The Great Dying by Kathleen Jones

A letter to Jim Harrison by Lindsay Pope

.
It may be of no surprise to you that the day
your book arrived the waxeyes at my feeder
were noisier, more nervous and more abundant
than usual. On the global face, I live on the
lower cheek of the world where the tears fall
and turn to ice. So you might not know these
little birds. They may have hitched a ride on
some seafaring boat and decided to stay. Or
perhaps they caught the tail of some

Rhyming Dictionary

For some of our writing prompts, rhyme might be important. That is true of our September 2015 prompt about light verse.

There are lots of online and print rhyming dictionaries available. A while back, Janis, who runs a site with a rhyming dictionary and other creative writing tools for poets called rhymedesk.com, offered me the code for a widget to add a rhyming dictionary to my website.

I also added it to our own poet links page.

Give it a try.

Enter a word in the search box above.

Provided by Rhyme Desk

Prompt: Verse Goes Light with Garrison Keillor

Everyone seems concerned with losing weight, watching calories and avoiding heavy foods these days. It seems natural that we might want our verse a bit lighter too.

I imagine that many of you also listen or read Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac for a poem to start the day. He has also edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, but he has also published O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic and Profound.


The title says it pretty succinctly. Some light verse is lyrical, some vulgar, some pathetic.

Keillor says that when he was in high school an English teacher tried to interest him in "Mr. Frost's guy who stopped in the woods to see snow fall and Mr. Eliot's guy who was not sure whether he should eat a peach" but that didn't work. It was "like serving bran flakes to someone who'd eaten buttermilk pancakes slathered with maple syrup."

Maybe you have read Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear or Ogden Nash or even W.S. Gilbert or, as Keillor has it "the great Anon." Light verse may be an acquired taste, but no one seems to consider it gourmet dining. It's more like acquiring a taste for cotton candy.

There are many notable poets in this genre and many "regular" poets who dabbled in light verse. Even serious Mr. Eliot wrote that book of cat poems that went on to be a long-running Broadway play.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him) was Tom's shot at light verse. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Here is one of Garrison Keillor's poems that I like in this genre:

Cicadas

The seventeen-year cicada crawls out of the ground
And looks around from a wall or a low-hanging limb�
He looks for her and she discovers him.
Courtship does not extend for months.
Their only job is to have sex once.
No long interlude of pleasant reminiscing about days gone by.
Just buzz and whir and thank you sir and then you die.
Cicada love does not involve poetry or song.
Was it good for you? Thanks. So long.

What is this light poetry, or light verse? I would say that it attempts to be humorous (not the same thing as "funny" as anyone who has ever read an anthology of humor). They are usually brief. They can be on a frivolous or serious subject. You'll want to feature some word play, including puns, adventurous rhyme and alliteration.

There are plenty of anthologies of light verse and the journal Light is a source of new poems. I was delighted to see that one of my online friends, Toby Speed, has the "Poem of the Week" on their site. Hers is a good, terse example of all the "rules" I listed above. Of course, poets of light verse laugh and make puns from rules.

How to Use a Lemon

Squeeze some into tea.
Frizzle off the zest.
Add it to piccata
and pith away the rest.

~ Toby Speed


This prompt is open to submissions until the deadline: October 18, 2015

History: the Horse, by C. K. Stead

Recall those wartime


draught horses pulling

carts around our suburb -



milk, bread, firewood � like

the record of something

irretrievably



lost, the way for example the

beast would stand, one

rear leg resting



poised on a hoof-point

like a ballerina -


or, square-foot, head-down,



nose in a chaff-bag,

or in the roadside trough

blowing through nostrils



before drinking, as

The Fox by Bernadette Hall

The fox is a single red stroke that cuts across
the clearing. The colour seems to hang like smoke,
you can almost see where she has come from.
Her musk (though you can smell nothing)
is specific like a thumbprint on the air.
It isn�t raining but there�s a kind of wet
on your face, a stickiness of insect juices dropped.
The fox is rusty-dull, discreet, not radiant or hot
or pulsing. Not agitated.