Light Quarterly 55

The Winter 2006-2007 issue of Light Quarterly features Max Gutmann. His poems are quite funny, but the interview with him is even funnier:

"Every poem should have something to teach us. The capital of Venezuela for instance."

"I write poetry because poems are like children—only you don't have to deal with soiled diapers or spend an arm and a leg sending them to college."

"In times of great social upheaval, people will continue to turn to poetry in their search for answers. ... That or alcohol."

L.Q. asked, "How is writing for children different than writing for adults?" M.G. answered, "You mean other than the obvious, going light on the obscenities, that sort of thing?"

*

Melissa Balmain's "Your Rejection Slip, Annotated" deserves special mention, as does Amit Majmudar's "Phone Tree." I was also delighted to read that Richard Wakefield's East of Early Winters won the Richard Wilbur Award for 2006 and has been published by the University of Evansville Press (following in the footsteps of another Light contributor, A. E. Stallings).

And Gutmann's There Was a Young Girl from Verona: A Limerick Cycle Based on the Complete Dramatic Works of Shakespeare is available from Doggerel Daze.

News Poet News

News Poet News is a site I wish I liked more than I do: every day a new poem that comments on the news. The cool thing about the poems is that they are in verse, but that is also the problem: the verse is not regular enough. As Don Brown wrote in a comment on my "What are Critics for?":

"No formalist myself, I do believe formal patterns should be adhered to if attempted. The ... sloppy ... attempts at form just make us all look bad. If you can't come close to John Hollander, get out of the game."

Of course, if you want to read formally sharp light verse that occasionally ventures into the political, you should check out Light Quarterly. (Yes, I know LQ publishes my poems, which makes this shameless self-promotion!)

Light Quarterly 52-53, Spring-Summer 2006

The latest issue of Light includes four more poems of mine. If that sounds like a lot, well, they add up to a grand total of fourteen lines. The titles:

Walk with a Five-Year-Old
Certain Persons
Postcard after a Visit
The Day after Writing a Poem

There are more words in the four titles than lines in the four poems! :-)

Light Quarterly No. 50; Richard Wakefield, "On Dogshead"

Light Quarterly no. 50, Autumn 2005, does conclude with a poem of mine, "Habit," but that's not what I want to share here. First of all, I just want to recommend this magazine, which I have been subscribing to for several years now, and which I always enjoy. On the whole, the number of poems that stick with me from this journal is as high as (or in many case much higher than) the number that stick with me from more "serious" journals. And the ones that don't stay with me are at least funny!

Secondly, I want to share this sonnet by the featured poet in this issue, Richard Wakefield:

ON DOGSHEAD

The rock formation there we're standing on
was known as Dogshead, jutting from the side
of Mount St. Helens. Now, of course, it's gone,
along with half the mountain, in a slide
that took out trees for twenty miles downstream.
This was taken in seventy-four, six years
before the mountain blew, and don't we seem
secure up there, triumphant mountaineers?
It's strange to think we stood a thousand feet
above the present summit. A single blast,
a sudden welling up of buried heat,
and all this mountain fell so far, so fast.
I look back on that climb we're resting from—
our innocence, not knowing what would come.