Where's the funny?
Over at Mark Wallace's blog, a Michael Theune review concerning third way poetics has been reprinted (that is, posted). In the comments box, among other interesting threads, Theune & Mlinko have an exchange on humor in middle-way and elliptical poetries. I've always thought it was strange that elliptical poets aren't read as more hilarious. Susan Wheeler has such comic timing! Burt initially sites Berryman & Dickinson as two of the elliptical predecessors, and I dunno, I laugh heartily when I read those terrifying, anxious, wilds. Also always have trouble with the term "elliptical," especially as used to describe poetry by women. It suggests a trailing off, a delicate elusiveness, where I think there are much louder crashing-ups. Which is not to fall into the wretch soft/hard binary. Something to puzzle, yet.
posted by Danielle at 12:47 PM
3 Comments:
Thanks for mentioning the review, Danielle--
I think you're right about how some elliptical predecessors and even some poets who might be considered elliptical really are often quite funny, often comically wild. But I think acknowledging this fact underscores how staid so many representations of the middle space/the post-avant/etc are. As I mention in the review: Shepherd seems to systematically drain humor from the poets he represents in his anthologies. Shepherd's work, then, as an editor seems to have been much less an accurate representation of the middle space and much more a shaping of that space in his own image.
On a personal note, I was so glad that my students at Illinois Wesleyan got to hear you read last year at the Tongue & Ink conference. I wish I could have been there, but I was away at a conference. I greatly admire your poetry--and I praise it in a review of some recent anthologies (including the "Ultra-Talk" issue of TriQuarterly) which is forthcoming from Pleiades.
All best,
Mike
Oh, we had such a blast at IW! Fantastic students you have.
I appreciate your diction "drain the humor." Something quite medical, sterilizing about the procedure. I wonder if a humorous poem wouldn't itself be sterilized in such a context...
I haven't seen the Am Hybrid volume yet, but am disappointed to hear that hybrid has been white-washed; a cheery grafting of dissimilar tactics with curiously antonymic effect, blending the strains into a homogenized mixture (albeit with chunks of Notley afloat). Hybrid historically used to mark human & animal subjects as subaltern; historically associated with monstrous bodies & suspect breeding processes. With all its connotations of power & mistake & grotesque, I'd rather see it coopted and interrogated than reformed. American Frankensteins. Global Bastards. Lyric Hydra Town. Multivalent Garbage Bread.
V. curious to read your take on the "Ultra-Talk" issue! And thank you for the kind words; flattered!
I love your proposed anthology titles, Danielle!
Here, now, we've got an interesting way to get into the middle, or through it, or around it. Titles like the ones you suggest at least promise, unlike so much of what is called "middle space" poetry, to be really interesting...
Cheers!
Mike
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