'A Line or Two Worth Keeping All Too Rare'

“He has never been much of a poet for opening magic casements -- ordinary dirty storm windows, rather.” 

That’s X.J. Kennedy on Kingsley Amis, clearly seeing his own reflection in that dirty window. Both are proof that the best writers of light verse or comic poetry are serious people, not Jerry Lewis clones. Their poems are moral in motivation – usually not moralistic – and suggest some failing in the world while seldom excluding themselves from the failure indictment. Theirs is a nimble balancing act. Kennedy has said he prefers “comic verse” to “light” and adds: “I like poems that are a mixture of laughter and sorrow.” Like Shakespeare.

 

Kennedy is the living poet I have been reading the longest. His first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase, was published in 1961 and I encountered him a few years later. How many contemporary writers can you name who have supplied pleasure and the strength to endure for almost sixty years? Take “On Being Accused of Wit,” from Dark Horses (1992):

 

“Not so. I’m witless. Often in despair

At long-worked botches I must throw away,

A line or two worth keeping all too rare.

Blind chance not wit entices words to stay

And recognizing luck is artifice

That comes unlearned. The rest is taking pride

In daily labor. This and only this.

On keyboards sweat alone makes fingers glide.

 

“Witless, that juggler rich in discipline

Who brought the Christchild all he had for gift,

Flat on his back with beatific grin

Keeping six slow-revolving balls aloft;

Witless, La Tour, that painter none too bright,

His draftsman’s compass waiting in the wings,

Measuring how a lantern stages light

Until a dark room overflows with rings.”

 

Kennedy’s gift is versatile. Gravity and wit, he proves, are compatible, as they were in Herbert and Donne. He published “The Poems of Wilmer Mills” in the Summer 2012 issue of The Sewanee Review. Mills had died a year earlier at age forty-one:

 

“Each one is like a coin of heavy gold,

Modest the denomination on its face,

Not meant to spend, a valuable to hold,

One that no common mintage can replace.”

 

Kennedy was born on this date, August 21, in 1929. Happy ninety-fourth, Joe.