Light and Dark

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2004 by Phillips, Robert

Light and Dark

AT THE MOST RECENT CEREMONIAI, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the finest poets of his generation, a poet who has been praised for his dark and sardonic view of the world, as well as for his elegies-was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. The recipient was R. S. Gwynn. The presenter, himself a very distinguished American poet, remarked that he hoped Mr. Gwynn did not mind being cited for light verse, that a great many serious poets have employed humor. I thought immediately of somber Robert Frost and his puns, such as "Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence." And Yeats's line about the distraught lover who cuts off his ear and sends it to his beloved. Yeats then goes on, "And Mrs. French, gifted with so fine an ear . . ." Recently Billy Collins has become a bestseller for his books combining humor and accessibility. His last book has a (light) poem about obituaries.

And what is light verse? The term was coined in 1867 by Fredrick Locker-Lampson, for comic or funny poetry (as opposed to poetry, which the Victorians reserved for serious verse). It nearly always rhymes and usually is written in meter.

Among the books sent me to consider for this chronicle were examples of both light and dark poetry, and some that combined both. The finest of the light verse was Fred Chappell's Backsass,1 which abounds with a sense of humor. (The jacket blurb writer helpfully informs us that the title derives from a Southern term meaning "irreverent retort," as in an ironic remark or "scoffing observation.") Until this frolicking volume, I'd mostly associated Chappell with his tetralogy Midquest (1981), which reprinted four previously published books (River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep). His work is rooted in his childhood and youth in the Appalachian Mountains and his vast reading of seminal books that forged Western culture. But now we have Backsass, and it is something else again.

The targets of many of the satires, and they are satires, because the reader feels Chappell would like to correct the follies of our age, are many. The first and last poems are soliloquies of "Fred's Answering Machine," porn sites on the web, Presidents who buy elections, men who mortgage their homes for a Lamborghini while secretly dining on hotdogs, the CIA, the FBI, and NASA, and the lack of anything left to explore. President George W. Bush is often alluded to:

I'm enlisting my brother Jeb

Gonna get him secret credentials, too

I have saved an extra box top

As if finding America today analogous to Imperial Rome, Chappell includes imitations and updated versions of Juvenal, including that Roman poet's seventh and eleventh satires.

Throughout Chappell displays a mastery of rhyme (Croesus/thesis, viands/friends, farces/horses' arses), and a propensity for the bitchy remark ('Your wine needs more paint thinner"). When a man is being tried for spousal abuse, he is told he can't contact his personal lawyer, but can be provided with a court appointed firm, "Steinern Friedan & de Beauvoir." Altogether the book is a delight. I just wish Chappell would punctuate his poems. Very few are. The effect is rather like reading a student who is infatuated with e. e. cummings, and with his dozen previous books of verse and the Bollingen Prize, Mr. Chappell doesn't have to resort to that.

Glyn Maxwell also writes, sometimes, about twenty-first-century America.2 Born in Hertfordshire, England, he now lives in New York City and is the poetry editor of The Nau Republic.

Among Maxwell's subjects are a man who holds his own funeral in a rented coffin and invites all his friends, refugees in Massachusetts, Tom the Weather Guy on TV, Genie, the thirteen-year-old California wild child, electrocution, women writing love letters to men on death row, and FBI agents (this seems to be the season for the FBI poems; I confess to having written one on that fat figure of fun, J. Edgar Hoover).

These are strange subjects, but Maxwell does not satirize or make fun of them. Compared to Chappell, he is a kinder, gentler poet, and I wouldn't call his poems light verse. He has a totally different tone. What he does demonstrate is that he can write a poem on any subject. W. H. Auden has been cited as an influence. Here's a short poem in its entirety:

Colorado Morning

Looping around the more or less dead straight

lines where skiers were,

some shy, nocturnal creature's one and only

shot at its signature.

Another poet who seemingly can tackle any subject is Rodney Jones.3 The problem is he may do it too often. His seventh single collection runs to 104 pages, and it somehow seems too long. Yet he remains a fine poet; in "Smoke," he shows his humor in a poem about being the token smoker on a committee for a smoke-free campus. In "Song of Affirmation," the poem which concludes the volume, he celebrates the ugly, the weak, the stupid, and the small of the world. In an age of Miss Americas, it is a refreshing subject: