Light poetry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Light poetry, also called light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature wordplay, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration. Typically, light verse in English is formal verse, although a few free verse poets, such as Billy Collins, have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition.

While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel, or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets, such as Horace, Swift, Pope and Auden, have also excelled at light verse.

In English, poets who are well known for their light poetry include:

One of the most popular contemporary Web sites featuring humorous doggerel is AsininePoetry.com. Tens of thousands of Web users every month visit the humorous online literary journal, which was established in 2001. The award-winning site’s growing catalog of weirdly comic and oddball verse contains more than 1,500 poems written by established poets as well as talented amateurs. The site was chosen as Cool Site of the Day (2/19/03) and Cool Site of the Month (February 2003) by CoolSiteoftheDay.com. The site has released several compilations though its own and other publishing houses, including Asinine Love Poetry (Xlibiris, 2005); Childhood's Smell by R. Narvaez; In the Days of Wonder and Taco Salads, by Robert Shaw; and Asinine/11, a chapbook featuring controversial poems about life after September 11, 2001.