Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.
Did I mention that we haven't talked about love poems much in this series? We still aren’t there, but at least we have the title this time. Love Poem by Melissa Balmain is light verse-ish. What is light verse? Great question. There is no real definition. In general, it's an ironic, sometimes humorous treatment of a subject or a person, written more to entertain than to probe deeply into a concept. It’s often observational, and as with today’s poem, slightly skewed logic and comparisons are common. In some cases, it might be thought of as what a meme might have sounded like before the internet.
First, a quick comment about the poet. Melissa Balmainis a poet, journalist, humorist and teacher. She’s the editor of a journal of light verse, titled, logically enough,Light(https://lightpoetrymagazine.com/) and teaches at the University of Rochester.
Getting back to the poem, what struck me was not the poetic techniques, or novel vocabulary, or unusual insight, but the fact that light verse, and the ironic or sardonic or sarcastic tone it often takes, is a wonderful vehicle for stating the obvious. Or at least, what should be obvious.
I am an Engineer by day (novelist and editor by night) so my normal inclination when anything isn't working, is to fix it. My wife gets annoyed with me sometimes, for taking something the neighbors threw out, lugging it home, and making it look like new again, or making it into something completely different, but useful. I was always a fan of Charles Dutton as garbage collector Roc Emerson, turning castaway items into a well-equipped, if miss-matched home.
Melissa Balmain looks into this idea, with the view that, if we can make something look so good, why give it up?
Her Love Poem starts out:
The afternoon we left our first apartment,
we scrubbed it down from ceiling to parquet.
Who knew the place could smell like lemon muffins?
It suddenly seemed nuts to move away.
She takes that idea, and revisits the logic through several examples - a common technique in light verse - including fixing up a car, and tuning a piano, and then focuses her attention on human relationships:
(The full article text is available on Facebook or Tumblr)
Once again this is Steve Spanoudis for theotherpages.org.
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