Light Verse
Light verse can lighten with precision,
diminishing the gravity of laws
that weigh us down with indecision
by snatching humor from depression’s claws.
Inspired by what John Updike wrote in a critical essay in The New Yorker on Max Beerbohm on March 7,1964, excerpted in the February 9 &16,2009 edition:
Our mode is realism, “realistic is synonymous with “prosaic, ” and the prose writer’s duty is to suppress not only rhyme but any verbal accident that would mar the textual correspondence to the massive, overflowing impersonality that has supplanted the chiming heavens of the saints. In this situation, light verse, an isolated acolyte, tends the thin flame of formal magic and tempers the inhuman darkness of reality with the comedy of human artifice. Light verse precisely lightens; it lessens the gravity of the subject.
2/9/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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