Using form: Quatrains: Stephen Gold, ‘So Pseud Me’
My verse is of the humorous variety,
And does its best to brighten up society.
To spread a little joy’s a noble calling,
A life without a laugh would be appalling.
Yet still, of late, I’ve had a thought that niggles;
What worth is work that just produces giggles?
Should it be judged as slight and ineffectual,
Compared to art we label intellectual?
And so I did what “proper” poets do,
And signed up to The Scrivener’s Review,
“The connoisseur of poesy’s magazine”,
Where scribes will scratch your eyes out to be seen.
I found it was a terrifying place,
Where people were obsessed with lower case,
Allusions veered from cryptic to absurd,
And “meaning” seemed to be a dirty word.
Their poetry was like the peace of God,
That passeth understanding – truly odd.
Some claimed to write for womxn and for mxn,
Though none had come across the verb, “to scxn”.
With open mind, I asked, “Is it my fault
That there is nothing here I can exalt?”
But days of dredging through this awful rot
Confirmed beyond all doubt that it was not.
Each new excrescence served to reinforce
That I had veered disastrously off course.
I wheeled around and fled back to the light
Which shines upon the droll and erudite,
Bring on a world where rhyme and meter matters,
And isn’t full of folk as mad as hatters.
Adieu to “Scrivener’s Review”, I quit.
Do I need what you’re full of? Not one bit.
*****
Stephen Gold writes: “The idea for So Pseud Me came from wading through an august poetry periodical which had better remain nameless, and coming to the following conclusion: WTF?
There was some good, thoughtful work, but much of it was pretentious drivel, written by the deservedly obscure with their heads rammed firmly up that place where the Lord causeth not the sun to shine.
If you were to ask them, I guess most would place high verse on a pedestal, way above light. But on this, I am with Kingsley Amis, who wrote in the New Oxford Book of Light Verse:
“Light verse makes more stringent demands on the writer’s technique. A fault of scansion or rhyme, an awkwardness or obscurity that would damage only the immediate context of a piece of high verse endangers the whole structure of a light-verse poem. The expectations of the audience are different in the two cases, corresponding to the difference in the kind of performance offered. A concert pianist is allowed a wrong note here and there; a juggler is not allowed to drop a plate.”
‘So Pseud Me’ is a light-hearted attempt to speak up for jugglers.”
Stephen Gold was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and practiced law there for almost forty years, robustly challenging the notion that practice makes perfect. He and his wife, Ruth, now live in London, close by their disbelieving children and grandchildren. His special loves (at least, the ones he’s prepared to reveal) are the limerick and the parody. He has over 700 limericks published in OEDILF.com, the project to define by limerick every word in the Oxford English Dictionary, and is a regular contributor to Light and Lighten Up Online (where this poem was first published).
Illustration: “A group of poets carousing and composing verse under the influence of laughing gas. Coloured etching by R. Seymour after himself, 1829.” is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
