In grade school and high school, they made you memorize poems — usually bad ones. The good poems memorize themselves.

So says Alan Van Dine, author of “If Instead of Apes We Had Come From Grapes, We Wouldn”t Yet Be Wine”. If that”s true, then there”s a lot to memorize in his collection of light verse about such weighty subjects as gravity, physics, evolution and the ecology and economy.

Press Release: May 13, 2006: Poet Explores the Silly Side of Science

Alan Van Dine thinks there is a place for humor in science – and a place for science in humor. His new book of light verse and humorous illustrations includes more than 30 entries involving questions of science – along with a good deal else. The book is called If Instead of Apes We Had Come from Grapes, We Wouldn’t Just Yet Be Wine (Towers Maguire Publishing, 2006).

Its subtitle is “Light verse for a heavy universe.” The book opens with a verse called “Knucklewalker’s Lament,” which considers how things might have turned out if the evolving apes had never freed their hands by standing up and walking on two feet. It begins, As everyone knows, if Shakespeare had needed to write with his toes, his verse would be shorter and so would his prose. Apart from science, “If Instead of Apes…” includes humorous verse and drawings on many other topics, including a section of “Rhymes and Ditties for Middle-Size Cities” and one called “The Nuns & Hermits Limerick Cycle.”

If you like Van Dine”s brand of poetry, you can find more of it at his own blog, Light Verse for a Heavy Universe. Read it. It”s fun poetry that makes you think. What more can a poetry lover ask for?