[Mary McLean]

Well, I've already sounded off about this but I'll expand a bit. I think the main feature of light verse is not humour but comprehensibility to a general audience. I've cribbed this view from Stephen Fry, who says:

Light verse does not need to be comic in intent or witty in nature: it encourages readers to believe that they and the poet share the same discourse, intelligence and standing, inhabit the same universe of feeling and cultural reference, it does not howl in misunderstood loneliness, wallow in romantic agony or bombard the reader with learning and allusion from a Parnassian or abstrusely academic height.

I think we should be proud to be light poets. Especially Wendy Cope, who has my vote for High Priestess of the Order. I would write more but I'm busy designing our robes and sacrificial rites.

[John Whitworth]

Ah Mary, I think all poetry should be comprehensible. I always am. Except when I'm not, if you see what I mean. If you're going to be incomprehensible you should know that that's what you're aiming at. Like this by Edwin Morgan:

The Loch Ness Monster's Song

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl -
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok - doplodovok - plovodokot - doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl -
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp

[Mary McLean]

John, I think that excellent example is just as comprehensible to the average teenager as it is to a university lecturer in literature. And I agree with you that all good poetry should be comprehensible to the public, but it seems to me that many of the mainstream poetry journals don't share our view.

[S. A. Wyatt]

I'm a little hesitant to add my two cents here, since I'm new to the forums, but this thread touches on the type of poetical technique I have been thinking about a lot lately.

Depending on how you define it, there is no such thing as light verse - only good and bad verse. The problem with a label such as "light verse" is that people tend to assume that it means poetry lacking in intellectual weight or the proper poetic seriousness.

In practice, good light verse can present itself as a lively and intensely feeling intellect (Pope, Swift, Byron, etc.), and I would agree that there can be a mocking element to it, much like the mocking tone in many of Mozart's pieces. Sometimes poets take themselves too seriously, and they need "light verse" to bring them back down to reality, or up from the depths, depending on where they have been spending their time (yes, I'm looking at you Dante!). I’d rather think of light verse as “lively verse” myself.

One of the problems with formal poetry today is that it is in danger of being taken as light verse by everyone. It all tends to appeal to the intellect more than the passionate soul; to the conscious more than the unconscious mind. The challenge is writing formal poetry that appeals to both aspects of our minds.

By the way, this is not meant as any sort of slight on Modernism or free verse. I think poets are able to achieve different poetic affects by using different forms, and probably all poets should try their hand at crafting poems using different techniques. The truth is, though, that with the rise of the novel (and free verse, then Modernism), there has been a tendency toward seeing any rhyming, metrical poetry as a variation on a nursery rhyme.

[Jayne Osborn]

Sean makes a good argument for merely separating poetry into 'good' or 'bad'.
In any case, 'light' is incredibly hard to define.

Good or Bad works for me! That's easy to define.

Jayne

[Cally Conan-Davies]

There's light in the dark,
and dark in the light,
and cloud in the day,
and mirth in the deep,
weep till you laugh
and laugh till you weep.

All I ask of a verse
is don't put me to sleep!

[Terese Coe]

I agree that the term "light verse" cannot encompass everything witty and/or amusing. I don't want to give names bc I don't have their permission to quote them, but one prominent poet told me when I sent him about six or seven samples of what I've written (poems that have gotten laughs at readings), "That's not light verse."

Quincy has also told me, "What you do isn't light verse." I imagine they mean it has a dark or satiric quality. The upshot is I don't know what to call it--if anything.

[Richard Wakefield]

For me, one necessary feature of light verse is that it really move me forward. The meter should carry me along, then bump me up against a witty conclusion. Of course this doesn't infallibly divide poetry into light versus non-light, since plenty of the second variety does this as well. It's a matter of degrees (like the difference between heaven and hell).
Lately I've been revisiting Frost's "Goodbye and Keep Cold," a poem that starts out light and takes a dark turn:

This saying goodbye on the edge of the dark
to an orchard still so young in the bark...

The anapests, the end rhymed couplets, the enjambment, the straightforward diction -- those are signs of light verse. When he ends a poem on a much more somber note, he slips in a concluding iamb

But something has to be left to God

as if the weighty conclusion demands the resounding double thump.