Originally printed in Parnassus, 14/2, 1988. Reprinted in the Light Quarterly forums by permission of the author www.LightQuarterly.org/forum

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The Oxford Book of Light Verse. Chosen by W. H. Auden. Oxford University Press 1938. 553 pp. $8.95 (paper)

The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse. Chosen by Kingsley Amis. Oxford University Press 1978. 347 pp. $13.95 $9.95 (paper)

The Oxford Book of American Light Verse. Chosen by William Harmon. Oxford University Press 1979. 540 pp. $27 .95

The Norton Book of Light Verse. Edited by Russell Baker. W. W. Norton & Company 1986. 447 pp. $17.95

Light Year '87. Edited by Robert Wallace. Bits Press 1986. 267 pp. $13.95

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But what is "light verse?" —that our two great anthology factories, Oxford and Norton, should busy themselves collecting and mass-producing it? I had always thought the term a kind of put-down, derived from the popular notion that comedy is shallow and inconsequential—Russell Baker in the introduction to his collection mentions this prejudice and says that we get it from our gloomy Anglo-Saxon and Puritan ancestors; and remarking that light verse is "easily enjoyed" and "needs no introduction," he refuses to attempt any definition of it, citing the near-total disagreement on the subject between W. H. Auden and Kingsley Amis in the introductions to their two Oxford collections. As for his own book, it's going to be "an amusement park"—from which his daughter has convinced him to banish Chaucer, because the readers will be "looking for fun," and "Casey at the Bat," because it has become a bore. Yet he can't help saying that light verse "has a fondness for dark messages" and adding at the end that it has "some heavy preoccupations" like infanticide. So he too defines. The habit seems to go with being human. Definitions come almost as naturally and irresistibly to us as light verse itself.

But there is so little agreement among these anthologists about the term, and such a lack of shared taste implied by the poems they have selected, that one begins to doubt that "light verse" has any meaning. For W. H. Auden "light" means "easy" and signifies the kind of verse written mainly before Milton and Shakespeare, when poets and their society shared common beliefs and-in consequence, he says—their poems were easy to understand. For Kingsley Amis light verse begins with the King's return from exile in France in the seventeenth century (just about when Auden says it was petering out) as a reaction to the imported French taste for literary grandeur, and for him "light" is the opposite of "heavy" or "high." And finally, for William Harmon in the introduction to his Oxford collection, "light" seems to be the opposite of "dark," as in the "Little Willie” poems he dislikes and excludes:

Willy poisoned father's tea.
Father died in agony.
Mother was extremely vexed.
"Really, Will," she said, "what next?"

     But Harmon points the way to possible peace and harmony among these divergent views when he—he alone—refers to "The spirit of comedy, which pervades all of the many species of light verse." Unfortunately this "spirit" promptly turns into a bit of a snob with an official social role and a "policing function . . . to get rid of the embarrassing disorder of clowns, hicks, braggarts, and fools." Get rid of clowns? Comedy? And it wants to be rid, too, of poems like the "Little Willie" I have just quoted from memory.

     A look at it may help us. From the deadpan of the first two lines with their absurd "tea-agony" rhyme to the momentous understatement of the third and the explosive double meaning of the last, it has to be some kind of classic. "These 'Little Willie' pieces," Harmon says, "probably serve as a corrective balance to certain excessively sentimental Kindertotenlieder” Of course, it's hard to imagine a poet-even a light poet-saying, "Now I shall provide a corrective balance," so it might be a little more accurate to say that the modern sentimentality about children provided rich material for the saucy wit of the light versifier. What's in it for the reader, then? As the Freudians never tire of reminding us, we would all like to kill our children (and our fathers and mothers) at one time or another, and few thoughts are more terrifying. Sentimentality is one defense against the threat, and in recent generations we have gone for it in a big way. The arts of comedy and tragedy (and as many have observed, tragedy may not be available in our democratic paradise) are a way of dealing with the situation that may be less harmful in its consequences. "Art is a recognition, sentimentality a denial, of what you are," I'm sure some wise old philosopher has said somewhere, "so sooner or later your sentimentality is going to break down, and when it does, the results are likely to be a lot more unpleasant than the discomforts you were avoiding." He might even point to our present outbreaks of child abuse as examples of what he meant and add, "That is why sentimentalists are the enemies of their city and the true artist its friend."

     But Harmon should be commended for including "Casey at the Bat," bore though it may be to some, and for making some interesting remarks about it, which will allow me to dilate a little more on the curative effect comedy is supposed to have.  It's a wonderful poem—full of detail, humor, and drama —but I can't agree that Casey is a "disruptive braggart" and that the reader at the end is placed "in the position . . . of a cultivated citizen of a larger community given stability and justice by [Casey's] harmless punishment." That's too quick and easy, and it passes over the underlying reality of baseball, to which the poem is meticulously faithful. We are meant to be aware that the odds in the game always favor the pitcher over the batter and that even the greatest hitters (like Babe Ruth) strike out frequently.  Casey's "braggart" qualities are only the usual byplay of bluff and challenge between the batter and the pitcher. The pitcher in the poem has just jeopardized his two-run lead by putting two inferior men on base, and now he must face the dangerous Casey.  Casey swaggers a bit to emphasize the situation and gambles that the pitcher, flustered, will be afraid to throw him anything "good." So he lets the first two pitches go by, guessing that they will be balls and the pitcher will then be in trouble. But the pitcher outsmarts him, throws him two strikes, and now Casey is in trouble.  He has to swing, and when the pitcher throws him a ball, a bad pitch, Casey swings and misses. 

     But if Casey isn't the butt of the humor, who is? There is only one obviously comic name in the poem—Mudville. The Mudville crowd, the spectators in their excitement, forget the reality of the game and produce their own absurdly artificial misery. As Harmon observes, the point of view shifts in the poem's final lines:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

But those other happy places-are they full of "cultivated" citizens who know better in their enlightened New Yorks, Washingtons, and Bostons, where everyone sees through such hype and hysteria—or are they merely other, maybe grander Mudvilles? The poem is about America, Land of the Big Lie. We are all in Mudville—caked with it.

     Let us start with the notion that art engenders responses which fall into two broad categories: we, the audience, may be moved to identify ourselves with the experience portrayed, or we may be invited to "distance" ourselves from it—with, of course, all kinds of shadings, gradations, and ironic sleights of hand in between. But no matter how obscured, the categories are always there, fundamental in our experience, as when we respond to a friend's tale (usually of woe) with either tragic sympathy or a more or less openly scornful amusement. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that these dramatic categories get carried over into short poems? The ages of sharpest distinction between comedy and tragedy on the stage (say 1660-1900) were also the ages in which, according to Amis, light verse in the modern sense sprang into existence and flourished. And now that the distinction between comedy and tragedy has virtually vanished from the stage, "contemporary poets," as Russell Baker puts it, "do not write verse that asks to be classified as 'serious' or 'light’”. This way of looking at light verse would also give a reason for Amis's insistence that versification be stricter and more impeccable in light than in "serious" poetry: for traditional versification adds a sense of craftsmanship and artificiality; that is, it facilitates the distancing essential to comedy. It also explains why Amis's rule is too uncompromising: for the distancing can be accomplished in other ways.

     The idea of comedy suggests yet another meaning of the "light" in "light verse." To take one's verse, one's utterance "lightly" means to claim or pretend that it has no consequences, no meaning even. It is the jester's pretense, when he says something dangerous before the King. Such lightness in writing is almost always ironic. Moliere's most serious comedies (Le Tartuffe, L'Avare) tend to have "false" endings—as they are usually called—which have puzzled critics, if not ordinary theatergoers.

But I think the word "light" in this sense describes them perfectly. In Tartuffe. for example. Orgon's blind fanaticism has enabled the religious impostor, Tartuffe, to dispossess his entire family. The action has veered. not to the tragic as some would have it, but to the cruelly shocking: and we are threatened, not just with a change of genre, but with artistic disaster. Then at the last possible minute a messenger from the King sets all to rights: Good King Louis (Moliere uses the occasion to inject some rather fulsome praise of his royal patron) knows all about Tartuffe, will have him arrested, and will make him give Orgon's house back. The scene is completely unrealistic (the King had no power to nullify contracts), and there is even a theatrical tradition, going back to Moliere’s time that the scene is to be played farcically. It’s as though the poet were stepping into the action and saying. "Ha, ha! We knew it was just a play all along. didn't we? It is, after all, only a comedy, and we may take it lightly." The device achieves the impossible. The shocking outcome has been avoided, but it is also still there because it has been removed so ironically.

     It is this extreme complexity of attitude that makes any persuasive theory of comedy exceedingly difficult. Irony and ironies within ironies are always present and paradoxes are everywhere. At the same time, with each decade comedy seems to pervade our literary heritage more thoroughly. T. S. E1iot finds it in The Jew of Malta, and a generation later, one begins to see the tragedies of Shakespeare—all of them—as formed in a "comic matrix.” But Robert Frost gave the extreme development of this view in 1935, when he wrote of poetry (in his introduction to E. A. Robinson's King Jasper): "If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other under it will do."

     That is, if a poem is going to "do" very much, it will have to combine the tragic and the comic. But Frost's statement is better: good tragedy is always comic, good comedy always tragic. It is like the saying that in every portrayal of the Christ Child one must sense the crucifixion and in every crucifixion, the resurrection. Let us look at some examples to see how this principle works out in light verse—and start with "Misgivings / (1860)," a clearly "tragic" poem by Herman Melville:

When ocean-clouds over inland hills
    Sweep storming in late autumn brown,
And horror the sodden valley fills.
    And the spire falls crashing in the town,
   I muse upon my country's ills—
   The tempest bursting from the waste of Time
On the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime.

   Nature's dark side is heeded now—
      (Ah! Optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—
   A child may read the moody brow
      Of yon black mountain lone.
   With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,
   And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

We needn't decide whether those magnificent last two lines make up for the clumsy four lines that precede them and the faintly bombastic first stanza, in order to recognize that the poem is agonizingly, probingly American. We have subdued an alien continent, creating—potentially, at least—a heaven on earth ("the world's fairest hope"). But the effort has been all mixed up with "man's foulest crime"—slavery based on race. That—that cause of the Civil War, "the storm we feel"—is only an outward emblem of a deeper, more fundamental oppression that we have practiced: our enslavement of nature itself. Someday the very wood in our buildings and in our navies may rebel.

     How could such notions and relationships, such a vaguely felt and monstrous foreboding, ever appear in light verse? Ogden Nash, of all people, shows us in "The Termite," from Baker's collection:

Some primal termite knocked on wood
And lasted it, and found it good,
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.

Note the mock-heroic tone of the opening and the biblical echoes in the second line. The primal termite responds to wood exactly as God responds to His newly created universe in Genesis That is, the termite is part of the large design of things which your—my, everybody's—Cousin May violates merely by sitting in her parlor. Her parlor, please note, not her kitchen. The pretentious room, the vain and useless room, the room at farthest remove from the termite and the divinely ordained natural order that he represents. The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the termite chews in the joist.

 When I was a little boy attending my parents' dinner parties, I was on the termite's side.

     Have I overburdened this airy nothing, this masterful bit of nonsense, unduly? Of course I have. All that I have asserted to be there, the echo of Melville's portentous foreboding about man and nature, is clearly not there. The poem is simply too "light" and graceful. But just as clearly, the foreboding is not not there, either. That's the way comedy works: the very wild grace that it attains is conditional upon its pretending to be—and being—nothing at all. It is like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I would nominate to be the original and pristine example of light verse—the prose parts especially—in English. Amis tells us that light verse is never beautiful, because it exists only when "there is something [beautiful]' there to be light in comparison and contrast with." That's like the statement I heard on my radio once, that Mozart is never comic because he is always so lyrical, so beautiful. Mozart is all comic—heartbreakingly so.

Nash's "The Duck" treats a closely related theme:

Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.

The poem opens with a familiar device of comic versification: saying the same thing twice with different rhymes. Moliere was fond of it, and here is Housman at it:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

My students never know how old the speaker is, though they've been told twice. The sheer verbal fun in Nash's first four lines is very intense, perhaps because all that is said is that a duck is not a chicken. What serious point could there possibly be in that? How about estrangement? We city people now —this is how we see animals and (by implication) all the other things in nature. A duck is not a chicken.

     In the concluding four lines, the comic dilemma becomes abundantly clear: we finally do see the duck, very graphically, but in the only way available to such an observer: by relating it to a cocktail party.  Ducktails and cocktails.  To see the duck is to see us. (Oh, I know, the world, especially the educated world, is full to death these days of amateur naturalists. I even have one for a lady friend, but I'm sorry, it is all a monstrous pretense. We will never escape bur urbanity.) We have grown so estranged from the duck that just to see it clearly, in the metaphorical way that we have to see things, is ridiculous. Surely there is an element of tragic terror in this, and it is present in the poem's hilarity.

Again there is a precise reflection in the world of serious verse: W. C. Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow."

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the while
chickens.

As I have remarked elsewhere, this is a poem about how we see things: practically or aesthetically; and—more to the point here—it shares Nash's theme of alienation from what is natural and human. But Williams's poem has a weakness in that he simply stands aside from the situation like a professor and tells us a little wistfully ("so much depends / upon" —cocktail-party language again!) what the problem is. In Nash's poem you are actually in the situation because he is himself. He has taken the poet's step and gotten wet in his own poem. There is no comment, and it's all vastly more vivid in its dramatization than in Williams. "But in Nash you miss the point"—which is true of all really fine poetry. But when you accept the poem easily and unself-consciously, the way poems should be accepted, you get the point immediately at the level on which poems work. Discussions like the present one can really add very little to a poem that one has actually experienced; and if one hasn't or can't experience the poem, then there is no point in such discussions at all.

     But of course, if the discussion of the poem is the main, perhaps the only, consideration, as some recent critics have implied, and even in some cases openly maintained, the experience of the poet and the poem can only be a hindrance. The case of Emily Dickinson is instructive. Except for the wonderful ''I'm Nobody! Who are you?" in Baker, the poems chosen from two of these collections give a poor conception of her power as a comic poet. Some of her most moving jokes are about death: to take a famous example, death as the proper gentleman who calls to take the lady "for a ride."

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

But she can joke, too, about what appear to have been her ecstasies. When we remember that in #76

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses—past the headlands—
Into deep Eternity—

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

she used the image from Wordsworth's Immortality Ode (lines 161-67) of the seashore facing the infinite ocean as the soul experiencing its original childlike ecstasy, then # 520 becomes very funny indeed:

I started Early—Took my Dog.
And visited the Sea—
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me.

And Frigates—in the Upper Floor
 Extended Hempen Hands—
Presuming Me to be a Mouse—
Aground—upon the Sands—

But no Man moved Me—till the Tide
 Went past my simple Shoe—
And past my Apron—and my Belt
 And past my Bodice—too—

And made as He would eat me up—
As wholly as a Dew
 Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve—
And then—I started—too—

And He—He followed—close behind—
I felt His Silver Heel
 Upon my Ankle—Then my Shoes
 Would overflow with Pearl—

Until We met the Solid Town—
No One He seemed to know—
And bowing—with a Mighty look—
At me—The Sea withdrew—

Exquisitely comic—that solemnly infinite sea having an "Upper Floor" and a "Basement" full of "Mermaids"! Emerson may have led the way to the Orient, but here in full attire is crazy Emily, our first genuine Zen Buddhist, in all her whimsical irreverence.

But what a wonderful time the resourceful Freudian discussers have had ignoring the humor in this poem. "But no Man moved Me—" Ah, yes, that's a clear reference to her sexuality, isn't it? And so the ocean is her sexuality, too—or maybe her daddy's, or her brother's, or her sister-in-law's (naughty, naughty!) . . . There is just no possibility, is there, that" no Man moved Me" might refer to her being touched, engulfed by the human condition) As the Devil by the Sign of the Cross, the sea in the last stanza is defeated-mastered, controlled-by "the Solid Town," full of her fellow human beings. The childlike ecstasy is devilish because it lacks human concern—"no Man moved Me"—and it threatens to overwhelm her. make her inhuman, too, until that "Solid Town" saves her with its common daily reality, its adult practical concerns so distasteful to other romantic poets and to simpler souls generally.

     I'll make a bargain.  If the Freudians will let me have this poem, I will tell them how they can have "Casey at the Bat." Casey at the Bat? The proper baseball phrase is simply "at bat." Clearly something else is meant.  It must be "Casey with the Bat," or, more likely, "Casey with his Bat." Now if there remains any doubt about the powerful, darkly phallic significance or Casey's bat, we need only recall that "case" is a Shakespearean code word (or the female genitalia (as when Mistress Quickly speaks of "my case so openly known to the world"). Need I go on? Clearly we subtle investigators of the twentieth century have discovered a pleasure to be had, reading poems, that can only have been guessed at in earlier ages.

     If “light verse" simply means "comic verse," then we must expect it to have the complexity, depth, and seriousness that we find in other kinds of comedy.  That sounds obvious, but in practice, few people seem to believe it. And also, as the reciprocal character of the Frost statement implies, and as our glance at Emily Dickinson shows, our greatest poetry can have—maybe always does have—a lightness, a sense of the absurd in even the severest suffering, that makes us doubt all our clear and comfortable distinctions—even while we cling to them in order to maintain our bearings. I'd love to quote King Lear at this point but I mustn’t. We might lose our bearings—and in any case, there is death aplenty in light verse proper. There is, for example, the anonymous "Epitaph for a Dentist" in Auden's col1ection:

Stranger, approach this spot with gravity:
John Brown is filling his last cavity.       

Here we have the "fondness for dark messages" that Russell Baker mentions. Is "gravity" forced in for the rhyme? How eerily appropriate it is to the earthy subject! (And also it is a grave poem.) Of course. this light-verse death is not the same death that wakes us, sweating, in the middle of the night. Or is it? Note how the poem deftly alludes to the decay of the body—death's most potent image. Comedy with its distancing, its making-light, can deal with terrors beyond the reach of tragedy—or at least can deal with them in an age when tragedy is unavailable. Its hilarious juxtapositions can locate our very selves so ridiculously that our laughter becomes healing, as in Arthur Guiterman's marvelous "On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness" in Baker's collection:

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar's dead and on the shelf,
And I don't feel so well myself!

     For all these reasons it is often very hard to know what is light and what is—neither "serious" nor "grave" nor any other word will do as an opposite because, like quarks, lightness is everywhere present, hence impossible to isolate. Yet everyone of us is certain on some personal level, and beyond any compromise, about what is light and what isn't—as when Randall Jarrell fumed because Oscar Williams put Yeats's "John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore" into the light-verse section of his anthology of modern poetry. Three decades ago, Cleanth Brooks in his class in modern poetry dismissed Housman's "When I was one-and-twenty" as "a sentimental bad poem," and so for years I gave myself the annual treat of getting my students to tell me how delightfully comic it is: the young man who becomes wise, aging from twenty-one to twenty-two. Housman was very sensitive to numbers—as may also be seen in the quatrain of his quoted earlier.

     Or is "When I was one-and-twenty" a serious playful poem rather than a light one? In trying to make such a distinction, we make the old mistake of trivializing light verse as unserious. And yet—and yet—people will make such distinctions, and I will myself. Let me be pompous for a moment and say that, in this, we have an example of the comic predicament present in all human thought: we need categories, metaphors, beliefs to hang onto and keep our sanity; and we have to recognize that all such devices are provisional. To vary the example slightly: we need a literary scene with publishers, critics, reviewers to tidy up our poetic experiences for us, put them into neat compartments, as light verse, tragedy, etc., so that we may have more intelligible conversations with our friends—and with ourselves; but we also need something else—especially in America, where literary scenes tend to stultify very quickly: we need the spirit of lightness to tell us—to make us feel—what nonsense such inventions so soon become. That spirit, God bless us, has many incarnations. It can play at fantasy, magic, nonsense, as in Donald Hall's "Scenic View" (which was published too late—in his last book, The Happy Man—to be in any of these anthologies):

Every year the mountains
get paler and more distant—
trees less green, rock piles
disappearing—as emulsion
from a billion Kodaks
sucks color out.
In fifteen years
Monadnock and Kearsarge,
the Green Mountains
and the White will turn
invisible, all
tint removed
atom by atom to albums
in Medford and Greenwich,
while over the valleys
the still intractable granite
rears with unseeable peaks
fatal to airplanes.

This is a very serious poem—because those cameras (and numerous other instruments) are robbing us of our ability to see, and an unseen mountain disappears—just as an unperceived fact of life disappears—until we smash into it.

     Of the four general collections of past and present light verse, I would recommend Russell Baker's Norton collection most warmly, though they all have faults and virtues. It may have been a distinct advantage to Baker that he is neither a poet nor a teacher of poetry but, free of occupational prejudices, merely an intelligent enthusiast for the art. The poetry world in general is in great need of such people.

     When one reads through a book like this, it is astonishing how the quality seems to swing wildly up and down from poem to poem, "What on earth is a wretched thing like THAT doing in here?" Perhaps the unsanctified, uncodified, under-the-counter character of light verse makes for a special uncertainty of taste—in somewhat the same way, perhaps, as the illegality of heroin tends to raise its price and reduce its quality. There are the usual anthology problems: of used and reused items from other anthologies—Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" springs to mind-and, on the other hand, wretched things that seem to have crept in because of some personal or professional obligation of the anthologist. "Oh, sir, if you think it may escape our notice, it hasn't, it hasn't!" But there are fine surprises (to me, anyway) in all these books, and . . . someday I hope I'll open such an anthology and encounter Hardy's "Epitaph on a Pessimist"—

I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd.
I've lived without a dame
From youth-time on; and would to God
My dad had done the same.

     Light Year ‘87, which I haven't mentioned yet, is an oddity among these books: the fourth in an annual series in which Robert Wallace, a poet and editor of a small Midwestern press, attempts to collect and present the best in contemporary "light verse and funny poems" in English. I take "funny poems" to be a clarification of the meaning of "light verse." Light verse is simply verse that makes you laugh. The assumption that underlies this gutsy adventure in book making appears to be that at least some contemporary verse—far from being the specialized, hermetically sealed phenomenon that many find it—is full of verve and wit, and deals with human experience in a manner accessible to the general reading public—if there is such a category. (I was reminded of Russell Baker's remark in his introduction that he "gave up on new poetry . . . thirty years ago," only to have the work on his anthology lead him to "dozens of contemporary poets whose work is full of wonders.")

     Putting together an anthology like the Light Years must be a hard and risky business. No comfortable old standbys, already well known and widely accepted for safe and solid inclusion. The editor has only his own miserable idiosyncrasies to rely on and staggering quantities of stuff to plow, wade, and chew through. But "the height of the adventure," as Frost might have said, is in this very difficulty. To make and appreciate a real book like this is to participate in the future of one's society—and to believe that it has a future.

     Of course, this one shares the unevenness of all anthologies. I sometimes cried out in exasperation that there ought to be more wildness, more outrageousness, more belly laughs—and that the editor might be too concerned about how the book will seem to prim librarians (who are themselves edgy in the presence of town fathers, high-school principals, etc.). But when all that has been said, we are still left with a collection that is a wonderfully enlivening experience. One finds (to take two brief samples) that the Little Willie tradition is still alive in X. J. Kennedy's "Domestic Crisis":

"Mother! Father! Hurry, hurry!
Something mammoth, fat and furry
Just jumped out of a banana!
It's making off with Adrianna!"

"Hmmm," says Mother, "is it handsome?
Did it not demand a ransom?"
Father frowns. "I must insist
We cross fruit off our shopping list."

And finally, just as I had decided that the art of literary parody had faded forever into the empty echoes of academia, I encountered "The Red-Handled Hatchet":

dinner depends
upon

the red-handled
hatchet

wedged in the chopping
block

beside nervous
chickens.

Quoting a passage of free verse, Amis remarks that "when . . . high verse abandons form, a mortal blow is dealt to light verse, to which form has always been of the essence," and so (obviously) free verse "can . . . not be parodied." But here one Mark Sanders comes out of anonymity (to me, anyway) and shows how it can be done: the "found form" (or, if one wills, the haphazard form or the no-form) of the original becomes the externally given form of the parody. The parody thus becomes wittier than the original (as Pound in a famous dictum said it must always be). Parodies stand or fall on whether they are intelligent criticisms of their originals; and this one, to my mind, makes a palpable hit. There is, after all, a struggle for existence going on underneath Williams's wonderfully sensitive aesthetic concerns.

     Looking back through the history of various literatures, one is struck by how frequently lowly comedy seems to outlast its lofty counterpart. The stupendous tragedies of Seneca seem to have sunk into stygian darkness, while the raucous indecent comedies of Plautus, about which Horace complained so bitterly, are still played, still funny—and, for me, profound. Many a parody, like Fielding's Joseph Andrews, is still read and relished while the work imitated lies forgotten by all but the specialist. Even among the works of the same poet sometimes, like Alexander Pope, the poems done in sheer fun and mischievous delight, like The Rape of the Lock or the satires, today seem more complex, more human, more significant than the poems, like An Essay on Man, that were done with a solemn purpose. Poor Nikolai Gogol drove himself mad and destroyed his marvelous comic talent trying to produce the serious social message that the critics in his literary scene demanded.

     So it is a good sign for our own literature that comic poetry—the darkly humorous with the light—is being collected and enjoyed. Perhaps by that avenue the lost audience for contemporary poetry will find its way back.

—Richard Moore