I have to admit I was taken aback by his phrase "whatever remains of light verse."

Ahem.

But J.D., that's a completely reasonable view from people whose main exposure to contemporary page poetry is in between prose pieces in The New Yorker.

Why wouldn't their poetic perspective be the literary equivalent of this?

https://brilliantmaps.com/wp-content...om-9th-ave.jpg

I believe that is distressingly accurate.

Quite something for the magazine that once employed Dorothy Parker.

I've said for many years that The New Yorker is the perfect venue for intelligent light verse that's equal, say, to the cartoons and Shouts & Murmurs. But the magazine abandoned lv long ago, about the same time that Updike stopped writing it. I had a cheap paperback of his lv in college and loved to read some of the poems to friends.

I think I speak for most of us when I say that the poetry currently in TNYer is about the last place I'd look for a laugh.

Ditto Sam.

Updike (introducing his Collected?) writes of his inspiration for lv obediently drying up when there stopped being a market for it.

I imagine that phrase struck many of us here.

Updike (introducing his Collected?) writes of his inspiration for lv obediently drying up when there stopped being a market for it.

And there was a market for it, not only in The New Yorker but also in what were called the "ladies magazines."

It was a victim of the cultural shifts of the 60s, I guess, but there's no single critic, poet, or other person to single out for its decline. It lingered on awhile longer in Britain.

Thank you for posting this. The Sleerickets podcast is on the case.

deleted, November 2

Excellent article though I could take issue on certain points about the correlations between artistic forms/styles (like rhymes) with things that have nothing to do with, especially in terms of politics and such. I've always thought this view was a poisonous one: guilt by association shouldn't exist in art any more than it should in life. Rhyme was (is?) popular because humans are, at the root of it all, pattern finding machines and arts are all about making patterns of our experiences. Sometimes those patterns are just for pleasure, that rush we get from fulfilled expectations and recognized patterns; but that pleasure also makes everything attached to it, including language and its semantic content, seem more important by that attachment. It's the old "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed" idea.

Rhyme is "so well expressed" because it ties ideas to those unconscious pattern-finding brains. The history of art is largely one in which the various patterns we adopt in art and become conventional are replaced by others, or else increase or lessen in importance with others. By Shakespeare English not only had the pattern of rhyme, but also the well-studied (and well-taught) patterns of rhetoric; both of which Shakespeare employed like a master craftsman with complete control of every tool, not to mention (given the cosmic breadth of his vocabulary) having access to all the tools available.

With the rejection of rhyme I get the sense that poets never did find a replacement that serve its same function for the average readers of poetry (ie, everyone who wasn't a poet, academic, or passionate fan of poetry). Though I think plenty of great poetry has been written in free verse, so much of it is missing the spark in rhyme that made poetry fun even when it was serious, and would make it funnier when it was not. Maybe there's an argument about English being limited in what's possible with perfect rhymes, but I think the issue (like Wilbur said) is over-exaggerated. Even if one is to admit that the limitation will make it so "chance" is always rhymed with "dance" that hardly means that a million completely different poems can't arise from that pairing. We may respond strongly to rhyme, but the rest of the poem is going to dictate, to a very large extent, how we react to the words that are rhymed. If we were only reading poems by the rhymes and ignoring all other words there might be a better argument, but nobody reads like that.