Graduate students have a sorry game in which they try to imagine dissertation topics that sound impressive but would only take a week or less to complete. A Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Chidiock Tichborne is appealing since this sixteenth-century Brit left behind only one extant poem before being executed for treason. The Influence of Emily Dickinson on Dostoevsky’s Late Fiction. The Old English Novel. And some wag will always toss in Humor in Milton. It’s true that Milton seemed to regard humor as the sign of a depraved nature, rather like that mad monk in The Name of the Rose who deduces from the fact that Jesus is never depicted in the Gospels as smiling or laughing that those who pursue the ideal of imitatio Christi had better remain as sour-pussed as possible. Milton does put one moment of humor into Paradise Lost that Milton scholars always point out when trying to humanize the old man. It’s in the War in Heaven section, just after the fallen angels have learned how to make cannons and shot from the rocks of Hell. Belial, in “gamesome mood” and “pleasant vein” reports to Satan on the angelic response to requests for negotiations with the Almighty:
Leader, the terms we sent were terms of weight,
Of hard contents,and full of force urg’d home,
Such as we might perceive amus’d them all,
And stumbl’d many.
. . (VI.621-24)
Surely they didn’t learn how to laugh in Heaven; it’s a mark of Belial’s fallen nature that he cracks a joke. (The more I think about it, Milton’s humor might be a terrific subject for a dissertation.)
It’s hard for lyric poets to be entirely humorless since wit is the leavening for most poems about human beings. Emily Dickinson wrote about death a lot, but she can be hilarious on the subject, as in “I Started Early – Took My Dog,” my favorite poem of hers (death disguises himself as a sex-starved sea-creature that wants to eat her up, just as he puts on his courtship clothes in the more famous “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and fools her again). And she can write straight-out screwball comedy as in “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed.”
But I’m more interested these days in Humor in Ethnic Poetry, which I offer to graduate students around the country who may believe that their professional best bet is to write about Virginia Woolf but just can’t bring themselves to sign on the dotted line. I know this topic from the inside, being a Jewish poet and having observed all the strategies of my co-religionists, ever since high school when I recognized that “Howl,” supposedly so full of despair and rage, was essentially a series of one-liners closer to the art of the Catskills than the dark attics of Manhattan:
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish. . .
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, &alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.
These and dozens of other morning-after lines hold their own with Pope and Byron. And they seemed to speak to the same sense of being a misfit in American society shared by all immigrant cultures. Ethnic poets first and foremost announce their fallen natures as a ticket for admission into the more dour society that looks them over suspiciously at the figurative border. Their humor is propitiatory, ingratiating, self-mocking, as fertile in likeable gestures as Chaplin.
Gary Soto’s “Mexicans Begin Jogging” is a prime example:
At the factory I worked The timeliness of the poem is a given; it will always be
timely, and not just in the United States.
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow
with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my
boss waved for us to run.
“Over the fence,
Soto” he shouted,
And I shouted that
I was an American.
No time for lies,”
he said, and pressed
A dollar in my
palm, hurrying me
Through the back
door.
Since I was on his
time, I ran
And became the wag
to a short tail of Mexicans,
Ran past the
amazed crowds that lined
The street and
blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from that
industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn
sky.
What could I do
but yell vivas
To baseball,
milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the
next century
On the power of a
great, silly grin.
The humor is defensive, though it imposes a satirical bite. Soto aims to please the reader just as the
“Soto” in the poem is amiable, willing to shout Viva! for American institutions and pose as a suburban jogger
though he is fundamentally a Chicano
factory hand easily stampeded by the police, the boss, and the social ethic
that prevents him from the assimilation
he is sweating to earn.
Humiliation is what
such humor is all about. As in Cathy
Song’s rueful poem “Shrinking the Uterus,” where a new mother is invaded by her
Chinese-American family and made to eat a folk remedy for post-partum
pains: pig’s feet soup. Every ethnic group has at least one repugnant
dish that signifies one’s place in the tribe; Song’s is the “triumphant
gelatinous hooves-- / silent pearly knobs of cartilage / bobbing like dentures
in a porcelain bowl.” Behind the tribal
humor there is also the lament for being a woman and prey to nature’s afflictions,
the “flabby bag of muscle” full of old blood, the unwashed hair “matted with
the sweat of labor,” the mind “rice gruel from lack of sleep.” Family values have brought this speaker to a
wretched state, but of course you can only deal with the situation by grinning,
like Soto the hunted fugitive. Or the
girl speaker of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s “Yarn Wig,” whose Japanese/Hawaiian mother
compels her to wear a wig to make her as cute as Cher or Lucy.
The humiliations
of aging have become one of the richest sources of humor in contemporary
poetry. Poets of old were granted a tiny
bit of whimsy in their poems about aging, and tiny bits of wistfulness and
complaint, but mainly they were expected to display decorum and a modicum of
dignity—see the work of Whitman, Hardy, Yeats.
But no reader of today has to be informed that our poets take their cues
from stand-up comedy and its Freudian crudity.
Sometimes it’s very funny: Edward
Field speaking (again) to his penis in “Old Acquaintance”; Maxine Kumin remarking
on creaturely decline in “The Poets Observe the Absence of God from the St.
Louis Zoo” . . . Or flat-out performance pieces like Mark Halliday’s “Refusal
to Notice Beautiful Women,” whose title tells all, but whose details of
psychological frottage make the
(male) reader cringe with recognition: So we leave the monkish poet reading his slim volumes and
move on, tomorrow, to a mode of unintentional humor, the truly bad line in a
good poem.
on Thayer Street but I know that has become fiction, she is fictive,
and I’m off now to a very large bookstore,
and once I’ve got a tall mocha and some slim volumes in the café
even the Michelle Pfeiffer of 1983 couldn’t make me look up.
Comments