Constance Rourke wrote many books, including biographies of John James Audubon, P.T. Barnum, and Davy Crockett. Most importantly, she wrote American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Greil Marcus penned the introduction to a 2004 NYRB reissue of the book and Luc Sante posted a glowing tribute to Rourke on her birthday last year. I found a used copy years ago at the Montague Book Mill and reading it brought immediate recognition with every sentence. Rourke traces the American character first through three different archetypes: the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel. She goes on to sketch how these various strains of humor, these ways of approaching life, manifested themselves not only in everyday Americans but in the work of Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and other American writers.
Luke Hankins has written on this blog about devotional poems, and the anthology he edited, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, in which three of my poems appear, offers the reader a diverse selection. Starting with excerpts from Eliot’s Four Quartets, the anthology travels through the second half of the 20th century into the 21st, offering up hymns by poets like Brother Antonious, John Berryman, Denise Levertov, Yehuda Amichai, A.R. Ammons, Leonard Cohen, Louise Glück, Marie Howe, Carl Phillips, and Sufjan Stevens. Luke connects the devotional mode in the West to the Metaphysical Poets like Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Southwell, and Bradstreet but includes other traditions, such as Hebrew, Islamic, Buddhist, Zen, and American Transcendentalism. Rourke’s book acts as prelude for that last one. In a country where almost 90% of the citizens feel they have a direct connection to the divine, this devotion—simultaneously to the real in front of us as well as to our own imagination—is a testament of another kind, as we hold together a nation-state while following 300 million distinct personal religious impulses, whether to Yahweh, Christ, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s in this realm that the devotional poem, for me at least, edges from the metaphysical to touch the ’pataphysical.
I wanted to use a passage from American Humor as an epigraph to my collection, Green Mountains, as so many of the humors Rourke writes about seem to be roaming around these poems. And the mode is certainly devotional, if anarchic, a carnival. Each time I thought I had settled on one, maybe two, I found another. I wanted to use the whole book as epigraph: the ranges of the Green Mountains were containing the echoes in a much grander vista than I first thought, one that put them on the same plane of conversation and back-and-forth, rather than one text supplementing the other.
But this makes it sound like publication of Green Mountains is imminent. ’Tis not. H_NGM_N published Ranges I and Forklift Ranges II, but Ranges III still needs a home before I started sending out the entire manuscript for rejection. ’Til then, enjoy some samples of would-be epigraphs.
The farther he receded from view the more completely he changed into a sly thin ogre something greater than human size.
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Peddlers may have been chockfull of metaphysics. Their secret has been closely kept.
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Scratch the soil in China or Tibet or North Africa, and up would spring a Yankee, exercising his wits.
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The Yankee was often called practical, but in the bits of story and reminiscence quickly accumulating about him, his famed ingenuity seemed less a practical gift than a knack for making changes.
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The Yankee would often spend hours whittling; in his hands unexpected and fanciful shapes would emerge from white hickory, which added nothing to a practical existence.
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Listless and simple, he might be drawn into a conversation with a stranger, and would tell a ridiculous story without apparent knowledge of its point. With not a change of tone, out would leap an odd figure. “He walked away as slick as a snake out of a blackskin.” “There we was amongst an ocean of folks and cutting up capers as high as a cat’s back.” A gulf often yawned between the large facts and his scanted version of them; as he marshaled the characters in a story he was an actor and a troupe.
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But this reluctance was only another form of masquerade. These bits of indirection were social; direct replies would end many a colloquy: questions or evasions prolonged the talk and might open the way for more.
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He could even take the Revolution as a joke; most of his songs about it streamed nonsense.
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Though he talked increasingly his monologues still never brimmed over into personal revelation.
A barrier seemed to lie between this legendary Yankee and any effort to reach his inner character. The effect was so consistent, so widespread, so variously repeated that the failure to see him closely must be reckoned not a failure at all but a concerted interest in another direction. He was consistently a mythical figure; he appeared in the forms of expression taken by myth, in cycles of short tales, fables, and plays. Plain and pawky, he was an ideal image, a self-image, one of those symbols which peoples spontaneously adopt and by which in some measure they live. Overassertive yet quiet, self-conscious, full of odd new biases, he talked—this mythical creature: that was one secret of his power. A deep relish for talk had grown up throughout the country, on solitary farms, in the starved emptiness of the backwoods, on the wide wastes of the rivers. The response seemed an outcome of isolation; yet the same thirst existed upon the denser populations of the East. His slanting dialect, homely metaphor, the penetrating rhythms of his speech, gave a fillip toward the upset of old and rigid balances; creating laughter, he also created a fresh sense of unity. He ridiculed old values; the persistent contrast with the British showed part of his intention; to some extent he created new ones. He was a symbol of triumph, of adaptability, of irrepressible life—of many qualities needed to induce confidence and self-possession among a new and unamalgamated people. No character precisely like him had appeared before in the realm of the imagination. In the plays he may have stemmed at first from the Yorkshireman of early English plays; the framework of many a situation in which he appeared may have been borrowed; but he had existed in life outside all these; and his final character was newly minted. It was to survive in many fanciful manifestations an as outline of the American character; it has never been lost.
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His slanting dialect, homely metaphor, the penetrating rhythms of his speech, gave a fillip toward the upset of old and rigid balances; creating laughter, he also created a fresh sense of unity.
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He not only created a bestiary; with the single digression to the floral he insisted that he was a beast—a new beast, and the records prove that in this contention he was often right.
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He was in fact a Mississippi river-god, one of those minor deities whom men create in their own image and magnify to magnify themselves.
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Crockett’s philosophy was simple: he wanted to save the land from the speculator.
Inflation appeared with an air of wonder, which became mock wonder at times but maintained the poetic mode.
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. . . he lied from the delight of invention and the charm of fictitious narrative. . . . The truth was too small for him.
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Sometimes the songs were adorned with corals and dolphins and fireflies. Most of them kept the rolling choruses with a touch of nonsense.
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The young American Narcissus had looked at himself in the narrow rocky pools of New England and by the waters of the Mississippi; he also gazed long at a darker image.
To sustain burlesque something more than grotesqueries is needed. Satire enters into its attentions; once a territory is invaded by burlesque, all its objects are likely to look puffed and stretched, pinched and narrowed. But pure satire stands aloof, while burlesque wholly possesses its subject and wears the look of friendship.
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The action included many digressions of plot, and minor travesties. Showers of puns and double entendres fell, underlined in the text and no doubt sufficiently stressed as spoken, yet never appearing as palpable hits, for they came in enormous abundance, tumbling one over another; they effervesced and overflowed; they often chimed and were musical.
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This lawless satire was engaged in a pursuit which had occupied comedy in the native vein elsewhere. As if it were willful and human, the comic spirit in America had maintained the purpose—or so it seemed—to fulfill the biblical cry running through much of the revivalism of the time: to “make all things new.” It was a leveling agent. The distant must go, the past be forgotten, lofty notions deflated. Comedy was conspiring toward the removal of all alien traditions, out of delight in pure destruction or as preparation for new growth.
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All their modes were outward, rhapsodic, declamatory, full of song, verging upon the dance, adorned with symbolic costume, moving toward that oratory which was half burlesque.
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He always demanded an audience: yet in the end, though he included the critic, though his self-consciousness grew noisy and acute, his finest efforts seemed mainly for his peers.
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Half magnification, half sudden strange reversal, these tales were likely to culminate in moments of “sudden glory” that had a touch of the supernatural.
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The strangest, most comic experiences, quiddities, oddities, tales, and bits of novel expression were treasured and matched one against another.
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Grotesquerie and irreverence and upset made their center.
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What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art.
