[R. Nemo Hill]

My goodness, there have been so many things said on this thread that I completely disagree with that I don't know where to begin. The one that stands out most is the notion that poetry should be totally comprehensible. Poetry that has no trace of incomprehensibility (no areas of darkness) doesn't interest me in the slightest. I would call poetry that is utterly comprehensible not light verse, but thin verse.

Then Jayne writes this: "OK, perhaps 'brilliant' is a bit strong - I use it in a casual sense to describe something I really enjoyed. I've been to brilliant restaurants, seen brilliant films, that kind of thing... it's just a word." It's just a word? I can't believe I read that on a poetry site. So does light verse mean that we take words lightly?

And then there is this distinction between verse and poetry. You're damn right there is a difference! Verse is a mechanical craft, and when it does not rise to the level of poetry, when it is not in the service of poetry, it seems to me no different than any other vapid way to mark the passing of time. Much of what I see published as so-called light verse suffers from exactly that problem. And that predominance of verse over poetry is at work even in a lot of poems not called light. Ignoring that fact is what gives, or can give, formalism a bad name. In a workshop context, honing the craft of verse is one thing: but when it comes time to actually write a poem one needs to cover one's tracks to a certain extent. Once you get in the vehicle you have to look beyond the mechanics if you want to travel anywhere.

Light verse has a light touch. I don't think I would go any further than that in definition. But poetry that hides from all mystery and conducts itself in an only mechanical fashion is, for me, just boring. I'll take the howl of romantic agony over that any day.



Nemo

[Chris Childers]

No it isn't. The Venn diagram of music and string quartet is one big circle labeled "Music" with a smaller circle ("string quartet") entirely inside it. The Venn diagram of poetry and verse is two overlapping circles, one labeled "poetry" and one labeled "verse." If it is assumed that a verse aspires to the condition of poetry but fails to attain it, it is perfectly reasonable to say that "this isn't poetry, it is only verse" or "this isn't poetry, although it is in verse." (But: the valorizing use of the word "poetry," along with the pejorative use of the word "verse," causes no end of squabbling and dithering over terms, and is very annoying. "Now THAT is poetry!" means only "Now THAT feels like a thing that's trying to be a poem AND I really like it!")

The desire to collapse the genre distinction between light verse and 'non-light verse' into simply "good" and "bad" poetry is unhelpful. TS Eliot tried to do the same thing with vers libre--there is no free and unfree verse, just good and bad. You might as well obliterate all distinctions of kind in the world and say, "There are only two types of things: things I like and things I don't!" I had a college friend who had a system in which he rated all sorts of random things either a 1 or a 2--2 if he liked it, 1 if he didn't. Just because the boundaries between genres are fuzzy and hard to draw doesn't mean that we should just get rid of them entirely.

The problem with "light verse" as a term of art is that it can be positive, negative, or value neutral. Some use it positively, because they value lightness of tone, of touch, the ability to treat serious subjects in a humorous or light-hearted way, etc.. Some use it negatively, because they think it can easily devolve into kitsch, it can be trivial, insignificant, unambitious, etc.. These two opposite colorations make "light verse" contentious as a genre term seeking to designate a certain type of verse, which can be "light" in a good or bad way, but that still participates in the genre; the use as a genre term is further complicated by the fact that it is difficult to define. My own guess in this direction is that the definition should involve tone more than content or effect or execution. A lightness of tone, whether the poem is funny or not, serious or not, good or not, should perhaps qualify a poem as light verse. Don Juan is a light epic--light not because you guffaw all the way through or the matter isn't serious, but because the tone is bantering and the versification witty. As tone can be unstable, so is generic classification based on tone. The fact that no unassailable definition exists does not invalidate "light verse" as a generic term or prove that it, too, does not exist.

Chris