The Clerihew, like most light verse forms, is an excuse for an intellectual type to be clever. Its thrust is biographical - it begins with the name of a famous person and proceeds, in two rhyming couplets of unequal lengths, to say something comical or satirical about him or her. Here is an example of […]

People like to back a winner. Sports fans are much more likely to attend a game if the home team has a winning record. Politics is also a sport, and voters are much more likely to back a candidate if they think he or she is likely to win. I’ve always thought of politics as […]

When I was young, I developed an unseemly passion for turning serious poetry forms into light verse. The following Shakespearian sonnet is from 1970: Consider, friend, the paradox of life: It’s all you have, and all you’re sure to lose. All that you do - grow up, pick out a wife, Owes more to Chance […]

If you talk to people about politics these days (and of course, I do), you’ll hear a lot of verbal hand-wringing about the fact that people don’t vote, even when it’s in their best interest to do so. In my view, part of the problem is that voting is too hard, and voters have to […]