Light (formerly Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse ) is an online journal which bills itself as "America's oldest and best-known journal of light verse."
5-665: Light was founded as a print journal in 1992 by retired postal worker John Mella . Mella personally published the journal until 2008, when he founded the non-profit Foundation for Light Verse with a $ 500,000 gift from poet Joyce La Mers . The Foundation, headed by Mella, took over publication of the journal. After Mella's death in 2012, the magazine was relaunched as an online-only, semiannual publication, edited by his handpicked successor, poet Melissa Balmain . The all-volunteer staff includes poets Kevin Durkin , Allison Joseph , Julie Kane , and Gail White . The verse in each issue begins with
10-471: A feature on a writer of light verse. Sections in between vary from issue to issue, and have included "Spectrum" roundups on types of light verse ( Little Willies , "impossible rhymes," etc.); book reviews by Barbara Egel; and an occasional column, "Historical and Hysterical," by A. M. Juster. The magazine has published the verse of Wendy Cope , Thomas M. Disch , X. J. Kennedy , John Updike , and Richard Wilbur , among many others. Notable contributors include
15-691: The family farm, and moved to Fresno, California in 1938. During World War II La Mers dropped out of Fresno State University , where she was pursuing a degree in journalism, and later married her boyfriend Tom Carlile. She worked as a homemaker and mother to the couple's two children until their divorce 17 years later, and subsequently got a job as a secretary and then as a copy writer at an advertising firm. Her 1960, marriage to her second husband, design engineer Herbert La Mers, produced one daughter, and lasted until his death in 2003. La Mers published her first poem in The Southern Churchman when she
20-522: The following: 2. Nicol, Alfred (August 2, 2013), "A New Morning for Light" A New Morning for Light . Joyce La Mers Joyce La Mers (1920 – October 2013) was an American writer of light poetry . La Mers was born Joyce Duncan in Billings, Montana in 1920, the third child and only daughter of a successful livestock dealer. The Duncan family was devastated during the Great Depression , losing
25-597: Was seven years old. Since then her poetry has appeared in The Wall Street Journal , The Saturday Evening Post , Collier's , Light Quarterly , and several anthologies. Her work, usually humorous and always metrical , has been characterized as "a marriage of Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash ". In 2007 she pledged half a million dollars to Light Quarterly , then the US's only literary magazine devoted to light verse, to ensure its continued publication. The terms of
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