One of the tests of a reading – or perhaps I should say of a reading audience – is laughter. Whenever I read, I’m conscious, possibly hyperconscious, of just how the audience reacts to certain lines or phrases. There are some lines that I can be certain will get a laugh in the right towns – New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore or DC – but which might get no response at all if I’m reading on some college campus. It’s not that students at colleges don’t get jokes, or that they don’t have the depth as readers that audiences of mostly poets will have in cities, so much as it seems to be that some schools have kept it a secret that it’s okay for literature to have humor, be funny even. Would my parents be paying this much tuition for me to study something that makes me laugh? Who, one wonders, is responsible for giving students permission to actually feel at ease with writing? One of the great values of works like Ulysses or Tristram Shandy is that they do just that.

The audience at Mills was perfect, picking up on the humor from the very first line. This audience, tho, was filled with poets & Mills itself has taken an interesting turn in recent years hiring several good poets (currently Leslie Scalapino, Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young & Stephen Ratcliffe) to teach at the same time. In short, it was as well read an audience as one could ever hope to have. When I got to the end of the sixth paragraph/line of Ketjak and read

Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them.

the audience responded with laughter. In a work full of “arbitrary” juxtapositions, ones such as this do indeed occur.

In Ashland the next night, with roughly the same texts, the audience let that line pass by in complete silence and I will concede to wondering if I was getting through. I actually started off reading Ketjak more slowly than I had in Oakland, where it had felt rushed to me out of my own nervousness at confronting a large crowd. By the time I got to the sixth paragraph/line in Ashland, tho, I felt that I was cooking as well as I ever do in a reading.

At both events, I followed my excerpt from Ketjak by jumping around in The Chinese Notebook. One paragraph that I read in both locales (there was maybe only 50 percent overlap) was

55. The presumption is: I can write like this and “get away with it.”

I was really pleased in Ashland to find that by the time I reached this passage, the laughter was every bit as loud as it had been the day before at Mills. Had a constant barrage of puns finally loosened their tongues, was I finally giving as good a reading as I had the day before (even if, in my mind, Ashland was the better of the two readings), does it just take an audience unfamiliar with “my kind” of writing a little longer to get with it, had the panda’s presence finally swayed them? I have no way really of knowing. Tho I’m glad the panda was there. Not only did my driver and I follow it to the reading (where else would a panda be going?), it brought the right energy.

Humor is not the only thing going on in my poetry, but it is the one aspect for which there is a clear verbal cue from an audience that it gets it. I have no way of knowing that an audience that either doesn’t get my humor (or doesn’t find it funny) gets anything else either. So I tend to think that a laughing audience is a more serious one. Thus when I read a response, such as the collaboration between SOU students Lacey Hunter & Nichole Hermance, that itself has some humor, I take this as a good sign indeed.

Gary Sullivan ended his dissertation on humor & context the other day with what I would characterize as an imponderable: “How is Celan’s work read by those who don’t know who he was, his history?” Now Annie Finch sends an email to ratchet the issue of irony up one more notch:

Dear Ron,

the whole [Jennifer] Moxley discussion has been fascinating. if this inspires thought for your blog, I'd be interested to read your response. I think the poems I was recalling are in With Strings or if not, another recent book. I guess part of the question raised is, how much does the context of the writer's other work affect the irony that individual poems can retain?

"Charles Bernstein has written some poems that I would not be surprised to see in a book by X.J. Kennedy. Ron, can you imagine a time in which the context separating those two is lost, or is that taking the idea too far?"

Two more thoughts/questions:

Do you think poems that go too much the other way, that don't have enough irony, are just as vulnerable to being lost after their originary time is over as poems that depend too much on transitory irony?

Then there is the phenomenon of poems that are written with irony and STILL survive after the irony is long gone in most reader's minds. Examples: Frost's The Road Not Taken and Blake's Songs of Innocence. Where do these fit in?

Annie

I would suspect that one of the Bernstein poem’s Annie might be remembering is “The Boy Soprano”:

Daddy loves me this I know
Cause my granddad told me so

Though he beats me blue and black

That’s because I’m full of crap

My mommy she is ultra cool

Taught me the Bible’s golden rule

Don’t talk back, do what you’re told

Abject compliance is as good as gold

The teachers teach the grandest things

Tell how poetry’s words on wings

But wings are for Heaven, not for earth

Want my advice: hijack the hearse

Compare this with Kennedy’s “A Brat’s Reward”:

At the market Philbert Spicer

Peered into the bacon slicer –

Whiz! the wicked slicer sped

Back and forth across his head

Quickly shaving – What a shock! –

Fifty chips off Phil’s old block,

Stopping just above the eyebrows.

Phil’s not one of them thar highbrows.

Kennedy, poetry editor of the Paris Review in the 1960s betwixt Donald Hall & Tom Clark, is a long-time practitioner of light verse as well as poetry for children – the smoothness of his metrics here is an index of just how good at this he is. Considering that we’re discussing mutilation in the market place, it’s remarkable just how free “Reward” is of even the slightest hint of social comment. The only moment it shows up is at the very end – that distancing effect of slang in “them thar highbrows.”

Even if we were unaware of the Anna Bartlett Warner hymn – hard to envision in a world in which Google shows over 40,000 pages devoted to it & its variants* – on which Bernstein’s poem is based, there’s a depth of sarcasm in the writing that is impossible to erase over time. Even presuming we don’t recognize the allusion – a presumption basic to satire – this displacement of “Daddy’s” love to granddad’s word for verification & the references to family violence in the first stanza make it unmistakable. As does the use of the term “abject” in the second stanza. As does the “advice” of the final line. Even prosodically, the degree to which Bernstein pushes away from the seven-syllable line of the original twists the poem away from the harmonic closure of the 19^th century lyrics toward a result whose dissonance – the degree to which it sounds “off” or “wrong” – underscores the connotative domain.

What we have are two poetries that have certain surface similarities, one of which is adamantly social & will remain so, even if many topical elements are drained away, the other of which is only incidentally (& possibly unknowingly) social. So while in theory the possibility of two poetries merging in such a way as to dissolve their original differences exists, in practice I think this is apt to happen only with much more parallel kinds of writing, the way the elliptical side of the mainstream (say, Jorie Graham’s work) shades over into aspects of post-avant writing (someone like Ann Lauterbach sits almost perfectly in the middle here, as do Forrest Gander & C. D. Wright). But not in work that is truly diverse, regardless of surface features.

Is it possible for poems to not have enough irony? My sense is no, in that I suspect that writing can incorporate an almost total spectrum of metalinguistic distancing effects, from no irony whatsoever (Denise Levertov) all the way to total irony (Joe Brainard). It is, however, possible for poems to use irony ineffectively, as Walter Conrad Arensberg does in “To Hasekawa.” That’s a different issue.

But as time passes, contexts fade. There are poems in which irony disappears only to reveal other strengths of the poem – that’s pretty much the situation with Blake. But other elements shift around as well. Just as Bernstein’s poem will continue to reveal a social structure regardless of whether we recognize Warner’s hymn, so too will the dark world envisioned by Paul Celan remain, whether or not the reader relates it to the holocaust:

BY THE UNDREAMT etched,

the sleeplessy wandered-through breadland

casts up the life mountain.

From its crumb

you knead anew our names

which I, an eye

similar

to yours on each finger,

probe for

a place, through which I

can wake myself toward you,

the bright

hungercandle in mouth.

Hungercandle (“Hungerkerze”) is not a term that is mistakable, any more than “mouth” can ever be softened without a pronoun. The bleakness of the situation could be Kampuchea, Babi Yar or the Balkans. What is not relieved, however, is the underlying sense of deprivation. Only in a world in which hunger & genocide were both abolished & forgotten could these lines appear to lose their sense of deprivation. Which I fear means that we are a long, long way from being able to test the ability of Celan’s work to operate without context.

Of the writers mentioned here, Jennifer Moxley is perhaps closest to Celan in her overall vision of humanity. Like him, she is on the low end of the irony spectrum. Neither has any interest in letting the reader escape the enveloping circumstance of the poem – like Celan, her poems may long for relief, but they seldom if ever offer any. That her works employ a neutral language, rather than, say, the high-torque neologisms of a Celan, is part of the analysis. Like Annie Finch, I’m fascinated by the reactions to her work. They underscore my own sense of its importance.

* Including a few that touch on its use by the Ku Klux Klan.

On the issue of humor, I got emails from several people. The most detailed response came from Gary Sullivan, who advocates a temporal theory of wit:

Hi Ron,

I’m typing this in Word, hoping I’ve got the settings correct so you won’t get question marks where apostrophes or ellipses are intended (a problem that I think I just fixed, but ... we’ll see ... if not, my apologies).

Your blog today touched on two of my favorite topics: humor and context.

Before I start in on all of that, though, I should say that “But I’ve always thought as well that Pound believed Mauberly to be a barrel of chortles” made me laugh out loud. (It was “barrel of chortles” that did it, for what it’s worth – in other words, the linguistic construction, which I’ll get to in a bit.)

The thrust of your argument seems based more on ideas about irony, specifically, and less so than on humor, or there seemed to be some conflation of the two as I was reading it.

I think you’re right about that Arensberg poem, it’s not really interesting. But, is it the lack of context that makes it so? Obviously, some context would help. But I’d argue that it would still be a lame poem (for me, anyway) if I knew who Hasekawa was. Also, the “humor” there seems more about something universal than Hasekawa (who may, ultimately, have been a made-up name, referring to no one in particular). The problem though isn’t – to me – that it’s simply humor, but a failed attempt at humor:

Perhaps it is no matter that you died.

Life’s an incognito which you saw through:

You never told on life – you had your pride;

But life has told on you.

There’s something metaphysical about the humor there, this idea that “life” is an “incognito.” But the ideas are so fuzzily presented, we don’t know what that really means – it’s too abstract. We (or I anyway) don’t know what he means by “Life’s an incognito” ... maybe he’s getting at something about the “life-force,” that it isn’t “personal” or that it’s invisible? Or “You never told on life.” What could that possibly mean? “Life has told on you,” probably means that Hasekawa, whoever he was, died anyway, as we all will. I mean, it’s impossible to tell. My sense is that we probably wouldn’t know even knowing who Hasekawa was ... unless Hasekawa had made some statement about life and incognito – in other words, unless this is Hasekawa’s language being used against him. In which case, touché, you’re right. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I doubt that that’s the case here. It seems like this is Arensberg’s language here. In which case, the problem is probably not lack of context, but poor structure.

I really believe humor requires more than just making manifest enough context for it to be understood, and that comes from laughing out loud when I was a lot younger at Woody Allen or Donald Barthelme or Firesign Theater pieces where I had no idea what they were “talking about.” (Months or years later, I’d figure it out, and it was as often as not less, not more, funny – although there was that feeling, yes, like, “aha! that’s what you meant!” In other words, “aha!” and not “ha ha ha,” which happened earlier, bereft of context.) It wouldn’t matter, in other words, if I knew who Pound was or, if I did know of Pound, what Mauberly was, but that, “barrel of chortles” is a completely hilarious construction.)

Humor depends largely  – not exclusively, but I’d argue predominantly – on timing, if verbal, or measure, if written. Why, in other words, has the Greek Anthology persisted – and not simply as a kind of historical item read in college, but as something even contemporary poets as well as humorists might pilfer from, retranslate, read for pleasure, or otherwise use. Epigrams give less opportunity for context about what is said than they do for the mechanics of what is said.

But, again, it seems like your primary argument is not about whether or not humor will last, but whether or not irony is read as irony over the years. Some English students may remember reading Swift’s Modest Proposal and “not being sure” at first if he’s “kidding.” But not me. Because, although there is no real context presently for that piece in the piece, it always arrives framed – in an English textbook anthology with an introductory essay, maybe, or however else one might conceivably receive it (in a Penguin edition, with footnotes explaining?) Same with Petronius’s Satyricon. Context can get carried over by others, by previous readers. Swift is, in other words, probably less shocking today, because we often get it with a set-up. Someday, your Stein quote will be recontextualized by a scholar somewhere, and that might be, for the next hundred or so years, that. Anyway, back to Swift, because as an example he’s “as obvious as an ear” – part of his plan, so it seemed, was that one would not know he was being ironic. That readers of the day would internalize the argument, to some extent, and then come out of that experience, understanding some level of concomitant participation in the genocide of the Irish. But, irony of ironies, he’s now read with the foreknowledge that he was being ironic. And the effect of reading him is, ironically, diminished.

That, btw, is the kind of irony I’m often most interested in. And it does have a very limited, immediate value. We’ll never read Swift – no one will – as he was then. But I think he’ll be remembered, and learned from, mimicked, used, referred to, and enjoyed, for a long time, despite that.

As you say, “Humor is always – & only – in the eye of the beholder.” I agree with that. But I also believe that meaning/intention and value are also always – and only – in the eye of the beholder. It’s all problematic or changeable or contingent upon context, I’d argue.

How is Celan’s work read by those who don’t know who he was, his history?

Enjoying the blog,

Gary

On the Poetics List, there was a certain to-do over the wink I suggested was absent in the poetry of Jennifer Moxley. This was not, as I noted at the time, a criticism, but rather an observation, an index of her willingness as an author to write precisely what she believes needs to be written, regardless of fashion. Any number of commentators rushed in to rescue Moxley’s reputation from sincerity or even earnestness, with Steve Vincent – a friend of this blog for over 30 years – suggesting that I had been “pulled into the wax.” Aaron Belz goes this way & that – he feels like Edgar Allan Poe on the issue when he’s not feeling like Bugs Bunny. Many ideas were thrown into the hat, no doubt causing the rabbit to feel crowded. Some of the more pertinent ones were:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The wink is a necessary “courtyard of emotion,” an idea I’d like to endorse just so I can use that phrase a few times.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The wink is a postmodern twitch.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The wink is a New York School thing (with some hint that there’s relatively little winking between 14^th Street & Columbia, where it is again permitted).

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>James Tate does/does not wink. Unless of course those messages that mentioned only the surname were referring to Allen Tate, a man whose poetry has been known to glare.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>There is such a thing as a “bad wink,” implying of course that its opposite might also exist.

At this very same moment, the Gertrude Stein list has been going on about what Stein meant when she said, sometime in the early 1930s, that Adolph Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. & a fellow at Buffalo emailed to ask if “Franzen’s boast in his 30 September New Yorker article that he defied the intentions of Coover and Pynchon by reading them to identify with their characters militate against your interpretation of the J-Franz/Oprah contretemps?”

My answer to that latter question would be that, no, it confirms my interpretation, because it reveals Franzen to be consciously operating on exactly that set of presumptions. And I would have thought that we have all learned by now that Franzen’s style vis-à-vis media inquiries into his process is to obfuscate & dissemble to the max. But, as the Stein quote suggests – it’s being employed apparently by Holocaust deniers – humor doesn’t necessarily travel well. If the wit is dry enough, it may in fact scrape.

I would characterize irony – the ability to say one thing while communicating something quite discordant to the denotation – as one aspect of humor & an especially important one in this epoch in the U.S. (I don’t want to generalize here.) Context is so important in humor &, by definition, so pliable & subject to change, that it is almost impossible to ensure that what is uproarious in one setting will remain so over time.

Almost certainly, everybody has had the experience of writing some bon mot in an email only to discover that your recipient has been horribly offended, perhaps justifiably.* The very same communication in person might not have had the equivalent impact because it would have been presented, with body language & tone, in such a way as to situate its reception.

Much of Stein’s humor – in Tender Buttons and the portraits, for example – does travel well over the decades. But I’ve always thought as well that Pound believed Mauberly to be a barrel of chortles & there is more wit in Eliot’s Prufrock & Waste Land than was noted when we were in high school. Eliot the ponderous was largely a critical fiction up until the Quartets showed that he’d begun to believe his own reviews.

But if you go back further into the recesses of the canon, what you find is that humor carries forward most effectively when it is most fully contextualized – in drama, for example, or in poetry that proposes its own contexts, like the Canterbury Tales. But the humor in Pope comes across now as stilted & clunky – which may be why he is not dealt with as seriously as he deserves, particularly when you consider how close he came to inventing the prose poem.

Which makes me wonder about the eventual fate of our current moment, long after we too have exited stage left. Irony today serves an important social & historical function – as an index of our own lack of innocence. It’s a confession that we expect our leaders to lie & all our social institutions to fail us, to do so systemically, & to do so cynically. When the FDA declares Claritin safe for over-the-counter sales, “making it available for everyone,” what that action really does is separate out one of the most common costs insurers have had to cover. Last month’s $10 co-pay for your prescription will be next month’s $30 charge at the cash register.

Many tendencies in poetry, not just the New York School, have relied more than a little on humor & irony – the actual figure of Maximus in the Olson poems is pretty funny. There is a lot of wit in Robert Kelly’s poetry – read Axon Dendron Tree if you don’t believe me – and in Jackson Mac Low. Clark Coolidge’s humor is one part Phil Whalen, one part Jonathan Williams. Dorn’s ‘Slinger is a long philosophical poem built on the model of a comic book. & no language poet does more with humor than Barrett Watten.

But identifying someone else’s humor on the page can be as problematic as taking excerpts from the work of Leslie Scalapino at random and knowing why this page is a “comic book” and that is an “opera.” Humor is always – & only – in the eye of the beholder. & what that eye sees depends very much on context – the moon at the horizon is big, but at the peak of the sky it’s very small indeed. This I think is at least partly why so few readers actually understand Ginsberg to have been primarily a satirist.

So while I am willing to concede the conceivability of Stephen Vincent’s suggestion that I have been “pulled into the wax,” I really doubt it. More important, I doubt that in the long run it will make any difference. If for any reason Moxley did not intend her statements in that poem (or any other) to be taken at face value today, there will come a time in the future when that is exactly how they are understood. The same will apply – ironically – even to John Ashbery & Charles Bernstein.

Which makes me wonder about the fate of the poetry of poetry today – it may very well be that we are creating a collective oeuvre that will age at greatly differential rates down the road. Jonathan Mayhew the other day in his blog characterized H.D.’s Hellenism as “kitsch” – yet its function during her lifetime was diametrically opposed to that very idea. Even now, if you look at the diverse poetics of, say, the early modernist period, it makes you want to scratch your head. If I thumb through an anthology like Harriet Monroe’s New Poetry (Macmillan, 1917 & 1923), the so-called “revolution of the word” is almost entirely absent. While the founder of Poetry includes Pound & Williams, and even such radicals as Carl Sandburg & John Reed, there is no Stein, no Loy, no sign of the Baroness, no Hartley, not even Hart Crane. Yet New Poetry does include Thomas Hardy, Edward Arlington Robinson, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, even Joseph Campbell and John G. Neihardt. Perhaps the most telling inclusion is Walter Conrad Arensberg, he of the “Ing? Is it possible to mean ing?” There is some interesting work to be found in Arensberg, but Monroe is having none of that.  Here is the shortest of his five poems in the anthology, “To Hasekawa”:

Perhaps it is no matter that you died.

Life’s an incognito which you saw through:

You never told on life – you had your pride;

But life has told on you.

It’s not self-evident whom Hasekawa might have been – a search on Google turns up nothing – but what is evident is the humor here. Without any context, it’s not funny, so that the husk of its structure is all that remains. It’s like a deaf person watching dancers with no hint of the music. In this case, it would seem that the dancers are a little clumsy, but that’s about all you can say.

Literature evolved away from the vision that Harriet Monroe held & while some Arensberg poems are still read today, this one mercifully is not. It would be easy enough to argue that Monroe’s sensibility was pedestrian at best, but I suspect that the reality is that it was not as pedestrian as it might now appear. Rather, it is merely that large portions of the work she favored and printed seems – 75 years later – terribly antiquated. Now there are poets from the 19^th century – all of Dickinson, much of Whitman – that don’t seem half as ancient as much of the writing in New Poetry. The problem isn’t time – it’s the variable rate at which poems age.

If the wink is in fact the ticket into our contemporary “courtyard of emotions,” it comes at high risk. While I like humor & wit, I think that a writer needs to recognize – presume even – that, of all the colors in his or her pallet, the ones that will fade fastest are the bright, funny ones. If you want some sense of how your work might read 70 years hence, just ask yourself what will remain of your poetry when none of your readers get the jokes. 

* My own most recent experience of this came on Friday the 13^th when one of the readers of the blog thought that I was comparing J.H. Prynne to the music of John Tesh or Yanni. In fact, what I was suggesting was that the problem of the “regional ear” was different from that of distinguishing good art – figured into that discussion as Anthony Braxton – from kitsch. If I had been making a Raworth is to Prynne as Braxton is to X kind of comparison, I probably would have said someone like John Zorn. I instinctively “get” Braxton in a way that I don’t Zorn, but I wouldn’t then suggest that Zorn was kitsch.