'Slowly the World Is Losing Its Rhymes'

In an essay about light verse I wrote several years ago for the Los Angeles Review of Books, I devoted space to the late John Mella, founder in 1992 of the biannual journal Light. Mella was a retired Chicago postal worker, poet, Nabokov aficionado and novelist (Transformations, 1975). In his work I detect an early-seventies exuberance associated with the growing realization among American readers and writers that Nabokov was more than an exotic New World transplant and the author of a dirty book. Much silliness and solemnity resulted, along with a healthy sense of playfulness and serious comedy. Mella had found a place where he could indulge his contrary streak, tempered with learning and waggishness, and I found some of his uncollected novelties while poking around in old journals. 

In “On Innovative Writing,” an essay published in 1982 in Chicago Review, Mella says:

 

“Speaking, then, as a more-or-less bona-fide ‘experimental’ writer, let it be stated at the outset that there are many forms of discomfort to which I would more willingly submit myself than to that of immersing myself in a typical ‘aleatorical,’ surreal, or avant-garde text; that (to take another tack) the writers with whom I have the closest affinity are not [André] Breton or any of his numerous dearies or dadas but rather such masters of the ordinary phrase and extraordinary fact, or matter-of-fact, as Stevenson, Chesterton, and Wells . . .”

 

Mella is exhilaratingly non-academic about that dreary thing, postmodernism, a word he doesn’t use. He overestimates Wells’ worth but almost redeems himself with a footnote in which he refers to “the divine Vladimir.” Now take Mella’s poem “On Free Verse,” published in the Winter 2000 issue of Italian Americana:

 

“What we dislike about it is not that it is

(This we could learn to live with like children with broken glass

Or old rusty fish-hooks--anything useless and dangerous),

But that it obtrudes its presence in every area of our lives,

Even poems, even this poem, which has abandoned every pretence to poetry.

Slowly the world is losing its rhymes, the musical chimes

That tell us how much we have lost, those antique themes,

When all was rhyme and all royal. Loyal

No longer, like dogs beaten down by forgetful masters,

They are gone, their fleecy haunches

Seen for a moment in some ruined back-yard

Ringed with confusion, haphazard thunderclouds

Clapping like dunces--gone, their pelts something we smelled

Then lost, finally recognized as just our slovenly selves.”

 

Free verse – the lazy refutation of craft that had attained the status of unquestioned orthodoxy around the time other writers were internalizing Nabokov’s lessons – “how much we have lost.” In a 2006 issue of Nabokov Studies, Mella published “The Difference of a Sibilant: A Note on Pale Fire, Canto Three,” in which he celebrates Nabokov’s greatest novel and stresses the centrality of sad, sad Hazel Shade. 

 

“While [John] Shade’s poem is lightly satiric, as befits its Popean ancestor, its heart is darkly hued with his daughter’s death. And Kinbote’s commentary at once doubles and triples this teeth-chattering reverberation: first, as he twists the poem to suit his own purposes, which is ludicrously comic in itself, and second and third as his creator, or one of his anonymous assistants, pulls the magic rug of his flight into unexpected directions to reveal (the process is slow, reluctant, and painful) his tragic affinities with Hazel, Shade’s daughter.”

 

In my light verse essay I wrote about the marvelous poet A.E. Stallings:

 

“Stallings recalls that Mella’s taste for mordant humor moved her to examine her own assumptions about the differences between light verse and other kinds of poetry. ‘I was often less successful in placing poems I truly considered ‘light’ verse with Light,’ she says. “Rather, [Mella] seemed to like darker things with music to them. It was often a place where I would send in things that were quite polished, but perhaps didn’t have the scope or gravitas for a ‘serious’ magazine.”