Light verse, free to read

September 18, 2023 10:51 AM

Light is an online poetry magazine that's been going since 1992. If you often think of poems as stodgy and hard to understand, you might want to give the sparkling light verse produced by their stable of poets a chance -- archives include work by Wendy Cope, frequent higgledy-piggledy (double dactyl) appearances, an "impossible rhymes" compilation including Tom Lehrer, Ogden Nash, and Roy Blount, Jr., and more. Poems reacting to current events, large and small, appear in the magazine's long-running Poems of the Week feature.

Higgledy-piggledy

Harihareswara

Points to Light Magazine's

poetry sheet.


I hope you'll pardon me

Eponymizingly

Using my name for the

Sake of the feet.

[This is a collaborative post produced by brainwane and JHarris. If you are interested in working on collaborative posts, the Collaborative FPP Drafting" page is available at the MeFi Wiki.]

posted by brainwane (12 comments total)

From the current issue:

Vanilla Icebox
Simon Mermelstein

Stop! Collaborate and listen
Let me inform you that your plums are missin
Someone (me) has been stealing them nightly
I ate your plums cuz they all said “bite me”
Will I ever stop? Yo, I don’t know
My appetite for stone fruit continues to grow
To my wife, I write a note of apology
Soon that note will be part of mythology

Ice, ice baby, too cold
Those plums taste nice, nice, baby, so cold, so cold

So cold
posted by vacapinta at 11:14 AM on September 18, 2023 [12 favorites]

Now this is a treat!
It's right up my street.
It's fab and delightful and
gosh it's just neat.

So much here to read -
I am grateful indeed.
Many thanks to you both!
This is just what I need.

I just love this. The linked impossible rhymes page is very educational in addition to being fun, and taught me to spot the mosaics when I moved on to the Poems of the Week feature.

This is marvelous, and is now at the very top of my Things To Read Instead of Doomscrolling list.

Thank you so much for posting this, brainwane and JHarris! You have made my day.
posted by kristi at 11:15 AM on September 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I used to have a Roy Blount Jr book that had several hilarious poems. One that I think of often is Against Broccoli.
posted by neuron at 12:04 PM on September 18, 2023

Thanks brainwane for finishing this post! It's been in limbo for over a month as we tried to work out the best double dactyl to include. It's a genre of poem with several fiddly little rules, including the second line of the second stanza being a word that's never been used in a double dactyl before, but we kind of threw that out the window and have no idea of whether "eponymizingly" has been used. Alex Steelsmith submits them in Poems of the Week all the time though!

Also, I didn't want to make the post entirely myself because a dear friend of mine regularly gets her poems published there, so it felt like I was a little too close to the subject of the post. Without brainwane's help I probably would have dithered about it indefinitely. Thanks again, b!
posted by JHarris at 12:36 PM on September 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Very little pleases me as thoroughly as a good double dactyl. Thank you!
posted by Jeanne at 12:37 PM on September 18, 2023

I love Light. I unfortunately had to let my subscription lapse a few decades ago during a time of tighening belts, and never got around to resubscribing. Yay archives!

(That they've published my work is only slightly relevant to my love, as I wrote for them because I already liked it. Alas, my last sale was long enough ago, it's in the issue just before their oldest in the archives.)
posted by Quasirandom at 4:05 PM on September 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I got punches a-plentiful
You bet your rear end it'll
Sting when I start swingin'
On your genitals cuz then it'll
Swell up all outta proportion
Lookin' like an eggplant
Forced in through your foreskin

—Punch 'Em In The Dick (MeFi Music)
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:15 PM on September 18, 2023

Wendy Cope is FABULOUS!

I'm not copying-and-pasting, I have this one committed to memory:

The day he left was torture
that night she went through hell
His absence wasn't a problem...
But the corkscrew had gone as well

Happy reading, everyone!!
posted by dfm500 at 8:20 PM on September 18, 2023

Wendy Cope is really wonderful, I think I ran into her poem "The Orange" here on Metafilter first:

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.
posted by fridgebuzz at 3:13 AM on September 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

…all this and more, this week on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!
posted by slogger at 5:03 AM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, this post has been added to the Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:21 PM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yay! Thanks!
posted by JHarris at 1:34 AM on September 21, 2023