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

In the 2009 issue of this journal dedicated to humor in contemporary American poetry, the editors Denise Duhamel and Salvatore Attardo wrote, “It is fair to say, if a little depressing, that not much has been written about humorous poetry” (Duhamel and Attardo 2009: p. 281). Since then, Rachel Trousdale has published the edited collection Humor in modern American poetry (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the monograph Humor, empathy, and community in twentieth-century American poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021). Although the former takes in James Merrill and John Ashbery, and the latter contains a final chapter on contemporary poetry, both books focus on early to mid twentieth-century modernists.

Laugh lines is thus a welcome addition to the scant number of commentaries on the role of humor in more recent US poetry. This critical dearth Carrie Connors rightly puts down to “reverence for the traditionally lofty genre of lyric” (p. 8) which, since modernism, has tended to stand in synecdochally for “poetry” itself by eliding other genres – like the ballad or the ode – within its span. When a short, meditative poem that eschews narrative in favor of complex modes of subjectivity is taken as typical, any humor it might possess is usually treated as ancillary to its “deeper” meanings. In contrast, “avoiding the homogenizing trend of lyricization,” Conners sees humor as intrinsic to the analysis of her chosen works, more especially because it plays off against the genres in which they’re written: “I contend that the restrictions and traditions of various poetic genres recall the societal constructs that the poets ridicule” (p. 9). The poems in question are not only humorous, but are humorous in relation to their forms, because the breaking of formal convention is part and parcel of what makes them funny. They are described as “contemporary,” even though none is more recent than 2002, because Conners asserts – rather than fully argues, it must be said – that the US political climate shifted after 9/11 in such a way as to produce a different kind of politically engaged verse (pp. 6–7). Her poets are, in order of discussion, Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn and Russell Edson, and their chosen works all come from the last four decades of the twentieth century, a time when the use of traditional forms came back into contention, not least from the American New Formalist poets.

Conners’ first study looks at what she calls “the politics of hedonism” in Marilyn Hacker’s Love, death and the changing of the seasons, a lesbian queering of the traditional sonnet sequence in terms of a “Dionysian treatment of the subjects of food, drink, shopping, and sex” (p. 19). Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are homoerotic, of course, and so the form has long had a queer heritage. Where Conners breaks new ground is in her emphasis on the hedonistic pleasures that are celebrated in these poems which, invoking Oscar Wilde, she reads in terms of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, but also through Roland Barthes’s notion of jouissance (very roughly, “bliss”), the supposedly quasi-erotic experience of engaging with a disruptive, avant-garde “text;” this, as distinct from the mere plaisir (pleasure) of reading a more conventional “work.” On the one hand, then, Hacker’s hedonism Decadently subverts the spiritualizing tradition of love sonnets, as well as the assumption that feminist poetry should be earnestly didactic; on the other, her use of colloquial and even crude language when describing her love affair with a younger woman produces “many instances of humorous incongruity” (p. 33) between the conventions of the form and its subversive content, and these amount to jouissance. Humorous incongruity is at the heart of Conners’ particular interest in genres and their destabilization, especially Elliott Oring’s notion of “appropriate incongruity.” Unlike other theories of incongruous juxtaposition, “appropriate incongruity” resists attempts at resolution and, in Hacker’s sonnets, “The remaining unsettling excess creates moments of disruptive bliss” (p. 33).

Conners unpacks Oring’s ideas in more detail in her analysis of Ed Dorn’s wonderfully absurdist Wild West parody Gunslinger, which riffs on epic poetry and employs a version of Howard Hughes as its villain. Lifting a phrase from the poem, Conners writes that “Dorn both ‘mimics and mocks’ the system of capitalism in order to expose its flaws, but, more importantly, to show how it generates myths and appropriates cultural narratives to sustain itself” (p. 81). Gunslinger also very freely mimics and mocks the cultural narrative of the western genre, and in doing so effectively disarms the macho tropes of its frontier justice narrative. But Dorn’s drug-addled Wild West never resolves into a neat political allegory, so Conners’ reading zooms in on the Hughes figure, as in the following, which alludes to Hughes’s germophobia and his status as the “Big Cheese”:

For He was decoyed as the cheeze in a burger

Upon a long white stretcher ferried by two poodles

While he shuffled along with his feet encased

In kleenex boxes He wobbled astride an industrial broom (Dorn 1989: p. 90)

The politics of incongruity are less at issue in the chapters on Harryette Mullen and Edson Russell because the genres of the works in question are less traditional and more fluid in form. Drawing upon Oulipian practices, Mullen’s Sleeping with the dictionary is politically invested both at the level of the individual word – Conners analyses her deployment of anagrams – and the genre, for example in fairy tales (Mullen 2002). Here Conners elegantly unpacks Mullen’s “European Folk Tale Variant,” a subversive retelling of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as a kind of rap sheet in journalese in which the heroine is recast as a burglar:

The finicky home invader helped herself to generous portions of the ursine honey eaters’ whole grain breakfast cereal, vandalized their heirloom antique furniture. Then, after tiring herself out with so much wanton destruction, the platinum blonde delinquent took a refreshing beauty nap in the bruin family’s bedroom – just like she thought she was a guest at a cozy bed and breakfast inn. (Mullen 2002: p. 24)

What makes this funny, Conners remarks, citing Salvatore Attardo, is “register humor”: the complication of the “simple” fairy tale being retold in “the dramatic, legally inflected language of a piece of sensationalist crime journalism” (p. 67), whereby the white, “platinum blonde” Goldilocks is reified as a hoodlum, in the way that young Black people are so often typified by the media.

Rather than undermining the genre of the prose poem, the darkly comic parables of Russell Edson seem ideally fitted to its protean energies, not least because of their post humanist attention to the lives and subjectivities of other creatures and objects. The tension is rather between the fable-like mode in which they address the reader and the troubling absurdism of their narratives, creating what Edson himself called “the humor of the deep uncomfortable metaphor” (cited in Conners: p. 111). Conners chooses to read Edson’s fables through the form of the bestiary, but one in which “people often take the place of beasts in funny role reversals” and so “turn our attention to our anthropomorphic tendencies” (p. 107). “Ape and coffee,” for instance, begins: “Some coffee had gotten on a man’s ape. The man said, animal did you get on my coffee?” (cited in Conners: p. 121).

Throughout, Conners pairs the analysis of her chosen works with examples by other poets which also demonstrate “the intersection of humor, poetic genre, and political critique” (p. 11). This can be useful when comparing Mullens’ anagrams to those of another African–American poet, Terrance Hayes, or her procedural poetics with Charles Bernstein’s With strings. It’s much less successful when drawing analogies between Dorn’s Gunslinger and Derek Walcott’s Omeros, which take different approaches to the epic. For all its Pop Art cuteness, Dorn’s work is more aligned with the mock-epic tradition of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras or Byron’s Don Juan. Walcott critiques the imperialism of the epic but, even as Omeros vernacularizes the Greek heroes, its expansive beauties also pay homage to Homer and his ocean. Comparisons between Edson’s poems and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of red as a “hybrid genre” (p. 131), while apt, are a little cursory, whereas R.S. Gwynn’s “Among Philistines” is employed more or less as a straw man to Hacker’s freer approach to traditional form.

Conners is a fine critic, and the strength of Laugh lines is in its individual case studies. But questions about what might overarchingly distinguish the humor of these poets – indeed, what might make it uniquely poetic in nature – are rather left hanging. In a coda, she argues that humor “involves a critical distance from its subject matter” which “allows people to see that social conventions and societal structures are not necessarily fixed or unchangeable,” relating this to the humorous subversion of generic expectations which “mimics and perhaps encourages the process of an active citizen questioning the justness of their society’s conventions” (pp. 138–39). This is a leap, and assumes too direct a link between an activist and a more purely literary politics; between political engagement and aesthetic estrangement. After all, since modernism, versions of what the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky called “defamiliarization” are pretty much taken as a pre-existing feature of the literary function as it is now conceived; Barthes’s jouissance is arguably one of them. Conners might therefore have thought just a little more about the relationship between literary transgression and humorous insubordination.