Send In the Clowns [by Michael Schiavo]

"Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies."

Frank O'Hara's famous "Personism" manifesto is one of the great modern expressions of American Transcendentalism. It reminds you that poetry isn't a form but a way. Just because a piece of text is written in lines doesn't make it a poem. Nor does a poem have to take the form of words necessarily. Anything that works well, that does the thing it intends to do, is a poem.

I often find more poetic inspiration from comedians than I do from poets. After all, everything that makes a good joke makes a good poem, makes a good comedian makes a good poet. Stephen Colbert daily examines the complexities of human language, and thus nature, with "The Word" feature on his show. Colbert's introduction of words like "truthiness" into our lexicon is an accomplishment on par with Aram Saroyan's "lighght" or The Collected Typos of Aaron Tieger. Indeed, each of these examples fulfill Emerson's insistence: "Every word was once a poem."

 

 

 

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Truthiness
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

The Poet Colbert also echoes the Emerson of "Spiritual Laws": "I may say it of our preposterous use of books, —He knew now what to do, and so he read." The satire (and danger) comes from the fact that he's arguing from a political perspective, not a poetic one.

My love for poetry comes from the verbal acrobatics and insane logic of Looney Tunes, Monty Python, the Marx Brothers, and almost ever single show on Adult Swim

 

 

There are poets who use humor, the premise of joke, as the form of the poem. Such as Aaron Belz. Belz is a funny poet. I don't mean he's witty or amusing or humorous—though he certainly is all these things—but that he's laugh out loud funny. To wit, check out this recent poem in The Washington Post. "Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game" is funny for reasons beyond the image of an adult man denying a child her use of imagination or that said child would actually identify a cloud in the shape of Alsace-Lorraine. His book The Bird Hoverer is both hilarious and touching. It really touches you. Sometimes in places you don't like. I'm sure his next book, Lovely, Raspberry, will continue the touching.

Peter Davis is another funny poet. Each poem in his book Hitler's Mustache takes for its subject, well, you guessed it. I once had the pleasure of reading with Peter and Aaron at Zinc in New York and while everyone enjoyed it, a blond-haired couple left after only a few of his poems. We found out afterward they were German tourists. We like to think humor is universal. It also requires timing.

Another poet complained to me that Peter's next book—Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!—was too close to the tone of Jack Handey's hilarious Deep Thoughts. But if Jack Handey can write a more thought-provoking poem than most so-called poets nowadays, why wouldn't we go to him, or Jon Stewart, or Aqua Teen Hunger Force for inspiration? Davis works in the same vein as John Ashbery, by making things so personal, they're universal. Poems like "Poem Addressing My Past, Current, and Future Students Who Are Sufficiently Interested in Our Class Enough to Check Out My Work" reads, in whole: "I hope you learn something from this poem, and the powerful mystical way it concludes!" I would also urge you to download Davis's musical project, Short Hand Attila. Now.

Gabriel Gudding makes poop and other seemingly juvenile bodily functions a centerpiece of many poems in A Defense of Poetry (you can read and listen to the excellent title poem here) and there are long discourses on dung in his masterful Rhode Island Notebook. But every single one of Gudding's poems is shot through with such humanity, you are forced to recognize that we cannot separate the mire from the marvelous, and that oftentimes the mire is the marvelous.

Jennifer L. Knox's books A Gringo Like Me and Drunk By Noon boil over with the blackest humor, graffiti from the bathroom of the universal mind. The beginning of "Johns" (originally published in Coconut): "John Cafferty is not John Fogerty / and an ass is not a vagina. // The lawyer said so.  O! / the slight, subtle distinctions // between perfume and a urinal cake. / Just because something works // doesn't mean everything worked / out."

A book like Harlot from Jill Alexander Essbaum (published by my fellow Benningtonian, the sharp-witted Reb Livingston) announces itself at first glance, then proceeds to cut you in a million hilarious (and sexy) ways. Mike Hauser's Samples are mash-ups in extremis, Dan Nester's "Queries" are voices from the wilderness,  and Kasey Mohammad's Sonnagrams are already one of the great achievements in 21st-century American poetry.

(That people are outraged over Flarf is outrageous. It's nothing more than an update of Modernism's collage style, which isn't even Modernism's, so there's your tradition for you, what Modernism was against.)

Mohammad explains: "Each Sonnagram, including its title, is an anagram of a standard modern-spelling version of one of Shakespeare's Sonnets, containing exactly the same letters in the same distribution as the original. The title is composed last, using whatever letters are left over once I've assembled a working sonnet in iambic pentameter with an Elizabethan rhyme scheme." While the Sonnagrams are wildly vulgar, they're also hilarious, moving philosophies in form and argument, and illustrate once more that, to a true poet, nothing is sacred, nothing profane. Here's Mohammad's take on Sonnet 81 (“Or I shall live your epitaph to make”), which he's giddily forced to title: "How Few Unravel Homer! Hear Them: 'Hunt, Raw Honor, Huh! Heel, Bare Valor, Heel! Huh!" (original published in Boo)

Anonymous in Bethlehem I lie,
A cryogenic Minotaur cadet:
Three gentlemanly vultures get me high
And gaily comb my germfree alphabet.

Mutated eyeless clones use neutron strobes
They’ve mounted on their deer head handlebars
To recombat the evil homophobes
Who tainted all their homonyms with SARS.

Alliterative turtles of Monroe
Lack literary luck: film at eleven.
The lilies of the valley do not sow;
And neither do they go to pussy heaven.

New operas bloom hugely into flame
When your urethra screams my Christian name.

"The Second Coming," anyone?

Nonsense is an essential element in American poetry, as Carl Sandburg and Constance Rourke do testify. We're indoctrinated into poetry at an early age through joke-telling, yarn-spinning, tale tales. The limerick is cousin to the mad song, but whereas the limerick is bawdy, the mad song is visionary. Both forms speak truth to power. Then, of course, there's the poem that everyone knows, a dead-pan joke as well as a philosophical inquiry that William Carlos Williams no doubt admired

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the other side.

Comments

[G.M. Palmer]

Anything that works well, that does the thing it intends to do, is a poem.

Seriously?

I think you've confused "work well done" with "poem."

This insipid attitude is why poetry is a forgotten and hated art outside of the circle-jerk realm of poets.

[Marissa Despain]

G.M. I don't read Michael's line as you do. He's commenting on the two previous lines. "Just because a piece of text is written in lines doesn't make it a poem. Nor does a poem have to take the form of words necessarily." And your conclusion is not only wrong, it's unnecessarily vulgar. If you want to make a claim, why not back it up?

[G.M. Palmer]

Sure, I'll back it up.

Try this experiment:

Go to a bookstore. Ask for the poetry section.

Look at it. How big is it?

Talk to the customers there--these are readers, right? Ask them how they feel about poetry. The reactions will be uncaring-to-hostile, I guarantee.

Why is this?

First it is because we've (English-language Poets) spent the last 100 years writing and praising the most difficult & impenetrable crap possible. Now, there are many poets who have, do, and are breaking this mold--but the damage has already been done.

But

Poetry is not taught for appreciation in most schools and it is regularly read by (a generous estimate of) about 1% of the reading population (which is about 0.3% of the population at large).

Moreover, not enough is being done to write poetry people want to read. Why are great and experimental novels published and read? Because readers are already familiar with and already love novels.

No one, statistically speaking, gives two shits about poetry any more. Certainly no one who isn't already a poet.

Perhaps you think this is fine--that poetry should just be the domain of poets--that we should be our own audience.

I, however, think that we are doing a grave disservice to the art and lifeblood of language--and to the greater population at large.

[DL]

Michael, I'm glad you've drawn attention to poets who incorporate humor so jubilantly and deftly into their work -- Belz, Davis, Essbaum, Knox, Gudding, et al. Nicely done!
GM, though I think you are overreacting to a specific sentence in the piece, the point you make so vehemently and eloquently in your follow-up comment deserves to be taken very seriously. I believe it is incontestable that modernism as advanced by Pound and Eliot made a virtue of difficulty, complexity, ambiguity, irony, tension. Something precious was lost when we jettisoned the whole array of techniques that had served poets for centuries. And I agree that the onus is on us to win over readers. What sense do you make of the fact that when a genuinely popular poet arrives on the scene, you can count on the other poets to put him down?

[G.M. Palmer]

Because the only money in poetry is tied up in tied up in personality and who-you-know(grants, awards, readings, etc), for many poets every new poet on the scene is a threat.

For others it is simply fatigue. William Logan, who I had as an undergrad at UF, told me simply not to try for anything resembling a mass audience for poetry because it didn't exist anymore--and he didn't think anything could be done to rebuild it.

I do know, however, that there are plenty of poets out there willing to nurture new talent. I have loved all the folks I've met through AWP & consequently West Chester--but again, they're all poets--and don't tend to know (or care) what non-poets might be interested in reading.

[ab]

GM, there's the rub: you "don't tend to know (or care) what non-poets might be interested in reading." Point of fact, most, if not all, of the audience members who have attended my readings in Hollywood are not poets, and i would imagine that few of them heed poetry. However, I see a lot of overlap between what I'm doing and what, say, Mitch Hedberg did, or Steven Wright has done. The poem, for me, is the calling-attention-to-something-interesting--the presenting of a bit of life that we've sort of passed over and taken for granted. For others, that's a bit. For others, it's a Facebook status entry. I agree that it's poetry-centric to refer to it all as "poetry." But the audience for such writing is larger than you suppose.

[G.M. Palmer]

Ah. A good point but OT for me.

I'm not talking here about performances. Indeed, performance is where poetry can shine--but the performer is what is important, not the poem--a great poem read by a lousy performer is painful to watch but a lousy poem read by a great performer can be earth-shattering.

I do think we can do great work for poetry by encouraging more and better readings--not all of us have to play harmonica like Kim Addonizio--but reading in a drone from the podium is probably bad form.

Having said that, books of poems still need to be made and sold simply because 1) reading will always be important and 2) it's more aurally stimulating to listen to music.

[ab]

To a professional comic, material is everything. You may have great stage presence, but without great material you go nowhere. Hence the perennial importance of writers in the entertainment industry. Hence the problem of the occasional writers' strike. I know it's a different take on the making, production, and delivery of texts, but it seems we (poets) might learn a lesson.

[Bernard England]

A critic like Logan and others of his ilk and money, are part of the problem, aren't they? Such a critic simply assumes there is no audience -- not a self-evident proposition -- and takes that as justifying high-handed indifference to readers, students, anyone outside the boundary of his self-regard.

[G.M. Palmer]

AB:

Sorry to come back later (we had a baby on the 4th)--but material is only part of it. You've seen The Aristocrats, right? Material is about half and delivery is about half--and good delivery can save mediocre material.

Also, checked out your site & liked it. "Thread" gave me a nice chuckle.