'Light verse isn’t always a laughing matter': X. J. Kennedy Reviewed

It isn't all that often we feature light verse on the blog, so we're grateful to Patrick Kurp who reviews X. J. Kennedy's That Swing: Poems, 2008–2016 at Los Angeles Review of Books. Kurp opens his review by remarking on Kennedy's long-time adherence to rhyme and meter, and building off a riff on the old saying "it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing," Kurp writes: "An unapologetic formalist and swinger, Kennedy turns 88 later this year and straddles, as always, the uncertain boundary between light verse and — well, poetry." More from there:

Born Joseph Charles Kennedy, the poet assumed his anonymous-sounding pseudonym to distinguish himself from the former president’s father. He published his first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase, in 1961, and since then has come out with more than 25 books of poetry for adults and children, as well as textbooks and translations from the French. Kennedy might be described as a resolute writer of light verse, but he shouldn’t be confused with fly-weight scribblers like Edward Lear or Richard Armour. His poems teeter cunningly between serious and playful, heavy and light, and upset the expectations of strict poetic taxonomists. As Auden puts it in “Letter to Lord Byron,” “Light verse, poor girl, is under a sad weather. / […] She’s treated as démodé altogether.” Kennedy’s standing as a poet recalls the late Thomas Berger’s as a novelist. Berger, the author of some of the funniest novels in the language, always denied being a comic writer, because, in our culture, humor is regarded as suspiciously frivolous. But consider the serious humor of Kennedy’s “Lonesome George,” devoted to a giant tortoise, the last of its species, kept in a pen at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galápagos Islands:

No mate for him exists.

       Last one of his subspecies,

he solemnly persists

       in turning into feces

eelgrass brown and dry,

       spine-sprinkled cactus leaves.

Straining to gulp a fly,

       dejectedly retrieves

blunt head. Dead-ending male,

       lone emblem of despair,

he slumps on his kneecaps, his tail

       antennaing the air.

For a long moment we bind

       sympathetic looks,

we holdouts of our kind,

       like rhymed lines, printed books.

Is this funny?

Read on at LARB and you decide!