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Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.9.1.0192

2333-9934

Kyle Smith,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Carrie Conners’s Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry is a delight to read. She argues that while “humorous social and political critique” (4) of contemporary American poetry has been the subject of several studies, specifying Ronald Wallace’s God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry and Calista McRae’s Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America, there is much still to be said about the topic, especially on specific genres that are often overlooked such as prose poems and epics. Conners’s study explores the work of four poets writing between the 1960s and 2001: Harryette Mullen, Russell Edson, Edward Dorn, and Marilyn Hacker. Each author receives their own chapter, and Conners smartly cuts her study off at 9/11, as post-September 11 work merits its own analysis. Conners moves from the most restrictive genre, the sonnet, to the least restrictive, starting with Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of Seasons and then taking up Mullen’s procedural poems, Dorn’s mock epic and, finally, Edson’s prose poems.The first chapter offers a close reading of Hacker’s book-length sequence of sonnets that carefully chronicles the poet’s relationship with a younger woman. Conners argues that Hacker emphasizes sensory and intellectual hedonism as a political framework. “Using pleasure as a measure of value,” according to Connors, “creates a system that focuses on situational ethical concerns” (21). Connors celebrates this in a manner consistent with Hacker’s own critique of the dominant (patriarchal and heterosexual) systems in her work. Referencing authors like Oscar Wilde and Roland Barthes, Conners links Hacker’s book to a much longer tradition of self-indulgence and amorous enjoyment that “places the onus of moral responsibility on the individual rather than society” (21).In her discussion of Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Conners teases apart the meaning of the title and the poems in entrancing ways. I have joyfully struggled through many a crossword, and Conners’s argument in this chapter suggests that readers are challenged “to discover the structural principle” of the poems using “investigative skills not unlike those used to solve a clue’s riddle.” Any lover of puns and other wordplay, Conners suggest, will appreciate the “creative constraints based upon the same chuckle- and/or groan-worthy word games” (46) that Mullen relies on. The political is personal in this text, however, as Conners points out, noting Mullen’s use of humor to “expose the damaging effects that the process of reification has on oppressed peoples and to interrogate and critique the language that sustains their oppression” (49). A reader looking for wordplay without politics or questioning of the capitalist system would not enjoy the revelations that emerge from even a cursory reading of this work. Conners dissects four poems at length: “Jingle Jangle,” an abecedarian; “The Lunar Lutheran,” a long series of anagrams; “European Folktale Variant,” a prose poem that retells the story of Goldilocks; and “Variation on a Theme Park,” a sonnet that reworks Shakespeare’s sonnet 130. Connors juxtaposes each poem with other, similar poems, which helps to frame them in their political as well as social environment. The result is a set of analyses that leave me wanting to pick up the original texts and possibly even use them in a literature course.In the next chapter Conners offers a detailed analysis of the Dorn’s Gunslinger, an epic-style poem, delving into the multitude of literary and cultural references while noting its numerous parodies and criticisms of capitalist culture. Dorn clearly has much to say about religion, Howard Hughes, capitalism, and (misguided) American ideals, which Conners does her best to unravel. Yet this chapter is the most difficult to follow; in her attempts to link Gunslinger to other epic poems, it seems as if she is trying too hard to fit it into a larger tradition of epic poetry. She concludes the chapter by warning readers that intense engagement with the text is necessary and that the “common reader could not be expected to know the numerous allusions to physics, classical literature, mythology, phenomenology, etc.” (104) that are strewn throughout the poem. While it is all done with good humor, this chapter still feels a little like an exercise in grasping at straws.Readers might not think of the poems Conners looks at in the last chapter as poems when they first look at them, especially as Russell Edson uses traditional paragraph indentation for his prose poetry. Yet Conners makes a convincing argument that they are and that they are political even though they do not “directly assert cultural critique” (105). Conners’s wit jostles and cavorts with Edson’s own, with her own enjoyment of the work woven throughout her discussion of the prose poem’s history. She astutely connects the whimsical tone of the poems to issues such as “fear, distrust, or suspicion of anything deemed ‘other’” (122) and failure/refusal to see the realities of a given situation. I find myself wanting more of these prose poems after relishing the snippets that Conners showcases.Conners ties the major authors of her study to other works of literature and criticism that may interest readers. In her conclusion, she comments that humor “involves a critical distance from the subject matter,” meaning that “one must take a step back and view the subject of the joke from a different perspective” (138). She follows her own advice in her critiques of the works. This relatively short book is easy to read and would work well alongside the original texts she studies in a variety of classes, including those in literature and political science.