I made a list of funny poetry books for you.
Must be a short list.
I get it—you hear “funny poem” and think, “There was an old man from Nantucket….” Or what you like about poetry—the slanting sunlight of the noble stance, perched on a crag; the melancholy swoon for the absent beloved—are the serious feelings. Poetry, after all, is serious business.
But poetry is an impertinent concoction of registers, references and intentions, providing a variety of pleasures, including giggles, chuckles, and/or yucks. The books on this list, then, discuss serious matters in funny ways, or they take the human comedy seriously. Some of these books helped me evaluate my own poems—my own stance in regard to various impulses to write—when I was working on The Coronation of the Ghost.
Now, the kind of laugh a funny line of poetry gets can sound like a huff or nothing at all. But there are similarities between the comedian and the poet that go deeper than sharing basement stages. We share rhetorical devices: understatement, overstatement, and misdirection, to name three. Some of us make fun of ourselves. And we have filthy mouths. Like the comic working with rhythm, time limits, expectations, poets also work inside and push against forms, whether or not that form is imposed from without (sonnet, ghazal) or arises from the possibilities and customs of the language (free verse).
And we also push against the received ideas of the art and of the moment. One way to reframe expectations is to rebuild them from the inside. I play with the sonnet in The Coronation of the Ghost, a form that others have painted over with love and argument, raided for parts, abandoned in all but the name, and even restored for historical accuracy. The funny in the poetry on this list helped me pump weird gasses into the rebuilt room and also move walls. Other poems in these books helped me move on up from the self-aggrandizing melancholy pup tent to more delightful abodes. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to give up brooding on the heath; there are melancholy passages in Coronation: as the title suggests, I was feeling belated, all of us the late us, and one speaker crowns herself for it, but that happens at the top of a see-saw. I think I overbalanced my despair, tipping the scales to delight, ending the book with a dram of hope. And if so, some of these books by funny people helped me do it.
Yeah, No by Jordan Davis
“Baffle baffle baffle disclose / … baffle disclose / …Baffle. Baffle.” That’s the final stanza in the title sequence of Davis’s previous book, Shell Game, and I read it as not just an ars poetica for the sequence but for the tricky camaraderie with which many of Davis’s poems meet us on the street. That the explanation of what he’s up to comes after pages of verbal sleight of hand is one of the ingredients in Davis’s sense of humor. In his new book, Yeah, No, he writes emotion with Classical distance and wit, the sentiment arriving, for instance, as we run through the baffles of enjambment in “Cassiopeia”:
…so far
the five stars
haven’t left
their omega,
Anna,
in bed
with a flower,
a pink
zinnia.
Why are the stars devoted to Anna, who is in bed with someone else, a pink zinnia? I especially like the gesture at an abecedarian poem—prepped with “omega” and delivered by pointing from “Anna” to “zinnia”—and we’re freed from having to read an entire abecedarian.
Davis has said that he likes his poetry to be flexible and irascible, with a bite. Sometimes in Yeah, No the irascibility is pronounced: Davis has some lessons to impart because “…if / dignity means a lot to me so does linguistics.” But Davis knows that dignity can maintain itself while being silly, as in this couplet that possibly suggests a glum moment at the breakfast table:
Corn cakes,
why do you make me sad?
Elsewhere (two pages earlier) he signals his astringent intentions with “Bad Poem”:
Put that rock down
Davis warns his impulse to throw poetry rocks that it mustn’t, but what would the bad poem throw stones at? (It might eat the stone, i.e., the reader might.) At the same time, he warns us: one of these poems might not put down that rock—that criticism or insult—but just might go ahead and throw it. I say, throw the rock, read the book!
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
The speaker in these poems admires the mango. The book begins with the prefatory “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential,” in which the speaker dreams “of one day being as fearless as a mango.” This odd claim for the tropical fruit comes to make sense as the themes are developed, and while those are serious ones—being distasteful to one’s mother and feeling inadequate for that and for the culture’s rejection of queer people—the arc of the sorrow bends toward comedy:
…[my mother’s] grandchildren ready to gobble.
They will be better than mangoes, my brothers.
Though I have trouble imagining what that could be.
Flying mangoes, perhaps…Beautiful sons.
The intention to find silliness in the midst of pain characterizes the collection. Confronting his sadness, for instance, the speaker wonders if anyone could explain it to him:
Maybe the centipede in the cellar
knows with its many disgusting legs
why I am sad. No one else does.
No explanation is found, but when
…my host sister
…said, SOIS HEREUX.
BE HAPPY…miraculously,
I wasn’t sad anymore.
All I felt was the desire to slap my host sister.
Joker, Joker, Deuce by Paul Beatty
Beatty became famous as a fearless satirist when his novel The Sellout won the National Book Critics Circle Award and then the Booker, but about fifteen years earlier he had received accolades for his poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Café, where he was named the Grand Poetry Slam Champion. In Joker, Joker, Deuce, his second book of poems, he tells us the stories of his coming up, making fun of himself (“im gonna be / the bulimic bohemian // eatin up my people / then purgin their regurgitated words”) and everyone else in order to present the depredations of racism. After a vivid description of the messed up feet “my soul is rested on,” for instance, he says, “dont nobody appreciate feet / like [blacks] do” and then tells an anecdote about falling in love with his teacher’s feet in second grade and dropping his pencil a lot so that he could look at them. As their origins at the Nuyorican suggest, these poems ask to be read aloud — they give the mouth a workout and jump and slalom down the page.
I Am Your Slave. Now Do As I Say by Anthony Madrid
JAM me in hot hell. Make me drive a street-cleaning truck
in the folds of the Devil’s anus, but don’t make me read all this Irish poetry.
All right, these lines made me laugh out loud. I think Madrid, the poet (“Madrid” is also a character in the poems), loves many Irish poems, including, I bet, the peat bog poems of Heaney to which the next lines allude. Or maybe the dislike is sincere. Regardless, this one’s also funny for its hypocrisy, which we get because earlier “Madrid” says he “…scissored out all the distichs [he] judged obscene.” Like outrageousness, misdirection is a tactic Madrid shares with the stand-up comic:
We
Split open the Big Bad Wolf…
The girl who stepped out from that chassis was not | the same as the one who went in. This new one got into Northwestern and majored in International Finance…
…Uppity little MacGuffin. You
Control the minds of the nation’s youth…
These bits should give you a sense of the field in which the Madrid circus performs, where erudition, persnicketiness, amorous flights, silliness, grandstanding, prayerful ejaculation, smut make a spectacle that will recalibrate your meter.
What It Is Like by Charles North
Although “A Note to Tony Towle (After WS),” a send-up of Stevens’ “Snow-Man,” heads toward critique (“deracination is fast qualifying as essence”), it makes darkly funny stops along the way, such as, “not to wake up and feel the morning air as a collaborator / thrown from some bluer and more intelligent planet.” And North melts the Stevensian frost by tap-dancing in the vaudevillian’s oversized shoes: “One must have breakfasted often on automobile primer /…and have read Paradise Lost aloud many times in a Yiddish accent…” (Try this! It’s weird.) Sure, the vaudevillian, like the tramp of silent film, is standing in a puddle, but there are poems in the book that are primarily funny, such as “The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight,” which compares the beloved in a number of let me count the unflattering ways:
More reliable than bail-jumpers
Defter than those who are all thumbs
…You are faster than tortoises
Tighter than muumuus
…Hotter than meat-lockers are you…
Philosophical, smitten, absurd—North packs a lot of stances into his poems, and although What It Is Like offers a varied, erudite experience, North’s sense of humor runs through his observations and his fine music.
Poemland by Chelsey Minnis
I wish I had invented the Minnis form. I wish I had thought up the Minnis voice, but there was no chance of that. In Poemland, Minnis writes a kind of femme absurd in stanzas of widely spaced four to six lines that peter out. A tipsy, wordly, girly persona speaks from these poems, and I hope you will read that gendered description as feminist; it might help to know that Minnis was included in the anthology Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, described by its editors as using “gender stereotypes to subversive ends.” In that persona I hear a little Lucille Ball, if Ball had spilled eros on her goofiness, a little Mae West if West had attended a women’s college:
I like a man in a fur coat…especially a man with very little self-discipline…
…He is just a little tramp…
The subject of the statements is often poetry itself, which is a great way for Minnis to evoke situations without belaboring the point:
In a poem…
You have to make a charitable sentiment…
…I like it to be very obscenely old fashioned like an old fashioned stripper…
And:
This is when you throw your shoe at the door…
And it is like moving the old man’s hand to your knee…
And it is like poking someone with their own crutch…
Your behavior does not please god but it pleases yourself…
I like reading around in the book. The reiteration of a small number of themes invites flipping back and forth, searching for the jokes and thrown to the mat tropes that please you.
The Orange and Other Poems by Wendy Cope
Cope can be downright silly, as in “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis” (although there may be more than silliness at play here that readers in the know would know):
It was a dream I had last week
And some sort of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem
But I love the title.
In general, Cope handles keen observations about gender roles and relations, as well as occasions for delight and love, in neat, rhymed packages, using both the concision and the rhyme to comic and pathetic effect. She also uses it to skewer, or corkscrew, stereotypes, as in “Loss.”
The day he moved out was terrible—
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.
Mourning the impossibility of having a drink rather than the end of the relationship is a move that Dorothy Parker would approve. That said, Cope doesn’t sound as if she’d feel at home at the Algonquin. But you can decide, for she herself reads the audiobook. Her careful inflections together with her British accent bring us the droll, nimble music of her thinking.
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland
The satirical title should signal a poet whose medium is irony. Hoagland can write about a lovely romantic moment, but he’s going to approach it at an angle, as in “Romantic Moment,” which discusses the mating habits of other species:
…And if she was a Brazilian leopard frog she would wrap her impressive
tongue three times around my right thigh and
pummel me lightly against the surface of our pond
and I would know her feelings were sincere.
Hoagland handles societal problems with a storyteller’s gift for jawin’ and feel for the trajectory of the plot, charming specificity, anger that, we understand, is directed at himself as well as the situation, and comic flourishes. In a poem concerned with race in America, for instance, he describes the American brand of whiteness as enfeebled, “…the way that skim milk can barely / remember the cow.” Rereading Hoagland, I wonder if unconsciously I lifted the description of trees as arthritic, which I use in the first poem of The Coronation of the Ghost. I don’t have to wonder but remember that I turned to Hoagland in the past, as I do now, for his strength in sharing weaknesses and mistakes and for being just damn funny.
