Whether others will comport with my assessment of "Cheese" by Liz Ciavarella is as unknown to me as it is irrelevant. Whereas the piece is thoroughly entertaining and wonderfully employs rhyme for comedic effect, I can think of only one reason why anyone could find fault with it: they have a fixed notion of what absolutely must be contained in a meritorious poem, and any poem in want of this requisite ingredient is necessarily worthless, or at least not to be compared with those that comply with their pedantic demands.

Although the poem hasn't the depth found in many good poems (or the obscurity of many that have been mistaken as such), it accomplishes all we could possibly hope it to accomplish - it achieves its purpose. And, in my opinion, this purpose - to entertain - is as exalted as any other in literature, and really the only legitimate one. I can picture Miss Ciavarella gleefully hammering out these lines, and that she passed on that glee to me in my enjoyment of the poem is all I ask for as a reader. My only complaint, if I had one, might be that the effect of this particular poem could have been heightened even further by the employment of anapestic meter. -