intimacy with their audience to be able to forget themselves and
their singing-robes.[3]
That is, Auden goes on to say,
“Lightness is a great virtue, but light
verse tends to be conventional, to accept the attitudes of the society in which
it is written. The more homogenous a
society, the closer the artist is to the everyday life of his time, the easier
it is for him to communicate what he perceives . . .”
There are several points of view on display in this
statement that you should think about.
The first is that light verse “tends to be conventional.” The second is that light verse is
conventional because it arises from the society in which it is written—it
assumes the same things about poetry, poetry’s purpose and value, even what a
poem is and what it can be about. It
values accessibility over “difficulty.”
Another point of view in Auden’s statement that is worth
noting is that light verse generally can be written only from within a society
that is more or less homogenized—that is, of the same or similar views of what
poetry is, can be about, etc. He argues
that most poetry before the Elizabethans and the Renaissance was/is “light” for
this very reason—art and the artist depended on being accessible to the society
that supported it.[4] He reminds that “light verse” became the
verse of the day again during the English Restoration,” and cites Pope’s The Rape of the Lock as a leading
example. No one, I don’t think, would
also describe Pope’s poem as “non-serious.”
Before the Renaissance, other examples of famous “light verse” might be
Edmund Spenser’s “The Shepheard’s Calendar” and The Fairie Queen, the latter of which one scholar once described in
a lecture I attended as an instruction book for young gentlemen on how to
behave at court. Both are “light” in
that they reflect the mores, assumptions, opinions, and expectations of the
times in which they were written. If
you’ve ever tried to read either one of these great poems, you’d have a hard
time describing them as “non-serious.”[5]
Fallacy: light verse is
facile; anybody can write light verse; it's Instagramish
Light verse is not facile.
Facile verse is facile. And not
just anybody can write light verse.
Writing light verse that is Auden’s kind requires certain expertise,
beginning with the sensitivity to, and recognizing the sensibility of, the
“song of your time,” with your ability to recognize and make something artful
out of the common words, expressions, worldview, beliefs of the culture and the
society in which you live. It is
accepting that milieu as your métier!
Auden’s kind of light verse also presupposes a vast knowledge of the
history of verse, light and otherwise.
But it’s written more or less consciously. For by doing so consciously, you commit to
the world in which you write and you commit to making the poem (or finding in
the poem, or letting the poem find in its own way) the particulars of that
social common understanding. You can
poke fun, as Pope did 400 years ago, and as Billy Collins does today; but your
commitment to the poem is still quite serious.
And that is where you should focus your writing for next
week’s project—a serious commitment to lightness. Be your own bell weather. If you sense the piece you’re working on is
slipping into the needlessly comic or nonsensical; if you find your internal
editor working a bit too hard to justify a word choice or image or metaphor
that’s really not up to the demands of the poem; if you wear the hat of a
“disinterested” (that is, in your evident skills and broad erudition) reader
and sense . . . er . . . bullshit; revise.
Your objective is to make a poem that “speaks to our time” without
flippancy, without being facile (easy, predictable rhymes, clichéd metaphors),
and conversely, without melodrama or other forms of false emotion and
gravitas.
You are a citizen of the 21st Century; you are of
a certain race or religion; you have been educated to a certain degree in a
particular pedagogy and learning philosophy; you define the world in a fairly
“reasonable” (that is, unsurprising or un-revolutionary) way. Your poem will in some ways be about you and
the world you live in (that made it possible to imagine in the first place).
Here are some examples. Have fun!
Boston
I come from the city of Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where Cabots speak only to Lowells,
And Lowells speak only to God.
—Samuel C. Bushnell
John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy’.
—Edmund Clerihew Bentley
John Milton
Never stayed at a Hilton
Hotel,
Which is just as well.
—W.H. Auden
Don’ts
Don’t earn golden opinions, opinions golden,
or at least worth Treasury notes,
from all sorts of men; don’t be beholden
to the herd inside the pen.
Don’t long to have dear little, dear little boys
whom you’ll have to educate
to earn their living; nor yet girls, sweet joys
who will find it so hard to mate.
Nor a dear little home, with its cost, its cost
that you have to pay,
earning your living while your life is lost
and dull death comes in a day.
Don’t be sucked in by the su-superior,
don’t swallow the culture bait,
don’t drink, don’t drink and get beerier and beerier,
do learn to discriminate.
Do hold yourself together, and fight
with a hit-hit here and a hit-hit there,
and a comfortable feeling at night
that you’ve let in a little air.
A little fresh air in the money sty,
knocked a little hole in the holy prison,
done your own little bit, made your own little try
that the risen Christ should be risen.
—D.H. Lawrence
This Be the Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and
coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
—Philip Larkin
The Roses
One day in summer
when everything
has already been more than enough
the wild beds start
exploding open along the berm
of the sea; day after day
you sit near them; day after day
the honey keeps on coming
in the red cups and the bees
like amber drops roll
in the petals: there is no end,
believe me! to the inventions of summer,
to the happiness your body
is willing to hear.
—Mary Oliver
My Valparaiso
Or, The Fish
—for Carlos, Camila, Claudia &
Ryan at the Neruda house, Valparaiso, Chile
This Pacific could not be bluer
if we waved a wand, or
this snail’s shell more green
or more certain of its greenness.
This stair could not labor so sensibly
up the hill of the poet’s dream
or these windows carry us
farther to paradise.
A minute here passes
like the cargo ships on the bay,
eternally, at ease, like the cat
licking itself in strong sunlight
on the funky garden bench.
I am caught by it, a fish in time,
surprised by the hook, the sharp,
startling wound of happiness.
—Me
[1] Am
I a poetry high-brow? Who knows? I prefer high-brow film, high-brow novels,
high-brow art. In jazz music, I prefer
composition over improvisation and improvisation over jamming and jamming over
just goofing around with notes and rhythms—instrumentalists should play from a
script (score), so that, if they depart from it, they have something to return
to. This leads to the question, What is
high-brow, anyway?
[2]
This last example, verse that apologizes for itself, is the worst kind of light
verse. Worst because it shows a lack of
confidence or commitment or need on the part of the writer; it still wants to
be read.
[3] W.H. Auden’s Book of Light Verse. Chosen by W.H. Auden originally as The Oxford Book of Light Verse, 1938;
revised with preface by Edward Mendelson.
New York: New York Review Books, 2004.
[4]
Cf., the Broadway musical.
[5]
Laughable bucket list item: reading the entire Fairie Queen; I was subjected only to its 550 page version in
college.
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