Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America 9781501750991, 9781501750984

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LYRIC AS COMEDY

LYRIC AS COMEDY

T H E P O E TI CS OF A B J EC T I O N I N P OST WA R A M E R­I­C A

Calista McRae

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

 “Heaven Be a Xanax,” from ­There Are More Beautiful T ­ hings Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker. Copyright © 2017 by Morgan Parker. Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: McRae, Calista, 1986– author. Title: Lyric as comedy : the poetics of abjection in postwar America / Calista McRae. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020000461 (print) | LCCN 2020000462 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501750977 (cloth) | ISBN 9781501750984 (epub) | ISBN 9781501750991 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—20th century—­ History and criticism. | American poetry— 21st century—History and criticism. | Abjection in literature. | Humor in literature. Classification: LCC PS325 .M464 2020 (print) | LCC PS325 (ebook) | DDC 811/.509—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000461 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc .gov/2020000462 Jacket illustration: Sean Landers, Joke? Joke! Joke, 2015. Oil on linen, 52 x 72 in. © Sean Landers. Used by permission.

Co nte nts

Acknowl­edgments  vii Permissions  ix

Introduction: Consider What That Feels Like

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1. Comedy in an Age of Close Reading: John Berryman’s Dream Songs 25 2. Robert Lowell: The Noise of One’s Own Voice

52

3. A. R. Ammons: Comic Badness

82

4. Terrance Hayes: Floundering Interiors

115

5. Coming to Terms with Our Self: Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, Monica Youn 146 Notes  179 Index  209

A c k n o w l­e d g m e nts

From the outset of this proj­ect, Helen Vendler was exceedingly generous with her time, encouragement, and guidance; her remarks on initial drafts of this manuscript made me rethink how I wrote about poetry, and conversations with her have been heartening. Philip Fisher was willing to have long, freewheeling discussions about the book, which left me clearer-­headed. Stephanie Burt offered suggestions that invariably turned out to be right. Bill Pritchard and Howell Chickering introduced me to poems, and their ways of reading have stuck with me. Philip Coleman, Marta Figlerowicz, and Walt Hunter provided extremely helpful advice about the stages to publication; Marissa Grunes and Sarang Gopalakrishnan, both gifted with bizarrely fine ears, went over many of ­these pages. At the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I am lucky to have colleagues who make work a genuine plea­sure. I’m especially grateful to Miriam Ascarelli, Louise Castronova, Winifred Cummings, Willie Green, Britt Holbrook, ­Wieslawa Kapturkiewicz, Eric Katz, Megan O’Neill, Rebekah Rutkoff, and two mentors, Burt Kimmelman and Bernadette Longo. I am equally fortunate to work with NJIT’s bright, considerate, and deadpan students. In NJIT’s interlibrary loan office, Aimee Calderon and Rhonda Greene-­ Carter have handled my overly frequent requests patiently and quickly. The Brooklyn Public Library and the New York Public Library have been invaluable; the book would not have gotten off the ground without them. I am also indebted once again to Cecily Marcus and Kate Hujda, at the Upper Midwest Literary Archives of the University of Minnesota. It’s hard to convey how much this book’s two anonymous reviewers improved the manuscript; they ­were incredibly discerning, generous, and patient. So was Mahinder S. Kingra, throughout the pro­cess: he gave me inspired suggestions and flexible deadlines, both at moments when I needed them. Bethany Wasik, Matthew Kopel, Michelle Witkowski, Michael Durnin (an exceptionally deft copyeditor), and Lynne Ferguson gave me all kinds of help in ­later stages. For making each day’s walk to campus somewhat brighter, I am grateful to Peter Monti and Anita Coogan of the Raptor Trust, and to Claus Holzapfel vii

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Ac know l­e dgments

and Mirko Schoenitz. For friendship and conversation, I thank Gaëlle Cogan, Marissa Grunes, Alan Lawn, James McDonnell, Daisuke O, Stella Wang, and Michael Weinstein, and my ­family—­Subramanian Gopalakrishnan and Rekha Warriar, and John, Claire, Annika, and Arleigh McRae—­all of whom continue to make life happier. Sarang: thank you for the brilliant and completely foul poems, for tramping across the city to misidentify shorebirds, and for much ­else. Parts of ­these chapters ­were given at conferences of the American Lit­er­a­ ture Association (for the Robert Lowell Society), the Modern Language Association (for the ­Women’s and Gender Studies forum), the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, and the New Jersey College En­glish Association. Some of the book’s ideas began to take shape in “ ‘Now someone’s talking’: Unpunctuation and the Deadpan Poem,” in Modernism/Modernity 25, no. 1 ( January 2018): 1–20. Research for the book was supported by an NJIT start-up grant, and the cost of indexing was covered by the Department of Humanities at NJIT.

Permissions

I am grateful to Martha Mayou for permission to quote from John Berryman’s unpublished writing, and to John Ammons for permission to quote from A. R. Ammons’s notebooks. I am also grateful for permission to reprint the following:

Marcus Wicker “Self Dialogue Watching Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip,” from Maybe the Saddest T ­ hing by Marcus Wicker. Copyright © 2013 by Marcus Wicker. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Morgan Parker See copyright page of this volume.

Kenneth Koch “To My Heart at the Close of Day,” from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch by Kenneth Koch. Copyright © 2005 by The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

A. R. Ammons “Ballad.” Copyright © 1975 by A. R. Ammons; “I Broke a Sheaf of Light.” Copyright © 1955 by A. R. Ammons; “Renovating.” Copyright © 1972 by A. R. Ammons, from The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, vol. 1, 1955–1977, by A. R. ix

x P e rmi ssions

Ammons, edited by Robert M. West. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Com­pany, Inc. “Their Sex Life.” Copyright © 1990 by A. R. Ammons; “Good God.” Copyright © 2005 by John R. Ammons., from The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, vol. 2, 1978–2005, by A. R. Ammons, edited by Robert M. West. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Com­pany, Inc.

Terrance Hayes “The Blue Terrance: I loved Bruce Lee and a ten dollar ukulele . . .” and “The Blue Baraka,” from Wind in a Box by Terrance Hayes. Copyright © 2006 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “How to Be Drawn to Trou­ble,” “New York Poem,” and “Wigphrastic,” from How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes. Copyright © 2015 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “A House is Not a Home,” “All the Way Live,” and “The Avocado,” from Lighthead: Poems by Terrance Hayes. Copyright © 2010 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Natalie Shapero Natalie Shapero, excerpts from “What W ­ ill She Go As?,” “Teacup,” “Hot Streak,” and “My Hand and Cold,” from Hard Child. Copyright © 2017 by Natalie Shapero. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Com­pany, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www​.­coppercanyonpress​.­org.

Monica Youn Monica Youn, excerpts from “Ignatz Pacificus,” “Ersatz Ignatz,” “Semper Ignatz,” “On Ignatz’s Eyebrow,” and “So Sweetly Slumbers Ignatz in His Sylvan Bower,” from Ignatz. Copyright © 2010 by Monica Youn. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Com­pany, LLC, on behalf of Four Way Books, www​.­fourwaybooks​.­com. All rights reserved.

P e r m i ss i o n s

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A version of “Comedy in an Age of Close Reading: John Berryman’s Dream Songs” first appeared as “ ‘­There ­Ought to Be a Law’: The Unruly Comedy of The Dream Songs,” Modern Philology 114, no. 2 (November 2016), https://­www​ .­journals​.­uchicago​.­edu​/­doi​/­abs​/­10​.­1086​/­687117. © 2016 by The University of Chicago.

LYRIC AS COMEDY

Introduction Consider What That Feels Like

In the last fifteen minutes of Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), Richard Pryor turns to the day he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine. The way he ends is an example of poetic closure that has stayed with me for years. First he thanks his audience; then he reminds them of the jokes they told about him while he was in the hospital. As he is talking, he strikes a match (he had asked the audience for a light a minute ­earlier; since then he has been fiddling with the matchbook someone handed him), and says “What’s that.”1 No question mark, barely any pause. He moves its flame horizontally in front of his face: “Richard Pryor r­ unning down the street.” The recording ends a second l­ater, on a hard-­to-­read smile and an arm thrown up in a wave. ­There is something formally striking in how effortlessly Pryor makes his run down the street and his walk off the stage converge. It is not just the poignant image of a h ­ uman having the tiny lifespan of a lit match. Pryor has spent an hour alone on a large stage, in his bright red suit, mostly facing utter darkness and the glare of a large spotlight; the match, for an instant, gives him a tiny double, as he doubles himself into an ­actual joke. The disaster itself and Pryor’s versions of it become fused in “Self Dialogue Watching Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip,” from Marcus Wicker’s Maybe the Saddest ­Thing (2012):

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2 Introduct ion

What of stepping outside the door on fire? What of r­ unning down a faceless road Let alone a busy strip, enflamed? Got-­damn! ­There must be 10,000 selves in an epidermis. Imagine Yours. Imagine the skin-­peeling flame of each selfInflicted arson. Imagine the freedom to say God Damn! To consider what that feels like. To speak A wild geyser spraying from a busted hydrant. You watch Richard Pryor in a loud fire engine Red suit—­all flashing lights, sirens: 10,000 selves Vis­i­ble to the world, & consider what that feels like. To think, you may or may not be God damned. To know, at least, your dick is intact.2 In this exhilaratingly rangy almost-­sonnet, Wicker’s speaker is thinking about what it might have been like to be Pryor, and about the intersubjective charge of Pryor’s per­for­mances. Look at all the open-­ended yous, which encompass not only the selves of the speaker’s “dialogue” but the reader. And notice the way distance collapses through associative leaps: the loud red suit leads to a literal emergency vehicle, and to the distress signals of an excruciatingly vis­i­ble act. Wicker is thinking about the limits of sympathy: while the “busted hydrant” suggests both a damaged ­human and a ­human who has shaken off his inner censor, it also allows for a wishful extinguishing of the fire, on the part of the poet. And he is thinking about humor itself, especially in the final line, which recalls Pryor’s retort to ­those who claim he has “been punished by God”: “No. If God wanted to punish my ass, he’d have burnt my dick.”3 Ten thousand shaky selves; one miraculous, corporeal preservation. Literary criticism of the last fifty years has tended to assume that to be funny, poetry must avoid what we have come to call lyric. Humor is the territory of avant-­garde proj­ects, or of witty, formalist, occasional verse, or of other kinds of poems that are expected to have more distance from personal feeling.4 But the recent lyric is itself the site of an unpredictable, unruly comedy. While it is often entangled with intense feeling, it is also entangled with humor, just as humor in one’s a­ ctual life is sometimes the byproduct of something about which one cares deeply. Wicker’s poem, which includes the act of “stepping outside” the traditional ­little room of the sonnet in its first line, also imagines what it might be like to speak within another genre, to “speak / a wild geyser spraying from a busted hydrant.” To do so might be to “stand in front of an audience and say ‘God

Consid er What That F e e l s L i k e

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damn’ in ­every way he could think to say it,” as Hilton Als recalls, or to change identity by changing voice or posture.5 Wicker is not the only con­temporary American poet drawn ­toward and drawing on Pryor: Adrian Matejka has described how Pryor’s monologues helped him “avoid some of that natu­r al impulse ­toward lyricism” in Map to the Stars (2017), and Cathy Park Hong mentioned Pryor’s work in a 2013 lecture, where she spoke of her desire to bring stand-up comedy to bear on poetry. “I’m often overcome,” Hong remarked, “with an impulse to rub [poetry’s] nose in the mud.”6 It is as if Pryor’s per­for­mances, and the genre he stretched, are seen as a kind of opposite to what poetry is usually said to entail. Lyric as Comedy makes a set of generalizations about the postwar American lyric and the comic opportunities within it, opportunities derived in part from twentieth-­century conceptions of lyric as exceptional. Rei Terada, surveying the history of the recent lyric, finds that “Lyricism is one of the qualities that is fi­nally synonymous with the fiction of quality, with the idea that ­there is quality—­whether conceived as ontology or as effect—­left over ­after quantity.”7 Notions of something special cling to lyric, as Wicker and Matejka and Hong each suggest. It continues to be i­magined as aesthetically prestigious, and as circling around a self set off from the social world. Such a view imposes odd expectations on poems that can entail much more. One explanation for this emphasis on quality has been offered by recent work in historical poetics. A major premise of the New Lyric Studies is that what twentieth-­century critics began to call “lyric” is largely a twentieth-­ century idea, taking the place of genres that ­were originally more culturally and historically enmeshed. As lyric gathers genres into itself, both lyric and poetry become sprawling, often almost synonymous concepts. That shift, as ­Virginia Jackson asserts, has consequences for twentieth-­century poetics: “When the stipulative functions of par­tic­u­lar genres are collapsed into one big idea of poems as lyr­ics, then the only function poems can perform in our culture is to become individual or communal ideals.”8 In turn, this pro­cess of lyricization—­what Jackson and Yopie Prins elsewhere describe as “the history of thinking about poetry as more and more abstract and ineffable”—­ encourages self-­consciousness about poetry as exceptional.9 In trying to define an increasingly idealized, capacious genre, criticism turns to distinctions that do not always fit with how an ­actual poem actually behaves. As Gillian White’s Lyric Shame makes clear, poets writing what looks like mainstream lyric, from the modernist era through the pre­sent day, are uncomfortably aware of the statements potentially made by writing about the personal.10 While critics like Jackson, Prins, and White have demonstrated that lyric’s conflicted

4 Introduct ion

theorizations have been productive for poetry, the comic effects of this confusion have not yet been fully recognized.

Ideal Poems and Their Prob­lems In many representative twentieth-­century definitions, lyric centers above all on subjectivity: around 1957, M. H. Abrams defines lyric as “any fairly short, non-­narrative poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a pro­cess of thought and feeling.”11 Abrams would have recognized as archetypal lyric the following lines from his near con­temporary John Berryman, who tucks his state of mind into a parenthesis that takes up half the poem. —­How are you?—­Fine, fine. (I have tears unshed. ­There is h ­ ere near the bottom of my chest a loop of cold, on the right. A ­thing hurts somewhere up left in my head. I have a gang of old sins unconfessed. I shovel out of sight a-­many ills ­else, I might mention too, such as her leaving and my hopeless book. No more of that, my friend. It’s good of you to ask and) How are you?12 ­ hether one is considering lyric on performative or formal grounds, it is usuW ally positioned as the discursive opposite to the conversational mode of How are you? and Fine. But Berryman, who frames his poem with that exchange, seems to be writing a lyric quin­tes­sen­tial (according to the definitions I’ll discuss) to the point of being slightly absurd. In the de­cades before Berryman tells reader but not friend how he is, the term lyric becomes increasingly associated with the private self. As scholars like Jackson and White have observed, the closeness of the association can be partly attributed to the continued life of John Stuart Mill’s “What is Poetry?” (1833).13 Mill distinguishes between the way events act on our feelings (through novels, gossip, and other supposedly shallow forms) and the way the “repre­ sen­ta­tion of feeling” acts through poems.14 This distinction allows him to make a case for poetry as “the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of the h ­ uman heart” and for the poet’s “utter unconsciousness of a listener”; as Sarah MacKenzie Zimmerman writes, Mill “inaugurates a critical history

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of divorcing lyricism from rhetorical—­and by extension, social—­concerns,” and thus from an audience.15 Without a listener, in complete privacy, Berryman’s speaker can encapsulate the difficulty of putting how one is feeling into words (most of which, in his poem, are monosyllables). His “Fine, fine” collides with unreleased tears, that physical symptom of being unable to express; the awkward, endless “loop of cold, on the right” chills the rest of the parenthesis, and the indescribable “­thing” that throbs to one side of the head can only vaguely be pointed at. Mill’s desire to elevate poetry, to keep it ­free of any vulgar awareness of a readership, leads to a standard postwar way of discussing lyric: abstracted from most contexts but that of a universal h ­ uman self. A ­ fter being reaffirmed in W. B. Yeats’s belief that the poet “never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast ­table,” it is turned into textbook form by the New Critics.16 It reappears in Northrop Frye’s 1957 explanation that the “poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners,” in Tilottama Rajan’s 1985 description of “pure lyric” as “a monological form,” and in Harold Bloom’s 1994 reference to “the autonomy of imaginative lit­er­a­ture and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.”17 In such accounts (most forcefully in Bloom, who sees his favored lit­er­a­ture as beleaguered by more populist forms) poetry centers on the individual, on the self barely keeping it together in Berryman’s rueful, surly, down-­and-­out yet wry Dream Song. As Jackson writes, the idea of an abstracted personal lyric as given shape by the New Criticism “remains the normative model for the production and reception of most poetry.”18 That is to say, the question of How are you has come to dominate lyric reading, especially in the common postwar pedagogical form of What can we deduce about this fictive speaker. By 1960, most poems are read as expressing fictive inner lives, partly so that poems can partake in what Herbert Tucker calls “the myth of unconditioned subjectivity”: if ­there is no a­ ctual writer or history attached to a poem, the utterances of its “speaker” have some hope of universality.19 But although The Dream Songs announces a speaker named Henry rather than John, its transparent subject is an ­actual poet. And while Berryman’s lines seem of a piece with what Frederick Buell, reviewing the midcentury’s anthology wars, sums up as “New Critical formalism, ‘academic’ poetry, and emphasis on the poem as a closed, crafted artifact,” the seams are beginning to show.20 ­There are traces of embarrassment, resentment, and comedy in how this speaker relays how he is, to himself and to a listener, over and over; this Dream Song is number 207 out of 385. The poem evinces constant self-­ consciousness about its postures and ways of confiding: it is not just that the

6 Introduct ion

speaker bristles at the question of his clueless colleague, but that he is in a position of addressing a reader, someone who seeks to pin down a tone and situation. His “No more of that, my friend” seems at least half-­addressed to that reader.21 And even within his s­ ilent answer, he is growing a bit rhetorical, mentioning the last two “ills” by saying he ­will not mention them. Attempts to mark the generic bound­aries of the lyric—to seal it off from other kinds of language, as the parentheses in Song 207 self-­consciously seal off the private from the social—­have contributed to the sense that lyric is exceptional: a fluctuating mass of mutually reinforcing ideals continues to assert the importance of quality to poetry, and to what poetry is presumed to do. Poems are supposed to be aesthetically accomplished, both finished and polished. (Though Berryman depicts a ragged emotional state, he does so in a scrupulously rhyming form, and his hesitating or somewhat overarticulated cadences come from standard metrical substitutions.) Over the years in which a Mill-­inflected view of privacy and universality becomes formalized, the expectations placed on poetic language intensify. Shira Wolosky sums up the main linguistic expectations, which figure the poem “as a self-­enclosed aesthetic realm; as a formal object to be approached through more or less exclusively specified categories of formal analy­sis; as metahistorically transcendent; and as a text deploying a distinct and poetically ‘pure’ language.”22 Poetic language becomes viewed as a stylistic and linguistic opposite to clichés like How are you? and Fine, fine. Thus the question of How are you both seems to get at what a twentieth-­century idealized expressive lyric is and seems its mundane, social, phatic opposite. As Wolosky’s summary indicates, idealized lyric language departs from everyday stock phrases in general; it seeks ways of saying that articulate more than words usually denote. R. P. Blackmur, for example, distinguishes poetry from mere “verse” on linguistic grounds: poetry is defined by “language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the m ­ atter in hand but adds to the available stock of real­ity.”23 The idea of the poem’s language as special received a particularly forceful twist through formal concepts associated with the rise of the New Criticism, like tension and unity—­“the kind of ­whole which the literary work forms or fails to form,” according to Cleanth Brooks.24 Edward Brunner, examining one midcentury glossary of critical terms, sees it as valuing the “deft balancing of thought and feeling,” with nothing tangential or extraneous: “What remains questionable is anything that resembles a style that is overt or individualizing. If style does not melt seamlessly into subject, the poem is less than literary. [The] glossary accurately reflects a New Critical concern that the true poem should leave no impression

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of superfluity.”25 Of course the emphasis on ordering and refining does not originate with the New Criticism (Yeats, building on his assertion that the poet should not sound like he is having a conversation over breakfast, goes on to declare that the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete”) but it is heightened during t­ hese years: by 1965, the disparate New Critics ­were being summarized as “follow[ing] [I. A.] Richards in his defense of poetry as a means of bringing order to the mind through a synthesis or equilibrium of opposing forces.”26 But the kind of private, self-­sufficient, clarified verbal structure that the New Criticism imagines, in which emotion is reconciled through style, might in fact accentuate the quite dif­fer­ent ways that ­actual poems ­handle balance, order, and completion. Consider the opening of Morgan Parker’s 2017 “Heaven Be a Xanax,” which also begins by invoking a more social mode: When p­ eople say how are you I say good It is a rule no one can answer Crying in the Gap by my therapist’s office or I am still angry with my parents for traumatizing me through or­ga­nized sports Dangerous and satisfying body of ­water I can still almost remember heaven or Still a w ­ oman slaughtered for won­der or Unfortunately misplaced grip27 Parker begins with the indecorousness of giving way to emotion in a trendy retail store, surrounded by streamlined mannequins and immaculate clothing. As her ­imagined replies continue, it becomes less and less certain where they stop; ­there is no clear demarcation between the poem—­that aesthetically justified way of discussing the private—­and another enumeration of the socially inappropriate answer. The answers that Parker’s speaker gives, some of which let in bourgeois cultural references, begin to seem excessive even for a poem: they do not appear recollected in tranquility, or mediated, or coordinated in the ways idealized in mainstream criticism. It is a poem seemingly composed of suppressed retorts, and it gets at the impossibility of crystallizing one’s feelings in a poem; a single answer would not be enough, or would soon grow inaccurate. “Crying in the Gap” becomes a brilliantly wry emblem for what this poem does.

8 Introduct ion

Parker’s lines underscore the way that representing lived experience might need to include the incomprehensible, unsubordinated fragment. They press at the friction that comes from putting perforated, nebulous, chaotic feelings into a form—­into something arranged, revised, logical, patterned, polished. While it might seem anachronistic to apply midcentury precepts to this twenty-­ first-­century poem, the critical emphasis on concerted style is not confined to the midcentury. As White observes, the nebulous “ ‘lyric’ abstraction” that continues t­ oday “draws on aspects of critical theory drawn from writings associated with the ‘New Criticism’ that ­were overcirculated, dulled, and naturalized into tokens of pedagogic culture—­eccentricities made central.”28 Parker’s opening exemplifies the sense, shared by each poet in this book, that it can sometimes be impossible to deal with psychological events in a meaningful order, to ­handle each proportionally, though one is writing in a form still trailing ideals of proportion and coherence. In “Heaven Be a Xanax,” something comic surfaces in the conflictual relations between what one feels, knows, and says: it exposes a rift between how one is and how one is supposed to pre­sent oneself, in or out of the poem. Both Berryman’s cluster of i­magined answers and Parker’s potentially never-­ending cascade of them suggest a kind of flickering comic potential within lyric: a genre so associated with quality (to use Terada’s word) is positioned not simply to shame or transgress or disappoint, but to be funny. Rather than stemming from control, the comedy charted in this book arises from impropriety and confusion, from formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, from self-­observation and self-­staging. Instead of seeing lyric as bestowing order on a rec­ord of the mind, and as depicting an emotion universally and fully and truthfully, ­these poets do not always see a clean fit between idealized understandings of lyric and accurate repre­sen­ta­tions of their experience. Accordingly, writing about the self can inch t­ oward the comic, even when the self is a catastrophe. Trying to answer the question of How are you, in a poem, involves discomfitingly self-­conscious discrepancies: one tries to make one’s self into something coherent, even when one is falling apart; though one is not at the breakfast t­able, one is not in as fully a private mode as New Critical ideals would suggest (to whom is Parker’s speaker speaking?). T ­ hese discrepancies lead to sheepishness and theatricality and confusion; they also lead to something that can look like stand-up comedy. You are not incidentally writing standup when you are writing lyric: as you get close to I. A. Richards’s or Cleanth Brooks’s idea of lyric, you reach the then-­emerging genre of stand-up.

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Sideways Sprawling Stand-up is a historically bound form availing itself of an often stylized personality and inner life; as Ian Brodie remarks, the comedian “is performing the self.”29 And as Christopher Grobe’s recent work on midcentury confession and per­for­mance has indicated, some strands of poetry almost converge with stand-up comedy.30 Berryman’s cata­logue of misery, for example, has something in common with the 1959 monologue where a shaky, queasy Shelley Berman must call the host of a party at which he wreaked havoc the previous night.31 Berman’s guilty admission that “I have this l­ittle headache in my left eye” is not far, anatomically or metrically, from Berryman’s vague, awkward “A ­thing hurts somewhere up left in my head.” (It is an unfortunate coincidence that their names are so close; that fluke is not what I want to emphasize.) Language adding to the stock of available real­ity ­here emerges from the inarticulate sense that one is in trou­ble. Every­thing is out to get one, as heard when Berman mutters to a ­bottle, “Oh my God ­don’t fizz, ­don’t be mean, Alka-­Seltzer.” The main link between the phone call and the Dream Song, though, is in how each stages the personal. Although both comedian and poet are creating fictional scenarios, both also (Berman confessing to an invisible interlocutor; Berryman confessing by pointedly not confessing) position us as overhearers. Both also involve an intermittently thin distance between the speaker and the known biography of the artist. While Berman is using the distancing conceit of a telephone, the unease he incarnates cannot be completely separated from the individual ­imagined ­behind the stage figure (the individual whom Lainie Kazan called “the most anxious, ner­vous, uptight, neurotic person I ever worked with”).32 And by the same token, while Berryman’s list begins as abstract and bodily before moving to widespread existential damage, it ends in straightforward prose admission: “my hopeless book,” the book you are holding. That is, Berryman, like Berman, adopts personae that stem from his a­ ctual self. The speaker, character, or lyric subject seems close to the poet’s own situation, even to his or her own voice, though also deeply and self-­consciously artificial. John Limon proposes that stand-up is about abjection, both in the older meaning of being humiliated, or prostrated, and in Julie Kristeva’s psychoanalytical meaning, of what is neither you nor quite not you—­a meaning that Limon describes as the “psychic worrying of t­ hose aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of ” (say, a cuticle).33 As Limon continues, ­these two meanings are in fact intertwined: “When you feel abject, you feel as if ­there w ­ ere something miring your life, some skin that cannot be sloughed, some role (­because ‘abject’ always, in a way, describes how you act) that has become your only

10 Introduct ion

character.” Stand-up comedians perform abjection, constantly displaying what is and is not one’s self. Though they might range over many subjects, they are perpetually hauling their own lives. The cultural moment on which Limon focuses is also addressed by René Girard’s 1972 argument that “we are ambivalent t­ oward every­thing we call our ‘self,’ our ‘ego,’ our ‘identity,’ our ‘superiority’ ”: the self is “both the ultimate prize we are trying to win, the most precious trea­sure to which we keep adding tirelessly, like busy ants, and a most frightful burden we are desperately e­ ager to unload.”34 (Girard’s “we” implies p­ eople like Berryman or like Robert Lowell, the writers with whom this book ­will begin; I ­will return to this point in a few pages.) Comedy—­which for Girard annihilates identity, robbing theatrical characters of distinction and forcing the laughing audience into disorientingly close proximity with the amusing object—is a plea­sure b­ ecause “it deprives us of the autonomy to which we cling and yet it does not deprive us of anything at all.” This plea­sure is especially intense, Girard suggests, in an era where “extreme humility is strangely coupled with the greatest pride.”35 Although Girard does not address stand-up directly, his account of the intellectual circumstances that lead to an increased desperation for laughter draws near to Limon’s theory of stand-up. For Limon, abjection “seek[s] an audience”: “Whenever t­here is abjectness, t­ here is per­for­mance; whenever abjectness is proudly performed, it is comic. It is comic ­because it should be prone but it is upright.”36 The idea that stand-up deals with and in abjection—­a sometimes searing embarrassment arising from something connected with you, something that cannot be subsumed or shaken off—­resonates with the comedy pre­sent when one writes a poem about the self in the mid-­twentieth ­century and thereafter. Explic­itly comic assertions of dismay about what one’s self does (and is) are everywhere across twentieth-­century American poetry, and continue ­today: personhood is like having “ten dogs on a single lead // and no talent for creatures,” according to Brenda Shaughnessy.37 But while discomfiture stemming from one’s be­hav­ior, thoughts, and impulses ­will run throughout Lyric as Comedy, for the next few pages I would like to concentrate on the ways that autobiographical poetry is also abjectly knotted with the idea of poetry with a palpable capital P. This sense of encumbrance might have some roots, like Limon’s own sense, in epistemological uncertainty. By the midcentury, humanist conceptions of the individual, summarized by Rochelle Rives as the “unified depth model of self hood and psy­chol­ogy,” are giving way to less unified conceptions, ones that might reinforce the feeling that Limon describes as the “failure to know what is inside of what, to find your own synecdoche, the homunculus that stands for self.”38 In the second half of Song 207, Berryman’s speaker pictures “the

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­ hole ­matter break[ing] down.” He could be speaking of his brain or of cusw toms like hallway pleasantries, but in e­ ither case his w ­ ill has gone “sideways sprawling, collapsed & dull,” literally abjected and literally presenting what Tyrus Miller has described as “a subjectivity at risk of dissolution,” a case of a late modern (and early postmodern) self seeming alarmingly permeable.39 It is not only that Berryman feels the potential deterioration of the unstable self, though: t­ here is a mismatch of genre. T ­ hose changes in understandings of the subjective coincide uncomfortably with the twentieth-­century idealization of lyric, which elevates and circumscribes a single subjectivity.40 Lyric consolidates as the place of the deeply private just as the private begins to seem more permeable, less certain, more historically and culturally ­shaped. Marta Figlerowicz, for example, has recently brought to light how twentieth-­ century poets and novelists probe “our incapacity to become aware of our affects on our own.”41 The apprehension that one’s understanding of one’s self might be mediated partly through other ­people would not seem to fit cleanly with ideals of a sequestered poetic interior. So the midcentury and con­temporary poets that are my subject are taking stock of embarrassing selves, but also of a set of expectations about what expressive poetry does. While they work in a genre increasingly linked with the solitary self, they do so as a sense of clarity or coherence about the self is van­ is­h­ing, and where divisions between the private mind and the external world seem less stable. They find themselves at cross purposes with a genre seen as centripetal and isolating and universal. And a sense that is rather close to Limon’s notion of abjection—of being defined by something partly extraneous—­ can arise from being situated in this alternately indistinct or constricting genre. Take the tender question of Kenneth Koch’s “To My Heart at the Close of Day” (2000), which would seem a perfect example of Mill’s “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.”42 This question grows comic in its unnecessary reminder, which exposes gaps within what one constructs as one’s self; the questioner ­here is a bit like a well-­meaning but imperceptive friend. At dusk light you come to bat As Georg Trakl might put it. How are you ­doing Aside from that, aside from the fact That you are at bat?43 The answer the heart might give seems obvious (we know how I’m ­doing, stop reminding me) but also elusive: Koch gets at the feeling of being able only to approximate your feeling, though it is stuck t­ here with you, and of not being fully in control of the ­whole of your self, or sure where the edges of that self are.44

12 Introduct ion

The comic discomfort in Koch is heightened, as it is in Berryman and Parker and some of the most in­ter­est­ing stand-up, by a half-­dramatic sense: by the way an intimate address to the heart is tacitly triangulated, by the sense that one is neither fully private nor openly acting.45 That uncomfortable theatrical ele­ment, likely to arise even (or especially) at moments of intense feeling, is also at work in how recent American lyric throws an uncertain self into relief. As Rebecca Wanzo points out, Kristeva herself implies that writing and abjection are themselves connected, largely through the way the former might relieve the latter: “writing is an exercise in expelling that ungraspable, nasty ­thing from the self as well as a way of dwelling on and externalizing abjection by defining what the ­thing is in a way that is impossible when it remains only in the mind.”46 But the relief offered by writing might become somewhat complicated in poetry around 1960, where de­cades of expectations about how poetry represents an “au­then­tic” self commingle. The expectation of intense personal feeling in the late nineteenth ­century, the impersonality of modernism, the New Criticism’s speaker suspended in a work wholly in­de­pen­dent of biography, the confessional label, the demand through all ­these claims that language in any case must be d­ oing more than it does in prose or conversation—­the personal poem in Amer­i­ca, circa 1960, tows at least a few of ­these expectations. If standup comedians are unable to be “­either natu­ral or artificial,” the postwar lyric is dogged by conflicting senses of naturalness and artificiality, of impersonality and the all too personal.47 Although Lyric as Comedy centers on poets with close ties to institutions, the comic self-­consciousness about poetry found ­here is also at work within less institutional twentieth-­century poetic communities, whose relations to academe are often tenuous. It is at work in Lucille Clifton’s ironic declaration that “she is a poet / she d­ on’t have no sense,” and in V. R. Lang’s complaint about “Poems about poems, poems about / Poets being poets writing poems.”48 The literary history of black American poets a­ fter modernism, to take a single instance, is one of questioning institutional desiderata and strictures. As Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics has demonstrated, poetic exclusion and poetic innovation go together.49 Clifton, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Melvin Tolson, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Wanda Coleman—to name several divergent examples—­press at the friction between poems and generic expectations, frequently eliciting humor from what it means to write a poem.50 Queer, trans, indigenous, and spoken-­word poetry communities do so as well. I might have focused this book on writers who are not clearly a part of a single group (or who belong to a group outside the orbit of academic presses and of the university) but who bear out the indecorous, restive, unruly humor

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that is my subject: they grapple with ideas of order and decorum, with what makes a poem a poem and what makes a self a self.51 That would have been a dif­fer­ent book in crucial ways, though. I chose to concentrate on relatively institutional poets, especially in the first few chapters, b­ ecause one of the goals of this book is to show the way critical precepts are both absorbed and resisted even where one would expect them to be most accepted.52 The whiteness of the critical traditions within which I am working reflects ­these poets’ relative comfort with academic and poetic institutions, critical discourse, and the universalized expressive lyric. By the early 1960s, the de­cade with which this book begins, poetry has become a discipline within the university, lyric reading has become the norm, and criticism itself has turned to emphasize quality. Midcentury discourse around lyric has worked itself into a­ ctual poems, and has helped produce a self-­reflective comic strain in modern poetry. And ­because the comedy of this book is tied up with subject positions of self-­involvement, its chapters are largely about white, male poets of the midcentury United States. T ­ hese writers are not only closest to privileges of universality and inheritance and importance, but to t­ hose of the autonomous self and self-­representation. Since much of the shame and humor examined in this book is pricked into being by a troubled narcissism, the writers I begin with exemplify Shane McCrae’s observation that confessional poetry entails “a very ­actual fall from grace,” a fall pos­si­ble only for t­ hose able to occupy a position of cultural ac­cep­tance, authority, and privilege in the first place: “at least in Amer­i­ca, ­people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white ­people do.”53 In the words of Darieck Scott, “blackness is constituted by a history of abjection, and is itself a form of abjection.”54 Grobe echoes McCrae’s point about the exclusiveness of postwar confessionalism when he remarks that “confessional poetry was essentially a genre of identity crisis,” a plight new mainly to white men; it “selects for privilege: for the ­people who are motivated to write this way, who feel confident in ­doing so, and who are then received and celebrated for it by the public.”55 Berryman, the subject of my first chapter, situates himself at the center of what he sweepingly calls “the world,” and uses every­thing e­ lse in the world to define his self, binding such definitions to self-­loathing and self-­aggrandizement. Lowell is still more explic­itly troubled by self-­centeredness. A. R. Ammons, born in what he saw as “a rural and defeated south,” carried senses of displacement and failure for much of his life.56 As the book moves to the pre­sent and away from its confessional beginning, the fall from grace is not so steep, at least: ­these writers (Tommy Pico, briefly; Terrance Hayes, at greater length; fi­nally Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn) represent lived experience in situations where the idealized self is not so swiftly taken for

14 Introduct ion

granted. While they sometimes turn to tactics encountered ­earlier in the book (self-­caricature, self-­deprecation, ­etc.), their identities and poetic proj­ects are less defined by the sense of a shameful new role. They write about themselves amid forces that would reduce or misread, and where their speaking subjects are not necessarily presumed to be of universal interest. So Lyric as Comedy explores midcentury and con­temporary poems that work within and against their status as lyr­ics. ­These poems rustle against the “fiction of quality” that Terada perceives, the sense of quality that has become still more closely intertwined with poetry in the twentieth c­ entury, as the genre is elevated beyond the fray of more social forms. My look at t­ hese poems begins from the following premises: first, as poetry begins to be idealized, it becomes more vulnerable to what Limon calls abjection. If stand-up comedians are tethered to their lives in a mortifying and entertaining way, postwar poems about the self (and postwar poets) cannot cast off all ties to the elevated critical discourses around them; they are stuck with claims that they might want nothing to do with, or that they cannot fulfill. The stand-up impulse is close to the heart of con­temporary lyric, and to understand con­ temporary lyric, we need to understand con­temporary comedy at the same time. The comedy of lyric is not an excrescence: it is a consequence of trying to write honestly about the self in a world where unselfconscious expressiveness is i­magined, and where excruciatingly self-­conscious inexpressiveness—­“A ­thing hurts somewhere up left in my head”—is often one’s starting point. Second, the friction between poetic ideals and a­ ctual poems runs in multiple directions: poets’ stances t­ oward institutional ideals are not homogeneous, or even internally consistent. Berryman, for example, is extremely ambivalent about New Critical values; by turns he ignores, aspires to, and celebrates the princi­ples he also assails.57 This second point needs slightly more elaboration, since I do not want to stress the sabotaging of repressive critical strictures at the expense of other dynamics: one’s relations to the critical discourses around one are often more uncertain.58 Sometimes, for example, ­there is an under­ lying comedy of trying not to write lyric when “lyric” terms and values are the terms and values one thinks in. And though many ideals are imposed by ­others (say by avant-­garde censure, or by the praise of an establishment one might not want to align oneself with—­both pressures are examined in White’s Lyric Shame), some are imposed by one’s self. One inherits, grows out of, and develops models, as when Lowell writes in fixed form, then decides it says “I’m a poem,” then heads back to fixed form again, then to ­free verse again.59 So, third: in addition to self-­consciously backing away from or into critical expectations, t­ hese poets are sometimes also realizing a version of Allen Gross-

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man’s “­bitter logic of the poetic princi­ple,” in which ­every poem has an ideal it falls short of. For Grossman, an a­ ctual poem resembles “an example,” which is “always other than what it explains, as a poem is always other than the impossible work that it replaces but shows what such work w ­ ill be like.”60 The impossible poem one might have in one’s head but not on one’s page can lead to senses of shame or failure; as Wanzo notes, “the idealized image of the self is the lost object of the abject individual.”61 And the discrepancy between one’s own impossible poems and what one actually writes might grow all the more uncertain as one absorbs ideals from the movements and criticism around one. While Eliot can assert that a poem’s material yelps “not that! not that!” u ­ ntil it is given an adequate form (and thus an escape from personality), Youn w ­ ill compare a poem to road rage, a way of trying to make a rigid literal vehicle express a feeling (and a sort of warped personality).62 ­Whether it steers into bathos, imprecision, or insignificance, one can see what one has produced about one’s self as abject, as never quite what one had in mind. “Not // ­every revelation deserves a stanza, dummy,” a voice in Pico’s head says to him, to which he answers: “The hope is unity / The real­ity a bit more sandpapery.”63 Of the predicaments that this unmanageably abstract genre draws out, here are several that w ­ ill hover in the chapters that follow: t­ here is the notion that poetry is mainly expressive of an ego, both in the sense of a coherent speaking I and—in the sense that became central to confessional poetry—­the self-­absorbed autobiographical I. T ­ here are the notions that poetry is so deeply private as to be unconscious of an audience; that poetry’s subject, the inner self, has been transmuted and resolved, as has the mess of the outer world; and that successfully transmuted poetry is universal, lofty, and profound. It is associated with privilege (especially the privileges of whiteness, such as being supposed universal or apo­liti­cal). Last but not least, it is aesthetically prestigious, which in the period where this book begins, entails formal justification, balance, and unity, as well as inventiveness. I have spent less time with the idea of aesthetic prestige, but it concerns each of my poets. As poetry, now the genre of the self, becomes elevated in critical discourse (and in American culture—­there is more to say about poems as comic objects in fiction, on TV, and even in live comedy), a rift develops between what one sees as one’s embarrassing, less-­than-­autonomous self and one’s celebrated, autonomous genre.64 Much of what I have described so far comes down to a lack of fit: poems seem to claim importance for personal experiences that are often, to anyone e­ lse and even to the writer, trivial. Though one persists in answering that question of How are you, one senses it is self-­involved: to write a poem is to assert that one’s feelings are worthy of intensely heightened attention.

16 Introduct ion

An Aesthetics of Comedy for the Postwar Lyric It is not immediately clear what makes this potentially embarrassing state—­ where you are saddled with an intrusive sense not only of your self but of your chosen genre and form, and of how none of t­ hese ­things seem to fit—at all funny. This strain of humor differs in spirit from traditional theatrical comedy and its descendants, where performers play roles and bring a script to life (in their sketch comedy, for example, the members of Monty Python transform into Hell’s Grannies; Key and Peele become truculent passenger and unflappable flight attendant, or Barack Obama and his “anger translator” Luther), and where script and role can be cast aside at the end of the night. In such genres, the audience is usually encouraged to forget they are watching an act, or encouraged to remember only intermittently, with a tiny burst of surprise (one plea­sure of the sitcom comes from reminders of construction). The comic opportunities of lyric form are less direct: to capture them is to capture specific kinds of humor that do not “feel” like generally recognized kinds of humor, and to work t­ oward an aesthetics of comedy that can take in the vast, nebulous, and perverse range of ­things we find funny, especially the moments where humor is subsidiary or incidental.65 This comedy is also dif­ fer­ent from irony. Almost all humor is ironic; it is too broad a term for the next level down of specification, which I focus on.66 Where irony involves distance, humor involves uncanny proximity, as Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai have observed.67 The substrain of modern poems I am looking at, however, are like stand-up in presenting—or being expected to pre­sent—­a stage for per­ for­mances, where one is shown as performer. Caught between artifice and sincerity, seen as honest and deceptive and extremely self-­conscious, both genres become funny in part through how they play with ­those tensions. Stand-­up’s comedy, Limon suggests, compounds multiple va­ri­e­ties of the same prob­lem, abjection. Since abjection in general involves the perception of something one cannot quite detach oneself from, and a stand-up per­for­mance itself does as well, the two can be exhilarating in their points of contact. ­There is more than one potential intersection. For example, you are lugging around an inescapable-­yet-­not-­quite-­integral ­thing that goes by the name of self. And since you have committed to a genre whose “single end” is laughter, and since your success in this genre depends on an audience whose laughter must be elicited, the audience is not “entirely distinct” from you, ­either.68 When Jonathan Winters announces that he “uh, did a t­ hing that a lot of us prob­ably would like to do, a few of us ­don’t, I ­don’t know, I’ll just have to ask you: did you ever undress in front of a dog,” his stumbling lead-up (“a few of us d­ on’t, I d­ on’t know”) already starts to disperse him into the us of the studio audience.69 Then

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his ties to his listeners are doubled again: consider how the intensity with which one waits on his question suddenly smacks into the unnervingly intense way that dogs watch ­humans. Such colliding patterns—­also that of how the undressing is fleetingly reenacted, for this new audience—­are responsible for much of the formal plea­sure of stand-up. They are at work in poems, as well. To set out the comic affordances of the recent lyric, I want to take up one last reply to the question of How are you. H ­ ere Frank O’Hara, actually saying the socially unsayable answer, finds a large, boxy objective correlative for his state of mind: how are you feeling in ancient September I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway how can you you ­were made in the image of god I was not I was made in the image of a sissy truck-­driver70 Although O’Hara’s friend (possibly an i­ magined friend, possibly a conscience) is appalled by how he talks about himself, O’Hara reiterates his comparison: if he takes ­after anyone, it is a “sissy truck-­driver.” He refuses to leave the idea of that unwieldy truck, that beautifully exteriorized state of mind. To get at why O’Hara is funny, we need to think briefly about what makes something funny more generally.71 Laughter is usually said to come from encountering something flawed, mismatched, erratic, irrelevant, or jarring: to put it as broadly as pos­si­ble, ­people laugh at something “off.” One of two long-­ established lines of thinking locates the source of comedy in defects, in anything undesirable—­“off ” in the sense that spoiled food can smell off, or a mannerism can be a turn-­off, or a joke can be off-­color. The other finds it in absurdity and incongruity, where “off ” suggests inaccuracy, deviation, distortion: ­going off the rails, being off-­beat or off-­k ilter. While ­these categories are units into which many differing notions have been compressed, and while the most in­ter­est­ing explanations of comedy do not fit cleanly into one box or the other, the two theories do tend to confirm similar emphases: they circle around the perception of something not quite right.72 The first of t­ hese accounts is the theory of superiority, which dates to Plato and Aristotle and links laughter with derision. In its most significant twentieth-­ century articulation, Henri Bergson contends that we are biologically and socially disposed to shame each other out of being inattentive: when habit takes over, one stops being alert to the dynamic world around one, and behaves in an automatic way, like “something mechanical encrusted upon the

18 Introduct ion

living.”73 The body encroaches on the spirit, clothes on the body, rhyme on language, and so on. One might also see Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of carnivalesque laughter as a partial inversion of the superiority theory: in temporarily allowing what is typically disparaged or repressed to triumph over official or social hierarchies, this laughter f­ rees rather than polices, but with a similarly moral impulse.74 The second theory, that of incongruity, is more intuitive to a con­ temporary American sensibility. H ­ ere, where something alien to an original premise throws the mind off its guard, comedy stems from surprise at what is odd or illogical.75 Since incongruity encompasses m ­ atter jarring not only to the intellect but to the emotions, it has been a productive way of explaining the humor in many poems. But although the comic sheen of O’Hara’s lines does center on their description of a less-­than-­magisterial inner life, and although he incongruously describes himself feeling “like a truck,” the kind of feeling his rapid answers elicit from me is a feeling closer to admiration, even to won­der. His answers are funny in part ­because they seem so convincingly slapdash, and ­because they come to seem so slapdash through being in a poem. On an a­ ctual nightclub stage, Limon declares, the abject self is literally “stood up,” a pun meaning that one pre­sents that self and thereby briefly escapes it, at once.76 This book traces a similar phenomenon in poetry, where the potentially embarrassing genre itself is presented and countered as well. O’Hara’s less-­than-­elevated retorts are all the more rattled and unchoreographed for occurring within such an elevated genre; in being unable to scrape off associations with the universal (and the ethereal, sublime, well-­wrought, e­ tc.), the poem finds a way to be yet more concrete, like a twenty-­ton truck on a wet highway. While the nimbus that has gathered around the recent poem—of timelessness and universality, uncontaminated by context or audience—­can be constraining, overwhelming or simply embarrassing, that nimbus also pre­sents a constant foil: it is a reminder that an ­actual poem is in fact a rather concrete ­thing, written down by a par­tic­u­lar person in a par­tic­u­lar time. Its putative freedom from audience can short-­circuit, underscoring the self-­consciousness and self-­staging that ­these poems often stumble into. ­There is something peculiar in feeling like a truck and being like a driver: such odd approximations get at a slanted relation to the self, and to the poem as transformed, cohesive expression of coherent self (as if one ­were “made in the image of god”). A poem is funny not only b­ ecause of lapses from ideals, as it might be to Bergson or Bakhtin, but ­because of the more complicated way it rattles within and against ideals. This point is made most thoroughly in Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy, which presses at how our relatively familiar comic binaries—­accounts of superiority, incongruity, subversion—­are more thor-

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19

oughly inextricable.77 Complicating the longstanding idea of the concrete interrupting the universal, Zupančič suggests that comedy lies not in interruption, but in how the universal seems to be embodied in the concrete, and vice versa. In other words, the comic event folds two mutually exclusive qualities into each other, forming something both less and more than a seamless ­whole.78 Zupančič’s study offers several paradoxical phrases for the way a comic encounter seems to press deficiency and abundance into the same space, reiterating that a sense of disjunction or shortcoming (what I have called the “off ”) is only one half of a comic event.79 When confronted with a pun, for example, we laugh at what Zupančič calls a “ ‘miraculous’ occurrence”: it is not that a “thought failed to be expressed, or ­didn’t get through correctly,” but that one “did emerge, materialize ‘out of nothing’ (but words).”80 The ways Zupančič describes comedy are useful, both to the essentially abject comedy at the heart of the modern lyric, and to the glancing comedy in modern lyric more broadly, in its attempts to make something both honest and aesthetically satisfying. When O’Hara sloshes the “truck on a wet highway” up against the faintly Keatsian “ancient September,” I think Zupančič would suggest that the comedy is not in ­simple indecorousness or inability, though it is indeed indecorous according to an idealized notion of decorum, and though a potentially disastrous inability is being described. It is that the language O’Hara has seems inadequate but is effective; what the poem tries to capture could not ever reside in language as fully as one wants—­and yet that language sometimes manages to go beyond what one can consciously articulate. This comedy springs up from the lucky interactions of impropriety, lopsidedness, and excess, in how unprepossessing and wayward ele­ments knock into each other and cooperate. The luck that accumulates in a poem delights beyond its individual components. It involves something stunning that stems from or results in embarrassment; it is a “flawless shambles.”81 That phrase is from Geoffrey Hill, and he is referring to Laurel and Hardy’s intricately chaotic slapstick; but it seems equally apt for poems like O’Hara’s, where the flawed and flawless appear to be one and the same. The crack that Grossman sees between the ideal and the ­actual is what Zupančič gives one more twist to in comedy: a rupture between the ideal and the a­ ctual that is somehow more than a rupture. Lyric as Comedy seeks to extend Zupančič’s argument to questions of aesthetic experience, especially to how language and form work in a poem—to an array of encounters that seem in some way wrong or abject or failed (as we already recognize) and in some way right. I use that awkwardly broad word “right” ­because it is so broad: a more specific term would cast too small a net. In par­tic­u­lar instances, one might use words such as consistent, or precise (or

20 Introduct ion

convergent, revealing, expressive, truthful, symmetrical, or efficient, among many). ­These words arise where failure becomes funny: Laurel and Hardy send pianos thundering down stairs with perfect timing, O’Hara sends his meta­phors skidding and swerving, with grace. Instead of an announced ­whole, what often seems at work ­here is what Yvor Winters condemned as “the fallacy of expressive, or imitative, form,” in which “the form succumbs to the raw material of the poem.”82 Rather than the triumph of form over material, the material is bursting through. So by “right” I mean to point to what remains the somewhat neglected underside of the comic moment, the opposite that makes the disgraceful or disturbing (I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway) kindle into comedy.83 One might describe a given comic event as “absurdly right,” or “miraculously wrong,” or “exactly what ­shouldn’t have happened”: to encounter a comic moment is to perceive ele­ments interacting in ways that seem to resist explanation.84 Space, time, and language click together when they should not; coincidences proliferate when they should not. The flashes of comedy in O’Hara’s truck, where one is about to go to pieces instead of cohering, and where vividness springs out of the never-­quite-­fitting calcified ideal of the poem, entail an ingredient of won­der not adequately addressed in conventional philosophies of comedy.85 Won­der is not the same as surprise, though surprise is a key psychological ele­ment in won­der; won­der is more specific and less neutral. In the words of Philip Fisher, it is “an aesthetic response of delight, a feeling of seeing the impossible happen.”86 And it can help explain oblique, incidental comic resonances that do not align with traditional terms. In comedy, the apparently impossible happens in unpromising material; when it comes to modern American poetry, the material is the unpromising, shameful self or poem.87 The word “comedy,” used throughout this book as the most general term for being funny, has long had a generic meaning.88 In narrative and drama, it is a work with a happy ending (e.g., a reunion or resolution).89 But if one could unfold the tiny compressed ball of a comic moment—­“What’s that: Richard Pryor ­running down the street”—­its form would spread out into something resembling a comedy in the narrative or dramatic sense: something retaining the creases of its former trou­bles, but eventually gathering up into a kind of unity, where something seems to fit even amid error or disaster, to fit even amid what does not fit. This dynamic is pre­sent in the last lines of the canonically absurdist Waiting for Godot, where “Well, ­shall we go? Yes, let’s go” is followed by “They do not move.” While not a happy ending in any traditional dramatic sense, it is an epitome of and resolution to the play’s nonresolution; ­there is a sense of of course it would end like this, of meaning even amid the meaningless-

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ness.90 Rather than affirming anarchy or order, comedy offers both at once. Even genres predicated on badness bear out this relationship: when you have heard the last inane detail of an excruciatingly digressive shaggy dog story, it crystallizes into total nonsignificance. It is a comically perfect incarnation of pointlessness. Its badness is skill on display.

Bundles of Accident and Incoherence Chapter 1, “Comedy in an Age of Close Reading: John Berryman’s Dream Songs,” begins with a poet reacting to the critical atmospheres in which he developed. According to a New Critical lyric reading, Berryman’s book-­length sequence is spoken by someone who seems to have chosen the wrong form (three sestets) and perhaps even the wrong genre. A ­ fter examining how Berryman flouts the canonical expectations of midcentury formalist criticism, I suggest that he breaks and defaces his form in part to depict an unusually wide range of m ­ ental states. To do so, he also reaches to the minstrel show, borrowing its caricatures of African American speech, which he applies to his abject self with an unstable mixture of irony, staginess, and expression. At the heart of this chapter is an iridescence between a lyric reading of The Dream Songs—of the poem as an expressive m ­ ental comedy—­and the ways Berryman undermines that reading. Initially, I was struck by how Berryman seems to transcribe the less-­than-­perfect mind: its irrationality and obsessions, its competitive or lustful impulses, its foul moods. But while the strategies of this work (and that of other poets I examine) are often expressive, they cannot always be explained simply through expressive premises. As ­will become apparent across Lyric as Comedy, culminating in Hayes’s work, one comic gleam in the postwar lyric comes from the tension between expression and what exceeds it. In its last few pages, chapter  1 turns to how Berryman takes to a willfully dutiful extreme the New Critical separation of speaker and author, thereby collapsing and exposing that separation. H ­ ere comedy lies in a theatrical intimacy, achieved from writing against the grain of Mill and l­ater critics. Berryman’s speaker is manifestly aware of a listener. He knows he is being overheard, speaks for the benefit of an audience, manipulates as poetry is not supposed to manipulate, and keeps reminding us that he is making prosodic decisions to rhetorical ends. Chapter 2, “Robert Lowell: The Noise of One’s Own Voice,” makes more vis­i­ble the way in which being at once alienated from and encumbered with one’s self, of inevitably being caught in a role, can be funny. Berryman finds a way not to sound like himself; Lowell cannot, and wishes he could. He

22 Introduct ion

wants to shed the way he sounds, the thoughts he gravitates t­oward, the reputation he has, even the physical brain he fears and depends on; he wants to have “one head / again, not many, like a bunch of grapes.”91 He is perpetually at odds with his own style, as one can see not only in how he keeps changing style, but in how he undercuts the one he is working in. From Lord Weary’s ­Castle to Day by Day, the act of writing about the self is loaded with one’s extreme instability and predictableness and self-­dramatization. It is abject in a way that is remarkably close to stand-up, even as it presses its own somberness into comedy. Lowell’s frequent revolutions of form bring up another question r­ unning through each chapter of this book: how the tonalities of humor change when poetry loses the guarantees and obligations of rhyme and meter. Traditional comic verse in En­glish, the kind of rhyming found from Chaucer and Skelton to Wendy Cope and Amit Majmudar, entails a beautifully concentrated kind of comic satisfaction, where surprise and gratification are promised at the ends of most lines. (A couplet, for example, is like a knock-­knock joke in that you have some sense of what is coming.) But that par­tic­u­lar satisfaction becomes less prevalent near the start of the twentieth ­century, when modernism ­frees poetry to do what comic verse has threatened to do for centuries: lose track of its rhymes, shatter its meter. This shift makes comic tonalities audible in new ways, to do with texture, pacing, and closure. Rather than gathering energy and releasing it in the last word of a line, the comic encounter now sometimes seems more diffuse: what is funny is often tucked into the ­middle of a sentence, not singled out and dwelt on, not accompanied by the nudge of rhyme. For the poets I ­will discuss, form—­its surprises, artificiality, randomness, and meaning—­remains an overdetermined trove for humor. Ammons, for example, takes his constraints from adding-­machine tape and other visual units, while Hayes finds poetic shapes in hip-­hop, newspaper puzzles, ghazals, and his own in­ven­ted or stretched forms. As chapter 3, “A. R. Ammons: Comic Badness,” sets out, Ammons illustrates how lyric ideals are sources of comedy for poets who are less firmly situated in institutional traditions and midcentury lyric practices. He has his poetry fall short of the aspirations of canonical lyric decorum, of more experimental movements like Objectivism (that the poem be as ­free of the self as pos­si­ble), and even of nonliterary communication (e.g., that one be concise, or that one refrain from discussing one’s gum disease or impotence widely). I begin with the explicit enactments of failure found in his first published book, Ommateum, which strives for vatic power and finds the glimmerings of a ludic style. Tape, Ammons’s initial attempt to convey even insignificant thought pro­cesses, makes clear his growing interest in an explic­itly comic ­mental life grounded

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in the failures of intellect and communication: in the books thereafter, this quasi-­transcriptive comedy gives way to something still more expansive, where waste includes all that cannot be explained as mimetic. This chapter ends by considering the poetry of Tommy Pico, who alludes to Ammons and extends some of his techniques. While Pico’s work seems quite removed from midcentury establishment ideals, his long poem Junk (2018) calls them up and plays off them, to make a rec­ord of unsubordinated, engaging, unsettling thought. Chapter 4, “Terrance Hayes: Floundering Interiors,” shows a con­temporary poet continuing to implement and push back against lyric reading as handed down and evolving from the New Critics. As Hayes remarked in an interview, the experiments of his first book “began with a s­ imple desire to challenge, sometimes impress, and mostly piss off the ­people [in his gradu­ate workshops]”; his work continues to have the ambivalent self-­consciousness that shapes how one writes about one’s self.92 While Ammons brings ­mental noise into what seems a transcription of thought (and Pico intensifies that noise), with Hayes the main comic iridescence is between expression and something beyond expression. This poetry’s centrifugal effects seem in excess of a poem’s meaning; it affirms a view of both a mind and a lyric as taking in more than their most vis­i­ble apparent subjects. Hayes’s interest in what cannot be reduced to a single coherent interpretation suffuses his flourishes of sound and image, his highly controlled long poems that seem to invite and foil lyric readings, and his most recent sequence of extreme variation in a fixed form (in American Sonnets for My Past and ­Future Assassin). His work also offers one more site for generalizing about humor: if the poets of the preceding chapters complicate theories of comic subversion, incongruity, and superiority, Hayes’s comedy exceeds the resolution theory, since the comedy of ­these poems involves what cannot be locked into a single meaning. Humor controls w ­ hole poems for Ammons and Berryman; Lowell’s poems do not seek overall comic effects, but do incorporate comedy; Hayes both has a keen sense of humor and questions it, exploring how a frequently comic mode responds to the excruciating: his work demonstrates how poems reckoning with bigotry can encompass both social commentary and aesthetic plea­sure. Hayes’s work offers a realm where lyric (idealized as the genre of provisional subjectivity) meets satire (the genre of moral authority), while also probing the impulse to evade intolerable topics through wit and verbal play: such evasions seem both a reproach and themselves a source of comic energy. Chapter  5, “Coming to Terms with Our Self: Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, Monica Youn,” draws together multiple aspects of lyric discussed in ­earlier chapters. While each of ­these writers asserts the value of humor to a rec­ord of personal experience, they also more specifically consider how to

24 Introduct ion

­ andle feeling, as bound up with gendered expectations and with critical dish course around mainstream poetry. Formal innovation is central ­here: to document the experience of con­temporary black womanhood in the United States, Parker splices lyric with extraliterary enumerative forms and with dramatic monologue. Turning poetic ideals on themselves, her poems both take in one’s private relation to the systems that oppress one and speak to the roles of ­those systems in the world more broadly. Shapero incorporates splinters of the well-­wrought formalist poem: her darting, seemingly random returns to rhyme (and other audible effects that say “I’m a poem”) convey ambivalence about a tumultuous con­temporary world and about making that world cohere. Youn, who dissects romantic obsession, si­mul­ta­neously considers how such personal material—­especially as coming from ­women and p­ eople of color—­has been depreciated both by avant-­garde and more traditional criticism. Trying out shapes that range from ballad to prose to fragment (one deadpan poem hides what sounds like doggerel in what looks like a serious experiment), Youn plays with the association between innovation and impersonality (poems that look impersonal are in fact rarely that). As ­these chapter summaries indicate, this book sacrifices range to detail. Another book about comedy in postwar and con­temporary American poetry might have included work centering more perceptibly on the demotic, participatory, off hand, surreal, and process-­oriented, such as that of the writers collected in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, 1945–1960, and the array of Language and Language-­adjacent poets who have followed. More specifically, one could pursue how an impulse to write about one’s self takes shape within writing that is not so closely affiliated with canonical, institutional lyric: for example, in Wanda Coleman’s tragicomic “The Saturday After­noon Blues,” where “a life full of been done wrong” finds a rhyme in “i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric / for a song.”93 Or in Bernadette Mayer’s sonnet that begins “You jerk you d­ idn’t call me up,” and opens out into a choose-­your-­own-­ adventure novel.94 Or in Harryette Mullen’s “Slipshod drudge with chance of dingy morning slog,” where depressing commute, clothes, and job are swirled into a forecast as effervescent as it is dreary.95 What Cathy Park Hong’s 2013 lecture imagines stand-up might do for poetry (to energize it, make it more honest) is happening in t­ hese poems, and countless o ­ thers this book has not examined. But I hope to suggest that something remarkably close to the solipsistic, self-­dramatizing, self-­distancing procedures of stand-up is at work even at the furthest pos­si­ble remove from stand-­up’s influence: in poems that seem as close to ideal, stolid lyr­ics as can be. ­Here comedy is a byproduct of the attempt to assem­ble a self—or a few of one’s ten thousand selves, as Marcus Wicker’s thirteen-­line sonnet puts it.

Ch a p ter  1

Comedy in an Age of Close Reading John Berryman’s Dream Songs

William Empson once divided literary critics into two kinds of “barking dogs”: “­those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and t­ hose, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up.”1 John Berryman recalls that depiction of criticism in an early Dream Song, where he imagines his soon-­to-­be-­published book as a young tree: Bare dogs drew closer for a second look and performed their friendly operations ­there. Refreshed, the bark rejoiced.2 This half-­resigned, half-­gleeful picture anticipates that critics ­will engage in territorial marking on 77 Dream Songs. First published in 1964, and extended by 1969 into 385 sections, The Dream Songs gave Berryman his reputation for absolute unruliness. The sequence, which is spoken by someone usually viewed as a lightly disguised figure for the author himself, both “rejoice[s]” at and rebuffs the work of literary criticism. In the lines above, inadvertently reversing Lenny Bruce’s “I’m ­going to piss on you” threat, Berryman accepts that the audience is ­going to piss on him: “bark” stands in as a metonym both for a dog, who has relieved his bladder and marked his territory, and for the tree itself, now watered and in fact revived.3 Berryman’s puns allow that poetry and its critics have a close 25

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relationship, though he explic­itly casts literary criticism as a public nuisance. The Dream Songs is a good example of how poets writing about the personal in the midcentury—as lyric is codified as “the expression of an essentially fictive individual self,” in V ­ irginia Jackson’s words—­work with and against the grain of an increasingly dominant way of reading poetry.4 In thinking about how midcentury lyric poetry h ­ andles the self, I am most struck by how The Dream Songs transforms Berryman’s self-­involvement. His letters cycle through self-­loathing, self-­pity, and self-­admiration, traits also touched on in Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson’s compassionate memoir of Berryman and other writers in the 1940s. T ­ hose traits are illuminated when one considers his early circumstances: as a twelve-­year-­old, he lost his f­ather to suicide. Throughout his life, he was insecure and desperate for praise, fearing that he would lose what ­little fame or financial security he had achieved. Rarely solvent, he moved from one temporary teaching position to another ­until achieving some stability in the Humanities department at the University of Minnesota. His health was so poor that he was misdiagnosed with epilepsy in his twenties, and from the 1950s ­until his death in 1972, he was hospitalized repeatedly for exhaustion and alcoholism. In the fall of 1964, he told his ex-­wife Ann Levine that his physical condition was “simply my mind tearing my body to pieces with anxiety.”5 The Dream Songs moves in an elliptical orbit around ­these crises, alternately glossing over or exaggerating the truth, or sometimes actually saying what happened. But that psychological backdrop does not itself convert self-­involvement into material for a rereadable long poem, especially not a poem grounded so firmly in a personality as this one.6 If you want to represent your state of mind truthfully, and your state of mind tends again and again ­toward egotism, how do you portray this tendency without repelling yourself or your readers? Berryman does not simply foreground his disorderly personality at a time when both disorder and personality ­were discouraged.7 He takes up an intricate, cinctured stanza, only to diverge from the formalist standards it evokes: he defaces his sestets ­every way he can. As his use of a blackface dialect suggests, this be­hav­ior is in part expressive: he seeks new stylistic strategies to depict the thoughts of his speaker, Henry. His con­spic­u­ous violations of meter, form, and grammar—­what Kaveh Akbar calls his “chopped and screwed language”—­ capture an unusually wide range of moods, and even transitions between moods.8 On this level, The Dream Songs can be read as a comic repre­sen­ta­tion of an inner life, including its more shameful and unappealing attitudes. What makes Berryman’s comedy more confounding, however, is an intersection between a pointedly “imaginary” character and a half-­fixed, half-­ malleable stanza. As the stanza is stretched and shrunk from line to line, it

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begins to seem that Henry himself is responsible for all prosodic decisions; the stanza has been commandeered by the character. Berryman goes against ideals of lyrical interiority handed down from John Stuart Mill: this speaker seems very aware that he has an audience.9 And at the same time, Berryman flouts the New Criticism’s emphasis on a fictive speaker. He does so not only through how, like the abject performers of stand-up, his poem cannot shake autobiography, but through how it presses at the notion of a unifying and unified speaker: it incorporates multiple voices and characters. Its structural response to shame lies in how the poem flickers between a supposedly private interior and a per­for­mance: ­here speech is sometimes to one’s self, but sometimes to an analyst, or into a microphone.

We Can Embarrass This Poem Even at their most turbulent, the Dream Songs are fitted into a form that resembles a well-­wrought urn. It is worlds away from the page-­r anging, unconfined verse of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 “Howl” or Gregory Corso’s 1960 contemplation of marriage (“O how terrible it must be for a young man / seated before a f­ amily and the f­ amily thinking / We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!”).10 Instead, Berryman borrows from W. B. Yeats, an exemplary craftsman to critics of that era. A Dream Song consists of three six-­ line stanzas: the stanza, in turn, splits into symmetrical halves, consisting of four pentameter lines checked by two shorter lines. ­These sestets seem to impose order, each with pauses for reflection; superficially, the form suggests the “so-­called fifties poem,” described by Edward Brunner as “metrically regular, or­ga­nized by stanza, and usually in rhyme.”11 The platonic idea of this form is demonstrated in Song 164. Henry plummets through the Song’s first sestet, one netted together by rhyme that recalls the resolution of a Petrarchan sonnet: Three limbs, three seasons smashed; well, one to go. Henry fell smiling through the air below and through the air above, the m ­ iddle air as well did he not neglect but carefully in all ­these airs was wrecked which he got truly tired of. (ll. 1–6) The two couplets, each syntactically complete on its own, are unhurried. Meter is steady, and its variations tend to be conventional. That steadiness requires

28 Chapte r 1

precise articulation of all three syllables of “cárefŭllý,” and it keeps Henry from expressing his grievances in too theatrical a manner: when he ­later complains that “His friends alas went all about their ways / intact” (ll. 7–8), his pentameter suppresses “alas” into a single unpunctuated iamb. The figure who falls with a fixed grin through this fixed stanza already seems tired of its “airs”—­ airs being both the space he falls through, and the songlike sequence. The sestet exemplifies New Critical irony, as well as New Critical order: it staves off deterioration through a form. In other songs, however, t­ here is l­ ittle sign of that uniform, polished stanza. Most are riddled with illegal substitutions or prose-­like rhythms. Some append random, irrelevant lines to the three-­sestet structure; in ­others, lines bulge out or stop short. As if to draw attention to the model sestet hovering b­ ehind each poem, many stanzas begin with pentameter that immediately falls apart. The final stanza of Song 69, for example, opens with clear iambs, made even more deliberate by commas. ­Here, gripped by a new infatuation, Henry won­ders if an as-­yet-­unnamed w ­ oman can be seduced: “I feel as if, unique, she . . . ​ Biddable?” (l. 13, ellipses in original). T ­ hose last few syllables already strain against their iambic base; thereafter, the stanza deteriorates. The next line (“Fates, conspire,” a total of three syllables) drops the usual five stresses for a dramatically short command. Although an unnamed friend tries to persuade him to stop talking, Henry simply reiterates and escalates his appeal, reaching for extravagant heights with a slightly antiquated verb: —­Vouchsafe me, Sleepless One, a personal experience of the body of Mrs Boogry before I pass from lust! (ll. 16–18) This complete deflation stems not merely from the euphemistic “personal experience” and the cartoonishly ugly name “Mrs Boogry,” but from that clumsy penultimate line itself, half again as long as is normal. Lurching from three-­to seventeen-­syllable lines, this stanza seems a decayed version of Song 164’s symmetrical, balanced sestet. The Dream Song stanza inhabits an uneasy position between neatness and sloppiness, tension and slackness, closed and bursting form. Its hypermetrical lines (such as the one about Mrs Boogry) offer an affront to critics who value compression. For example, in “The Morality of Poetry” (1937), Yvor Winters asserts that prose-­like poetry “lose[s] the capacity for fluid or highly complex relationships between words; language, in short, reapproaches its original stiffness and generality.”12 R. P. Blackmur, writing in 1952, agrees: it “produces flatness, inhibits song, and excludes be­hav­ior; and I see no sense in welcom-

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ing ­these disorders”; such “deliberate flatness” is “the con­temporary form of Georgian deliquescence.”13 It is difficult to imagine such critics admiring Song 204, in which Henry, listening to Schubert, moves from the gentle pentameter of “I’m playing it as softly as I can” to the bloated, fourteen-­syllable boast that “my gramophone is the most power­ful in the country.” That line does not seem an example of compressed paradox, in which “re­sis­tances [are] acknowledged and overcome.”14 But as Song 164 makes clear, Berryman’s stanza does not simply flaunt its laxness. It can also suggest the opposite: a kind of bumbling, dutiful attempt to color inside the poem’s lines. As often as Henry rails across borders, he stays within them. In ­doing so, he adopts the guise of an incompetent versifier who pads or constricts his utterances to obey the form, as in Song 108’s contortions bemoaning “the dead of winter when we must be sad / and feel by the weather had.” That awkward arrival at “had” recalls Ezra Pound’s condemnation of inversion as artificial: “Mr. Yeats has once and for all stripped En­glish poetry of its perdamnable rhe­toric. . . . ​He has made our poetic idiom a t­hing pliable, a speech without inversions.”15 Berryman’s poem is full of inversions, often compounded by a sense that words are being arranged just to suit prosodic requirements. In Song 298, for instance, Henry describes a BBC session where he “was on TV / with his baby ­daughter, / and Housman’s rhyme O in this case was ’oughter”: improvising Henry just has to survive the line, as he has to survive the eve­ning, in a half-­automatic fashion. Berryman’s filler lines and syllables seem to fly in the face of another of Pound’s dicta: “If you are using a symmetrical form, ­don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.”16 We often see Henry stifled by his symmetrical form, forced to cram in or pad out his syntax, as if verse warps and even steers his thought. (Such effortfulness reaches a high point in Stevie Smith, where a letter writer named Wilfred, off on a hunting trip that has disconcerted him, strug­gles to fulfil the obligations of his couplets: “Yesterday I hittapotamus / I put the mea­sure­ments down for you but they got lost in the fuss.”17) Berryman’s rhymes embody his poem’s unpredictable mixture of tidiness and sprawl, and the multiple directions from which he punctures formalist strictures. If rhyme is, as a 1954 essay by William K. Wimsatt argues, “the icon in which the idea is caught,” ­these rhymes frequently appear to be driven by the exigencies of sound rather than of meaning.18 Some seem entirely nonreferential, as when Henry resorts time and again to the interjection “O” for a rhyme to “woe,” “go,” “ago,” “Sappho,” “Kyoto,” and “dough” (among ­others). Anne Ferry has pointed out that minor parts of speech—­like “of,” or the phatic “O”—­“are fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the parts of speech traditionally allowed in rhyming. They have a function in relation to other words

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but no inherent signifying capacity.”19 To alter syntax so as to arrive at rhyme words that have “no inherent signifying capacity,” as Berryman so often does, defies the expectation that rhyme words involve a heightening of significance. Berryman also exploits rhyme’s promise of steady gratification, its contract for “the production of like sounds according to a schedule that renders them predictable: a continuing expectancy, continually fulfilled,” as Hugh Kenner puts it.20 In Berryman’s hands, it is an expectancy unpredictably fulfilled. The Dream Song sestet has, in theory, over seven hundred pos­si­ble rhyme schemes, and they frequently change between stanzas: a pattern set in one is discarded in the next, or maintained for two and dropped in the third.21 While Berryman can adhere to a rhyme scheme punctiliously, he can also be oddly negligent, given what would seem to be a manageable three-­sestet obligation. Sometimes he divides the sestet into perfect, Petrarchan tercets; sometimes he lets it unravel (abbaxx). He wrenches rhymes: “nonsense” and “im­mense,” “typewriters” and “curse,” both in Song 83. He uses slant rhyme (like the garishly jokey “hubby” and “hobby,” Song 117), identical rhyme (the hopeless “­bottle” and “­bottle,” Song 209), and broken rhyme (as when “frisky & new” is complemented by “u-­/sual” in Song 115).22 For ­every rhyme that brings out a meaningful relationship, another seems entirely illogical or nonreferential, impelled by song rather than by sense, as when Henry irreverently completes “chauffeur” with “brrr” (Song 200). And just when song looks to have the upper hand, prose comes barreling through. The lack of vis­ib­ le, consistent rationale in Berryman’s rhymes is emblematic of a larger difficulty. W ­ hether disfiguring its stanzas or the sentences within ­those stanzas, The Dream Songs seems to go against the ideals traced by critics who expect “­every short poem to justify its form,” as Paul Fussell’s 1965 treatise Poetic Meter and Poetic Form repeatedly prescribes.23 Of one subpar example (not from The Dream Songs), Fussell suggests that “­here we might contrive a reason for the space between the first stanza and the second, but it would be hard to find one for the space between the second and the third,” a lack of justification that he calls “pseudo-­form.” He interrogates another by saying, “We can embarrass this poem . . . ​by asking why it pre­sents itself in three stanzas,” implying that its form and content—of a poem so much its own autonomous t­ hing as to be itself self-­conscious—­are insufficiently fused.24 Berryman’s poem is not easily embarrassed: its form and content sometimes dovetail, sometimes seem entirely at odds. The Dream Songs is a reminder that the relationships between poets and poetic institutions are as complicated as the array of New Critics themselves: ­these critics ­were Berryman’s mentors, colleagues, and friends.25 Berryman began writing when formalist criticism dominated publications and university

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classrooms, and in the 1930s and 1940s, phrasing authoritative stylistic judgments as moral judgments, he sounds like the critics he eventually came to resist. A letter he sent in 1936, for example, deals out aesthetic verdicts, declaring that “the formal character of the verse is magnificent,” and disparaging another poet for verse that “is in general formless even if it is metrical.”26 Berryman was aware, however, that even his early poetry—­Yeatsian, Audenesque, somber, craftsmanlike—­did not meet New Critical ideals. It was also in 1936, for example, that he received a letter from Tate, about the results of a Southern Review contest: “If your poem had been cut down to proper length considering the form I should have placed it first. . . . ​[Randall Jarrell] ­didn’t have your line by line excellence, but what he had was better subdued to form.”27 Berryman responded: “Thanks very much for your letter and the criticism therein—­your use of ‘form’ still puzzles me a bit. . . . ​‘Ritual’ is prob­ ably too long but I’m a bat if I know what to delete; at any rate, I hope someone prints it.”28 His frustration became explicit when he relayed Tate’s corrective criticism to his ­mother: “[Tate] condemned [the poem] for length & formlessness—­neither he nor Mark [Van Doren] seem to realize that something damn impor­tant is being said.”29 Twelve years l­ater, his verse was still being criticized for its lack of restraint: in a 1948 review of Berryman’s first book, The Dispossessed, Winters took a dim view not only of Berryman’s “somewhat loose iambic pentameter, which displays no real organ­ization of lines into varying rhythmic and rhetorical units,” but his “disinclination to understand and discipline his emotions”; Winters hoped that he would learn to “think more and feel less, and to mitigate, in some fashion, his infinite compassion for himself.”30 Berryman, in turn, argued down the margins of Winters’s In Defense of Reason (1947), and all over the pages of Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-­Wrought Urn (1947): “Brooks in a way understands; but he does not understand what he understands,” Berryman writes next to one passage. “Dog bites dog,” he says of another; “No!” or “My God!” to many.31 His archives at the University of Minnesota hold drafts of an essay called “The Old Criticism,” which offers “John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters ^Robt Penn Warren^ and R. P. Blackmur ^Cleanth Brooks^” as pos­si­ble “American generals” for the movement. While promptly admitting that “­there are differences among the four critics I have named, as among their disciples,” and that their criticism has distinct value, Berryman argues that “they have shared impor­tant attitudes, and above all exerted an influence in common.” He focuses on their shared “orientation to ‘tradition’, a kind of local seriousness, a pontifical tone, ^an interest in form^, attention to individual features of style, deliberate inattention or indifference to the work of personality in poetry.”32

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Berryman’s longest reply to New Critical desiderata is The Dream Songs, which intensifies the undisciplined form and personality regretted by Tate and Winters. Several of his first readers ­were disappointed: the apparent lack of formal rationale—­and the lack of rationale for entire songs—­presented an obstacle even to appreciative critics. M. L. Rosenthal found the form “a tedious excuse, as it w ­ ere, for proliferation without qualitative development.”33 Robert Lowell’s review admitted tones of frustration: “How often one chafes at the relentless indulgence, and cannot tell the what or why of a passage.”34 Although Tate wrote a favorable blurb for 77 Dream Songs, he eventually concluded that the poem was a falling-­off from Berryman’s more obviously distanced, coherent work. Years ­later, asked about his former pupil in a 1974 interview, he answered, “He was an original poet and a very in­ter­est­ing one, but he ­wasn’t a ­g reat poet. . . . ​He never grew up. That was his ­whole trou­ble. And Dream Songs is simply paranoid projections of childhood manias and obsessions.”35 That interpretation, which takes the poem as flat transcription of psychological damage, has continued in the de­cades since. One suggestion of a rationale for the poem’s wildly inconstant form appears in an essay produced for a collaboration with Tate himself. While teaching at Minnesota, Berryman and Tate (and their colleague, the phi­los­o­pher Ralph Ross) worked together on a textbook called The Arts of Reading, published in 1960. Among the poems for which Berryman wrote commentary was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Explaining the jolt of “like a patient etherized upon a ­table,” Berryman writes that the poem’s first two lines ­ ere a come-on, designed merely to get the reader off guard, so that he w could be knocked down. The form . . . ​is reductive; an expectation has been created only to be diminished or destroyed.36 Berryman is thinking of the way Eliot begins with an apparent love song—he says it “sounds very pretty—­lyrical . . . ​it sounds like other dim romantic verse”—­only to drop it, and of how we are invited to think Prufrock is addressing his beloved, u ­ ntil we have to drop that idea as well. In The Dream Songs, such come-­ons seem directed at a prosodic, linguistic, and moral judge, the kind of academic mocked in Song 35, when critics are “assembled . . . ​in the capital / city for Dull” (i.e., the 1962 MLA conference). While Berryman’s princi­ple of surprise approaches the way his own stanzas create and then dash expectations, his image of the reader being “knocked down” does not quite fit what happens in The Dream Songs: I think I watch its formal aggression, rather than experiencing it directly. That is, one is not actually the victim of Berryman’s stanzaic vio­lence; instead, it is as if you are watching Mort Sahl eviscerate Joseph McCarthy, or Joan Rivers engage and

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then demolish a heckler sitting a few rows away from you. ­These poetic misdemeanors seem closer, in spirit, to Umberto Eco’s idea that comedy occurs when t­ here is the violation of a rule (preferably, but not necessarily, a minor one, like an etiquette rule); . . . ​we are, so to speak, revenged by the comic character who has challenged the repressive power of the rule (which involves no risk to us, since we commit the violation only vicariously).37 If we hold Eco’s vicarious rule-­challenging and New Critical criteria in our heads as we read, the first layer of Berryman’s comedy emerges: a pointed formal unruliness, aimed at ideas of lyrical elegance. This poem kicks over and slips ­under hurdles; Berryman seems to violate any rule that occurs to him. We watch someone (I ­will return to my use of “someone” ­later) bail on a rhyme scheme and bungle meter. Although the effects of t­ hese pervasive metrical alterations are my main subject, questions of audience and of aggression—of who laughs, of what the joke is and who is in on it—­bring up Berryman’s use of blackface dialect. Blackface dialect is concentrated in the poem’s second speaker, who comes in occasionally to calm or question Henry (while he is never named, recent commentators have tended to follow Helen Vendler in referring to him as Henry’s conscience).38 As de­cades of critical and poetic responses to Berryman’s use of minstrelsy have suggested, postwar blackface offers what Kevin Young describes as “an elaborate ritual that allowed [white poets] to speak to the soul in crisis.”39 Berryman turns to blackface for self-­expression; that expression is enmeshed with the history of blackface as a specifically comic device. In keeping with his much-­broadcast obstreperousness t­ oward poetic institutions, Berryman may partly imagine this language as another affront to the largely southern, conservative New Critics, who would see it as undignified and as less than universal.40 And by the mid-1960s, ­after literal minstrel shows had largely died out, Berryman might have ­imagined that a blackface voice would discomfit his white, liberal American readership—­somewhat like Lenny Bruce’s satires on race relations, where Bruce ventriloquizes bigotry or unleashes a cata­logue of slurs. Matthew Meier and Chad Nelson’s argument about Bruce’s satirical treatment of race, that it both criticizes racism and “reinforc[es] the centrality of the white subject,” seems equally apt for Berryman’s approach. Berryman seems to have in mind a realm without black listeners, the Americans whom vaudev­ille minstrelsy served to misrepresent and patronize by caricaturing them as ignorant and emotional.41 Peter Maber,

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suggesting that Berryman uses minstrelsy “as a means both for self-­exploration and for racial exploration precisely ­because of its contradictions and its inauthenticity,” makes the similar point that Berryman’s blackface reveals the “limitations in [the poem’s] self-­conscious, self-­reflexive awareness of minstrelsy’s ingrained racism and its previous literary transgressions and appropriations.”42 While Maber argues that Berryman’s use of literary blackface was more self-­conscious than that of the first wave of white American modernists, that first wave remains relevant to a discussion of Berryman and humor. The overlap can be illuminated through Michael North’s summary of the rebellious linguistic appeal of minstrel dialect: Stein, Eliot, Cummings, and Pound found in blackface something expressive they could not get in their own dialects or cultures. As Nathan Huggins wrote in 1971, “So essential has been the Negro personality to the white American psyche that black theatrical masks had become, by the twentieth ­century, a standard way for whites to explore dimensions of themselves that seemed impossible through their own personae.”43 Berryman, finding it difficult to represent himself fully through standard or poetic En­glish, adopts the mask of a minstrel dialect: dialect is a dodge that lets him be more confessional than he other­wise would be.44 Perhaps above all, he sees it as funny—­perhaps as edgy, but more significantly for him, as linguistically “wrong.”45 Such language gives him another way of reaching irony and excess and idiosyncrasy. And it allows him to put quotation marks around his utterances. If he had written “­Women are better, braver” rather than “­Women is better, braver” in Song 15, he would have sounded like W. D. Snodgrass. Wanting that linguistic potential, but unable to disconnect it from race, Berryman seems to attempt to anticipate critique by mentioning burnt cork and clowning. He foregrounds the role of white American minstrels in Song 2, which is dedicated to “­Daddy” Rice, who pop­u­lar­ized minstrelsy in the United States (Harry Belafonte’s 1967 documentary A Time for Laughter begins with Rice stealing Jim Crow’s dance, and laughing in response to Jim Crow’s protests).46 Michael S. Harper hears the expressive aspects of Berryman’s blackface in “Tongue-­Tied in Black and White.” Observing that “only your inner voices / spoke such tongues,” Harper points to how Berryman picks up dialect on his own selective terms, as it suited his own subjectivity.47 When Tyehimba Jess reworks several Dream Songs in Olio (2017), he responds to precisely this use of black dialect to express white personality, and presses that expression into a recognition of the personal and po­liti­cal histories that Berryman had elided.48 Although I only rarely mention Berryman’s minstrelsy in the pages that follow, his use suggests the poem’s overpowering concern with expression.49 It recalls James Baldwin’s account of “white men, who believe the world is theirs

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and who, albeit unconsciously, expect the world to help them in the achievement of their identity.”50 Berryman wishes to represent what Harper calls t­ hose “inner voices”; to do so, he reaches for dialect, and to other ways of stretching language, poetic form, and the expectations of an (itself predictably white and largely male) audience.

In a State of Chortle Sin Despite his objections to the dominant trends of midcentury literary criticism, and his erratically antiacademic stance, Berryman himself wrote criticism (book reviews, textual studies, biographies) throughout his life. One of his essays singles out The Two Gentlemen of Verona (ca. 1590–1591) to register a sea-­change in comic lit­er­a­ture: describing the clown who “comes onstage alone at 2.3.1 and begins to talk to himself, or rather he begins to confide in the audience,” Berryman declares, “­Here we attend, for the first time in En­glish comedy, to a definite and irresistible personality, absorbed in its delicious subject to the exclusion of all e­ lse; confused, and engaging.”51 His description of Shakespeare’s clown, who makes the audience laugh through his addled speeches, might double as a sketch of the clown talking through The Dream Songs. The poem’s stanzaic and linguistic irregularities allow Berryman to pre­sent an inner life in more expressive ways than are conventionally pos­si­ble. A regular stanza is a foil to an irregular sense of control, obedience, and proportion; it makes out-­of-­balance ways of thinking even more noticeable. An anomaly in Song 215, where Berryman remembers a 1937 visit to his hero Yeats, offers a case in point. The poem’s first sestet ends by portraying the older poet at the end of life: “Humourless, ­g rand, by the ­g reat fire for a look / he set out his death at twilight” (ll. 5–6), where the nobility of age is supported by the sunset and glowing embers of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. Before the opening of the second sestet, however, Berryman inserts a single unaccompanied line. “The goddamned scones came hot” (l. 7) is surrounded by white space, on its own in the m ­ iddle of the page. I can imagine a formalist (say, Fussell) casting a cold eye on that interjection: to break one’s form at the behest of something so trivial, and to make a sentence so trivial into its own unit, is unjustified, or self-­indulgent. But in the hyperexpressive mode Berryman sets up, that extraneous line emphasizes both the disjunction of Henry’s memory and his memory’s comic lack of selective hierarchy. Though one is trying to remember Yeats’s somber dignity, one might more keenly remember getting burned by the scones; the stanzaic aberration captures the discrepancy between what one thinks is most impor­tant and what

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one actually recalls. When Eliot admits in “Mr. Apollinax” (1916) that “Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah / I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon,” he makes explicit a similar conflation of ­people and the tea over which they conversed; in Berryman’s poem, however, the interrupted stanza itself bears out the recollective glitch.52 As the memorably hot scones that barge in on one’s form indicate, this second layer of comedy represents a fallible mind. The Dream Songs stages impercipience, fixations, afterthoughts, passing moods, and countless other ­mental pro­cesses. It evokes “the ultimate familiarity of the dialogue of the mind with itself,” as Helen Vendler has written (a description echoing Eliot’s account of the “first voice” of poetry, where one talks to oneself or to nobody at all).53 The formalist princi­ples exploited in The Dream Songs illuminate how thoroughly this hero is kicking against the laws of broader world. To break one’s meter is to fail to keep a promise; to transgress is literally to step across a limit, ­whether a commandment or the gap of white space at the end of a stanza. Aesthetic princi­ples seem to stand in for a larger domain of expectations, commitments, and standards which one might, in one’s ­actual life, strug­gle or fail to reach. Song 164, the first stanza of which gave this chapter its example of a “flawless” sestet, ­later uses a thirteen-­syllable outburst to embody resentment: as Henry, three limbs broken, remembers his unharmed friends, he grumbles, “­Couldn’t William break at least a collar bone?” (l. 8). Henry’s desire for com­pany in injury is as unabashed as his disregard for the pentameter. While drastic breaches of a delicate form can help assert extreme ­mental states, Henry’s conformations to his stanza are expressive as well. See, for example, how much monotony is begrudged through a ­little parallel in Song 53, where Henry waits “with prob­ably insulting mail to open / and certainly unworthy words to hear”: his meter and syntax are as unvarying as what­ever is deposited by the postal ser­vice. A ­ fter denouncing “Iowa, / detestable State” in Song 290, Henry grows effusive about Ireland, which exists for him as a dreamy, quaint fiction: Adorable country, in its countryside & persons, & its habits, & its past, martyrs & heroes, its noble monks, its wild men of high pride & poets long ago, Synge, Joyce & Yeats, and the ranks from which they ­rose. (ll. 7–12) This wandering sentence without a main verb represents how Henry contemplates Ireland in his lazily nostalgic moments. The stanza is snugly routine;

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the rhymes seem complacent (“past” and “Yeats”; “heroes” and “­rose”). The steady meter lays stress on a sudden mass of ampersands, the most automatic of connectives (“& pérs|ons, # |its háb|its, # | its pást”). As symbols used to link close or frequent relations, the ampersands suggest that Henry has ­imagined t­ hese vignettes before, drifting in exactly this order, with the same idealizing adjectives. Song 290 suggests that even a formally inconspicuous stanza conveys an unmistakable state of mind: it stages one of Henry’s favorite ­mental pictures, a prepackaged idea of Ireland as picturesquely heroic, to which he often returns. Stanzaic disruption and conformity, then, can depict very par­tic­u­lar ­mental states. This expressiveness is unexpected, since Berryman’s language has seemed most notable for being hyperstylized, brassy, and outré. The poems are low on atmospheric details, and their scenes tend to be made up of spiky, quick, exaggerated action (Henry “f[alls] smiling” through lines as if they are panels in a comic strip; we know nothing about Mrs Boogry except her name). Vendler has called The Dream Songs a set of “Freudian cartoons,” explaining that “the reductiveness and garishness and vio­lence we associate with cartoons—­and do not normally associate with our ‘sensitive’ therapeutically-­ presented selves—­are Berryman’s startling comic means ­toward repre­sen­ta­ tion of his irrepressible Id.”54 What is comically startling, I would add, is not simply the fact that the self is cartooned; it is that something surprisingly fine-­ grained is at work within a style that initially seems reductive, transgressive, or simply off-­k ilter. ­There is a strand of admiration amid the disreputable ­here, where a nominally fixed stanza encompasses wild ­mental states, and where “reductiveness and garishness” are so suggestive of nuanced m ­ ental states. ­These high-­contrast, bold, zany pieces of language grow funny b­ ecause of the ways in which they are not only garish but subtle. A harder-­to-­classify but equally tangible idée fixe appears in Song 55, when Henry undergoes an “interview” at the gates of Heaven, usually a site of joy or comfort. (This predicament was a routine in minstrelsy and vaudev­ille, and remains a stock topic in a­ ctual jokes.) Peter’s not friendly. He gives me sideways looks. The architecture is far from reassuring. I feel uneasy. A pity,—­the interview began so well: I mentioned fiendish t­ hings, he waved them away and sloshed out a martini strangely needed. (ll. 1–7)

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Henry is rattled. The paratactic syntax of the beginning, in which one short sentence follows another without subordination, hovers between portentous terseness and inarticulate fretfulness.55 The sentences that follow, even the longer ones, pointedly avoid grammatical complexity: no dependent clauses, no inversion of subject and predicate, always a subject and then a verb. The song’s metrical motions, however, are more diverse. A ­ fter the first line, the poem rarely falls into regular pentameter, though most of the lines in the first two stanzas come quite close to it. Meter sags in a list of “indifferent m ­ atters” (a flippant pun summing up the banal topics of their conversation); but iambs again emerge when Henry tries, haltingly, to explain the way their interview went downhill: Then a change came backward. A chill fell. Talk slackened, died, and he began to give me sideways looks. (ll. 11–13) The effect of this repetition is one of circling back to the real prob­lem, the ­thing that has been bother­ing Henry since the poem’s first line. As Henry returns to St. Peter’s indescribable but ominous glances, his agitation wells up, making his last clause (“and hé begán to gíve me sídeways lóoks”) into what is traditionally characterized as the most “natu­ral” of En­glish meters: it recalls how Dickens lapses into pentameter at moments of strong feeling.56 At first, the humor h ­ ere seems directed at Henry’s fixation on Peter’s insignificant “sideways looks,” and on how he himself is being viewed. He seems to fail to register the gravity of the situation; his language makes the day of judgment into a business interview, and its failure is merely “a pity.” But the superficial look is significant: it is an intuition that something is g­ oing wrong. Though the thought is only half-­articulate, as is often the case with Henry’s attempts to define something (see Song 1’s “It was the thought that they thought / they could do it”), he rightly senses that ­these sideways looks are an omen. The resurfacing meter and phrase make a striking repre­sen­ta­tion of tongue-­tied singlemindedness. Henry has no better language for what Peter is ­doing than “gives me sideways looks”: he uses the phrase twice. Songs like this one, which get at an almost indefinable feeling, are not adequately explained by a comic theory centered exclusively on superiority or subversion: as with the provincialism of Song 290, the comedy of uneasy preoccupation in Song 55 invites something close to admiration. The Dream Songs also takes the rules of En­glish itself to break or comply with. Berryman owned two copies of H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern En­

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glish Usage (1926), and many of the practices condemned by Fowler are committed by Henry, who thereby gains another set of ways to delineate a state of mind.57 Take the poem’s moments of complicated syntax, which pointedly invoke formality and stability. ­Because joints and pivots such as wherefore, thus, therewith, or whereat involve differentiating relations between parts of speech, they imply reasoning and forethought; at such moments, Henry’s grammar indicates that he has pulled himself together and knows what he is g­ oing to say next, or that he wants to seem as if he does. It can signal pomposity, as if he is proud that his syntax is muscular enough to classify and connect any topic to any other. In Song 215, where Henry is gratified to be taking tea with Yeats, his syntax rises to the occasion; the opening two lines even display epanalepsis (the virtuosic rhetorical device where a clause manages to end on the word it began with), through their “took” and “took”: Took Henry tea down at the Athenaeum with Yeats and offered the master a fag, the which he took, accepting too a light to Henry’s lasting honour. (ll. 1–4) The faux-­regal air is created particularly through a now obsolete construction, “the which”; it creates a l­ittle pocket of commentary that serves mostly as a redundant flourish (as does the instance of what Fowler would call an “eloquent variation” of diction, the move from take to accept). While ­these grammatical structures are so intricate as to be themselves a source of self-­ contentment, they frequently trip up the person who seems to construct them. Although Song 83 opens with a veneer of impressiveness and stately pauses (“I recall a boil, whereupon as I had to sit, / just where, and when I had to, for deadlines”), its seemingly precise grammar ­will not parse. As such moments begin to suggest, Henry employs linguistic opposites: both scholarly and nonstandard En­glish often occur within the same Song. Song 114, for example, begins with a neologism merging whip and chirp, suggesting that he is already in such dire straits as to be reaching for animal-­or baby-­like sounds. Two lines end with “whines,” and his “ich” is more of a squeak than an I would be: Henry in trou­ble whirped out lonely whines. When ich when was ever not in trou­ble? But did he whip out whines afore? (ll. 1–4)

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The most salient disarrangement is the stammering “When ich when was,” with its sense of acute confusion (when, when?). Henry has himself so much at the front of his mind that his pronoun ousts the verb from its proper place; then he shut­tles back to another “when,” while weltering in alliteration and deranging meter. What is comic ­here is the iridescence between the speaker’s seeming collapse and his expressive success. His use of garbled English—­part from minstrelsy, part from German, but a w ­ hole that cannot be mapped onto any language—­calls to mind the Dickens characters who play up their linguistic class markers to manipulate a listener. In David Copperfield, for example, Mrs. Gummidge elicits sympathy by repeating, “I am a lone lorn creetur . . . ​ and everythink goes contrairy with me,” as if to underscore her unfortunate situation; Uriah Heep keeps proclaiming that he is “ ’umble,” with h-­dropping that reinforces his claim to lowly origins.58 This poem’s speaker, possessed of a correspondingly good ear for the pathetic, uses ­every means at hand to demonstrate his weakened condition. The ability to mingle linguistic heights and depths gives Berryman a way to represent both ­imagined magnificence and ­actual puerility—­moments of pettiness, impercipience, a lack of proportion. At the end of the first stanza of Song 114 (where t­ hose lonely, incoherent whines are “whirped out”), Henry delivers a thesis: he is “fleeing double,” in a pun that takes in the trou­ble of his past and pre­sent. For the next few lines, his syntax resembles a complex logical structure, with colon-­directed deductions that are building to a point: “Mr Past” is undesirable: “Sir ­Future Dubious” is, worse, “calamitous & ­grand.” Making the archaic and efficiently verbless decision that he “can no foothold ­here,” Henry infers that one possibility remains: for Dr Pre­sent, who ­won’t thrive to us hand over neither hand

wherefore I pines

from them blue depths nor choppering down skies does Dr Pre­sent vault unto his task. (ll. 10–14) That “wherefore” frames Henry’s thought as highly sensible; the long, seemingly deductive clauses reason out that his current state is ­every bit as useless as his past and ­f uture. But that structure is soon undercut by nonstandard grammar. The clauses crumble into confused pronouns and verbs, querulous double negatives, and doleful (“weft on his own”) baby-­talk, culminating in the morose imperative of “Pluck Dr Pre­sent” (l. 16). This state of mind fuses self-­pity and self-­congratulation: Henry shows both how palpably time

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oppresses him, and that he is still capable of adopting a slightly facetious tone ­toward his situation (his personified figures act in a literal cliff hanger, where Dr Pre­sent is neither swimming nor flying to the rescue). The grammar dramatizes how he draws himself up into rationality, attempts to be jocular, and dissolves into plaintiveness. Henry is ignoring advice dispensed repeatedly in Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day (1956), where another struggling protagonist is reminded of the importance of “the pre­sent moment”: “The past is no good to us. The ­f uture is full of anxiety. Only the pre­sent is real—­the here-­and-­now. Seize the day.”59 Henry, however, has de­cided that even his pre­sent is failing him: he “can no foothold” on the day. Berryman shares with Bellow the comedy of bottoming out; inside the cover of Herzog (1964), he keeps track of e­ very time he laughs: “I chuckled first at the bottom of p. 2, next at v. top of 7, 8 b[ottom]–9 t[op], 11 m, 7×, 93 103!, 108, 111t, 116, 122–3, 152 is ­great, 166, 173–5, 196, 216– 7, 277.”60 When Berryman addressed listeners at Harvard in 1966, he told them, “Prepare to weep, ladies and gentlemen. Saul Bellow and I almost kill ourselves laughing about the Dream Songs and vari­ous chapters in his novels, but other ­people feel bad. Are you all ready to feel bad?”61 Like Bellow’s autobiographical character Herzog, who puts his turbulent self into letters he never mails, Berryman foregrounds his desperate ­mental state. ­Until the twentieth ­century, madness in English-­language poetry was usually Gothic and tragic; Berryman paints a broader picture than Tennyson (in “Maud”) or perhaps even Plath (in “Ariel”) by making the excesses of the mad include lust, addiction, and absurd vanity. In d­ oing so, he joins a postwar tendency to mine m ­ ental distress and especially psychiatric treatment for comedy. As Stephen Kercher relays, Shelley Berman’s “act itself mimicked a kind of therapy session,” in which the audience becomes the therapist confessed to. Berman once told Time that “My ­whole act is confession. E ­ very word I say, I’m admitting something.”62 When Berman calls his psychiatrist in “Complete Neuroses,” or when Mike Nichols’s hiccupping analyst tries to listen to Elaine May’s distraught patient, or when Rodney Dangerfield, on the couch, describes “All pressure. This pressure is like a heaviness. It’s always on top of me, this heaviness” (as the psychiatrist, Bill Murray, sneaks out of the office), ­these routines get humor out of the intensity with which one talks about oneself, as compared to the way another person listens.63 With Berryman as with ­these professional comedians, the mind is a site that joins triviality (the sheer vanity of talking about one’s self for a ­whole hour) and unexpectedness (what makes Berman’s five-­minute monologue tolerable is its weirdness). The Dream Songs relies on the strange swerves of Henry’s thought, and on how a mood can slide from the pompous to the piteous. In

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Song 57, syntax accentuates an incongruous mutation of tone and topic; it tracks Henry’s shift from assurance to doubt to disregard. He begins in an irreverently punning “state of chortle sin,” “reflect[ing]” on what the wages of sin ­will be. Unconcerned, even cocksure, he depicts Hell as a place of “good talk, / and gripe of retail loss,” summarizing Book II of Paradise Lost, where the fallen angels gather to make speeches. Henry dismisses the idea of being sent to Hell himself, with a somewhat insouciant “I dare say not.” But the idea prompts another thought: I ­don’t thínk t­ here’s that place save sullen ­here, wherefrom she flies to­night retrieving her w ­ hole body, which I need. (ll. 6–8, diacritic is Berryman’s) “I ­don’t thínk,” with its careful, tentative accent—­less emotive than italics would be—­seems to second-­guess his certainty. But while the stately, archaic “wherefrom” intensifies the Miltonic echoes, the subject then changes completely, pivoting on “body” in a short, de­cided relative clause: “which I need.” The sentence enacts a thought descending from heroic melancholy to a slightly petulant demand. The last few pages have moved from presenting The Dream Songs’ rule-­ breaking as incompetent or fractious to seeing it as deftly and comically true-­ to-­life. The change of view is summed up by W. H. Auden, who describes how we first see a clown as the clumsy man whom inanimate objects conspire against to torment; . . . ​ but our profounder amusement is derived from our knowledge that this is only an appearance, that, in real­ity, the accuracy with which the objects trip him up or hit him on the head is caused by the clown’s own skill.64 For Auden, one laughs not from a sense of mere superiority but from something nearer to admiration: a similar dynamic works in The Dream Songs.

Not the Poet, Not Me The Dream Songs pre­sents Henry—­“an imaginary character (not the poet, not me),” as Berryman asserts in his preface—­interact with a stanza.65 Sometimes, as we have seen, this imaginary character obeys the form, padding and arranging lines ­until they scan. Equally often, however, he seems out to break it,

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with prose-­like lines that go on for fifteen syllables, and comically haphazard rhymes. ­Behind t­hese appearances of incompetence is a performer with expressive skill: Henry himself seems to wield his form, to dramatic effect. The character stuck in the printed page has been granted a strange amount of formal power. If we accept the fiction that Henry is the speaker who violates nearly ­every rule of En­glish, we are also asked to consider that he ignores or adheres to his stanza, moves into and out of pentameter, and rhymes when it suits him. Berryman’s use of a purportedly fictive speaker and a prominent, set-­but-­ varying stanza creates the impression that this character is not merely talking (with John Berryman arranging his words into a stanza), but manipulating his verse form himself.66 ­Here the poem joins a hall-­of-­mirrors tradition more frequently encountered in other genres. For example, Berryman literally interacted with his copy of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767): on a page that Lawrence Sterne left blank so that the reader could draw a picture of his mistress, ­there is a faintly penciled face.67 Molly Bloom begs Joyce to let her out of Ulysses (1922); characters conspire against their author, himself another fictional character, in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-­Two-­Birds (1939); the corrupt attorney general in Blazing ­Saddles (1974) tells a taxi to drive him out of the film; Deadpool (1991–) is aware that he is in a comic book. In turn, The Dream Songs pre­sents a character conscious of the form in which he speaks.68 One almost analogue occurs near the end of The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387– 1400), when Chaucer puts himself into his book as the most inept of tellers. Although the pilgrims’ host expects “Som deyntee thyng,” the Tale of Sir Thopas turns out to be, like the Dream Song stanza, a formal disaster. It begins with a six-­line unit that forces the pilgrim Chaucer to stuff his narrative with superfluous, risible material; but within a few pages, the sestet begins sprouting additional lines, and then almost doubles in length. Soon one of Chaucer’s own characters interrupts the tale and condemns its versification, saying exasperatedly that such “drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord.”69 Both poems share a comic shimmer between apparent incompetence and ­actual skill, the kind embodied in Auden’s clown. And both play a slightly dizzying game with authorial control; in Berryman’s case, the clown stumbles not only for our amusement, but to convey what he wants to convey about his inner life. The way that this protagonist is wielding the form in which he is placed is a new one in poetry. If the form of The Dream Songs has been hijacked by the character, that character is conscious not only of his theatrics, but of the theatrical potential of his own stanza. He can do what he wants within it: ­whether he demolishes it or defers to it, he uses it to capture highly distinct attitudes. In Song 266, when

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asking God, “Was then the ­thing all planned? / I mention what I do not understand,” Henry maintains his meter, rhymes fully, and speaks in standard En­glish without even a contraction; his doubt, such dutifulness implies, is honest, unrhetorical doubt. He draws on techniques to well-­established effects: it sometimes seems as if he has read Fussell’s examples of imitative meter and is compiling an anthology of exemplary cases, which he uses to play up his vari­ous states of mind. Even the moments where Henry seems to lose all grip on his stanza, show him ­doing so with intent, as in Song 46. ­After announcing the “Incredible panic” he sees outdoors, he depicts a wild scene, relayed by an equally discombobulated mind: ­ eople are blowing and beating each other without mercy. P Drinks are boiling. Iced drinks are boiling. The worse anyone feels, the worse treated he is. Fools elect fools. A harmless man at an intersection said, ­under his breath, “Christ!” (ll. 2–6) Song 46 (which was read by the defense at Bruce’s 1962 obscenity trial, prob­ ably ­because of its concluding “memory of a lovely fuck”) demonstrates intensely theatrical breakages; the stanza runs wild.70 Its second line is distended to contain a ­whole sentence, and then the four short sentences that follow are so hasty as to step on their own heels. Enjambment places italicized pressure on “Iced”; the prosodic force is comically greater than the word itself. Henry rhymes “mercy” with “worse,” desperately, and “iced,” nonsensically or blasphemously, to “Christ,” while ending his stanza with a sixteen-­syllable prose rush. The vio­lence being inflicted on this sestet is so exaggerated as to call attention to itself as a deliberate act, expressing incredible panic at Henry’s behest. If Henry’s form is stagily chaotic and out of control in Song 46, it is quite the opposite in Song 67, where control itself is handled stagily. H ­ ere he discusses the writing of poetry, through a surgical meta­phor that might be drawing on James Thurber’s 1939 short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” where the hero, in one of his rich imaginary lives, intervenes in an open-­heart surgery as doctors blanch: I ­don’t operate often. When I do, persons take note. Nurses look amazed. They pale. The patient is brought back to life, or so.

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The reason I d­ on’t do this more (I quote) is: I have a living to fail— ­because of my wife & son—to keep from earning. (ll. 1–7) Henry truncates his second (usually pentameter) line, putting extreme stress on “persons take note.” The pentameter of the fourth and fifth lines, by contrast, sounds pointedly calm, even blasé (“or so”), and yet controlled. Henry’s tone is manifestly calculated: the parenthetical “I quote,” and the colon that brings line 6 to an abrupt halt, announce that he has planned each statement; and he exploits his stanza-­ending to trick the reader, in slow motion. Around the edges of his grimly clever explanation—­Henry must fail to fail, however much he just wants to give up—­glints the trappings of a per­for­mance. This character manipulates his form for an audience whose attention he wants to hold, despite his grave situation and his almost antagonistic terseness. Like Mitty, he pays attention to ­whether he is the subject of attention. At this high point of theatricality, the voice of Henry’s conscience (a more discerning, wider-­minded interlocutor) intervenes to sum up the financial prob­ lem with dry sympathy. Henry, however, continues to dilate upon his sensational “operations.” At the second stanza’s end, he hastens to point out the conditions in which he works, fitting thirteen syllables into a space that typically holds six: Now ­there is further a difficulty with the light: I am obliged to perform in complete darkness operations of ­g reat delicacy on my self. (ll. 8–11) Though the sentence begins with the understatement of “a difficulty,” its three-­ syllable conclusion throws im­mense weight on each word of his revelation: “on [pause] my [pause] self,” as recorded at Harvard in 1962.71 It brings form (a drastically curtailed line, monosyllables, the sudden absence of rhyme) to bear on what seems to Henry most crucial. Song 67’s final exchange compresses several states of mind. When the wry voice of conscience and self-­awareness infiltrates Henry’s exhibition to ask, “­Will you die?” the question seems poised between mockery and genuine concern. In response, Henry splits his line both horizontally and vertically, for a hyperbolically suspenseful pause: —­My friend, I succeeded. ­Later. (ll. 18–19)

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He is ominous and nonchalant, to the last word: by the 1950s, “­later” is both portentous (“I w ­ ill succeed in d­ ying ­later”) and a slangy American curtailing of “see you ­later.” The same kind of punning slang is at work in “operate,” a verb that could include both the terrible procedures of the surgeon and the seedier work of a shrewd operator, a slick talker. Through fluctuating meter and sleight-­of-­hand syntax, Henry operates with g­ reat delicacy on his readers; his relish of his per­for­mance and their attention, though not explicit, is audible. By such minute linguistic innovations, The Dream Songs collapses distance between speaker and reader: we see not only how Henry thinks, but even how he wants to be perceived. Reading The Dream Songs as spoken by an unruly, deeply self-­conscious character can help explain some of its more baffling features. For example, while its frequent use of the third person has been construed primarily as expressing fragmentation, depersonalization, and dissociation, it is also a device that expresses a somewhat self-­aggrandizing self-­consciousness; comic novelists have capitalized on it.72 In Dickens’s Dombey and Son, Major Bagstock speaks of himself as “Joe Bagstock,” who “has not had the happiness of bowing to you at your win­dow, for a considerable period. Joe has been hardly used, Ma’am. His sun has been ­behind a cloud.”73 In The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer humblebrags in the third person: “Mailer had a complex mind of sorts,” and when Thurber’s Mitty lapses into heroic daydreams, he returns again and again to his name.74 ­These instances suggest characters imagining their own celebrity, picturing themselves as ­those thinking or writing about them would. Just as they aspire to being noticed and narrated, so too Henry’s third person embodies how he dwells on himself, ­whether in a self-­dramatizing or self-­denouncing mode.75 Henry’s style implies an awareness that he is performing, and an awareness of how his utterances are perceived and even scanned. This stratum of Berryman’s comedy is akin to one Eliot finds in “situations where a character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light”: in such moments, according to Eliot, we see the character possessing “a sense which is almost a sense of humour (for when anyone is conscious of himself as acting, something like a sense of humour is pre­sent).”76 A sense that is “almost a sense of humour” is certainly a sense of irony. It is an irony close to that heard in Thom Gunn’s refrain of “I know you know I know you know I know,” where the speaker tells both unknown listener and audience that he is posing: “I’m still playing the same / Comical act inside the tragic game.”77 ­There is an I know you know I know in how Berryman’s speaker draws me into hearing what I think is a private admission, only for me to realize how theatrical and self-­conscious he is being. When the first seven lines of Song 67 lead one to think that Henry is talking to “us” or “me,” it is characteristic of what Helen Vendler has described

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as a Freudian lyric, where the reader interprets the poem as the psychoanalyst interprets the patient, listening for and piecing together a deeper psychological situation (a mode of reading Gillian White has recently discussed with regard to Anne Sexton).78 With the appearance of the unnamed Friend, Henry addresses and converses with someone e­ lse: the couch is on a stage, and we are overhearing dialogue. This second voice (the one heard in Song 67 and the one often described as Henry’s conscience) puts a wrinkle in the fiction of the poem I have been exploring, this notion of the character as poet, as a dramatic speaker who takes over. One way of explaining the second voice could be dialogic: that the poem has at least one other character, who treats the poem’s stanza with more re­spect. Or it could be transcriptive, another aspect of the main speaking subject. If it is a repre­sen­ta­tion of a completely separate second voice, Berryman or Henry not only shapes his poem’s form, but fashions another character for it. By d­ oing so, he can represent the way his posturing and imperceptiveness are interrupted by an occasional moment of clear realization, how some thoughts remain completely untouched by self-­ostentation. It might seem that to read the second voice as another voice in the main speaker’s head would continue Mill’s image of poetry as innocent of its audience, as “a soliloquy in full dress, and upon the stage,” where (despite the theatrical setting) “no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be vis­i­ble in the work itself. The actor knows that t­ here is an audience pre­sent; but if he act as though he knew it, he acts ill.”79 If you act as though you have an audience, you have turned from poetry to eloquence, “feeling pouring itself forth to other minds, courting their sympathy.”80 Henry, however, is making a play for the reader’s sympathy at ­every turn, thus contravening both Mill and the twentieth-­century critics who reworked Mill’s completely solitary speaker, so as to let poetry remain untainted by eloquence or the social. In Song 67, rhe­toric has encroached on the territory of lyric. As David Haven Blake has documented, “Berryman was keenly interested in the public aspects of the confessional poem, dwelling extensively on the poet’s reputation in a media-­centered world”; The Dream Songs mentions fame and publicity frequently.81 In addition to taking the stage routines of blackface minstrelsy and making ­those public “entertainments” into a private drama, Berryman also refers to actors (he “cast[s]” Shirley Jones and George C. Scott in Song 363), microphones, even public address systems (familiarly abbreviated to “p.a.”). When Song 267 depicts poetry as “thought rush[ing] onto a thousand screens,” it might seem to be a continuation of Prufrock’s seeing nerves thrown “in patterns on a screen” (the total sestets of the 385 songs offer just over a thousand such screens, con­ve­niently “rush[ing]” onto the screen without the interference of a poet). But for Berryman, the screen is also the

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tele­vi­sion screen, and thought in Song 267 is displayed for the mass audience of the BBC; feeling confessing itself to itself draws close to feeling broadcasting itself. In taking to a perverse extreme the New Critical separation of speaker and author, Berryman seems to literalize Wimsatt and Brooks’s claim that “Once we have dissociated the speaker of the lyric from the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals itself as drama.”82 Drama in Berryman is quite literal; this dissociated speaker poses for an audience and is manipulative, as if to say that even a fictive speaker cannot be ­free of eloquence. In ­doing so, Berryman reworks the dramatic monologue.83 Herbert Tucker sees the monologues of Tennyson and Browning as pushing back against the early decontextualizing of lyric: they conduct “a reductio ad absurdum of the very lyric premises staked out in Mill’s essays.”84 Reacting to that view of lyric as “uncontaminated by rhetorical or dramatic posturing,” t­ hese monologists create dramatic speakers who tend to stand for hyperisolated lyric subjectivities. Berryman, in turn, muddles the relation between the monologue and the twentieth-­century subjective lyric. First, while he essentially announces his poem as dramatic monologue (following from the New Critical understanding of all poetic speech as fictional), it is also about himself, quite transparently: it follows the poet from Minneapolis to Dublin and back, and it has access to the poet’s memories of Iowa and Berkeley, of broken limbs and diarrhea. Second, t­ here is the intense writerliness foregrounded by Berryman’s breakages. In this re­spect, Berryman’s dramatic monologue differs from the prior notion of a dramatic monologue: the way his character speaks in verse departs from Robert Frost’s blank verse monologues or the couplets of Lowell’s “The Mills of the Kavanaughs.” The constructedness of ­those verse forms, or even of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is not foregrounded as Berryman foregrounds this one, by a flashily warped or conformed-to stanza. Similarly, in Donne’s elaborate stanzas, the speakers are not so assertively put forward as personae, not troubled by a preface that reiterates the poems as spoken by someone “not the poet, not me.” Berryman’s loud formal strategies set up an oscillation between our overhearing and our spectating, between Henry as thinking to himself and performing for o ­ thers. A reminder of John Limon’s concept of abjection is helpful ­here: an abject person stages “daily infradramas, actor before audience and vice versa. You are, a­ fter all, literally beside yourself, watching your faculties—­ desire, for example—­play unaccustomed roles, always authored by someone ­else.”85 Something similar is at work in Berryman’s inadvertent book-­length study of self-­regard, where his histrionic speaker both is and is not quite him.

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This sense of per­for­mance is embodied in Song 4, where Henry is overcome (or rather, represents himself as being overcome) by an imaginative impulse that permeates his language, grammar, and rhythms: Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. (ll. 1–3, diacritic is Berryman’s) At Berkeley in 1965, Lenny Bruce imagines this predicament in an ambulance rather than a restaurant, asserting a man can “have a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus” and still “mak[e] a play for the nurse”: “ ‘How could you do that t­hing at a time like that?’ ‘I got horny.’ ‘What?’ ‘I got hot.’ ‘How could you be hot when your foot was cut off ?’ . . . ​‘I ­don’t know.’ ”86 But while Bruce’s patient is ashamed and defensive, and seems mainly concerned with sex, Berryman’s speaker is as interested in drama—in making a scene—as in lust. His opening is swept along by a trochee at the opening of a pentameter line (conventionally, such a substitution is supposed to be invigorating and exciting), by a participial phrase’s forward pull, and by the way the w ­ oman is mentioned only as possessor of the “compact & delicious body”: she is already such a central character in Henry’s mind that he does not think to introduce her.87 In other words, anticlimax and electric melodrama contend for the same space: they merge when that one-­syllable line, “twice,” disrupts the set form. That line puts a huge amount of weight on a word that reveals the ­woman’s glances as insignificant; as the sentence deflates for the reader, it reaches an apparent pinnacle for Henry. Both lust and imagination shape Henry’s language and form, and even his typography: the final stanza of Song 4, in which Henry stares resentfully at the husband (“The slob beside her      feasts . . .”) is perforated by what we might call a spatial caesura, a device used throughout The Dream Songs. It is one typographical equivalent for a comedian’s pause, and replicates the halting, struggling, blanking-­out moments in thought and speech. So this poem trou­bles multiple aspects of New Critical models of lyric reading. If one reads it as a transcription of a mind, of a lyric subjectivity, it is the mind of a hyper-­self-­conscious person who is thinking about how he is viewed, contra Mill. If it is read as a dramatic monologue, it is tethered to the poet’s own shameful self and desires. And it might also explode not only lyric isolation and impersonality, but lyric singularity: it is a stage per­for­mance foregrounding vaudev­ille and dialogue, and involving multiple acts, voices, personae, perspectives and audiences that are not necessarily attesting to a coherent speaker at all. A literal lost sheep, who sees his shepherd as “the strange one with so few legs,” is the speaker in Song 28.

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Berryman’s innovations of style and character—­a character who seems cognizant of his verse form—­partake in a late modernist and early postmodernist questioning of precepts summarized by Tyrus Miller: “[t]he heroic subjectivity of the innovating artist; the organic convergence of form and content in a symbolic unity set down by the artist . . . ​the exhibition of stylistic mastery as a criterion of value; . . . ​all ­these basic tenets of modernism’s aesthetic ideology ­were put in doubt” in the late 1920s and 1930s.88 In Berryman’s case, ­these doubts are writ large: he expresses a precarious subjectivity while turning that subjectivity onto a stage. And so, as Young observes, The Dream Songs bridges the impersonality valued by modernism and “the postmodern poetics—­si­mul­ta­neously disembodied and more personal—­practiced now.”89 Marilyn Chin, for example, flattens a line from Song 4 into a line from Song 14 (“Oh god, where have we gone wrong? / We have no inner resources!”) as part of a long reflection on what it means to be an I or a we in the con­temporary United States.90 Anne Carson’s “Twelve-­Minute Prometheus” collages quotations from The Dream Songs into a dialogue between Prometheus and Hermes, confounding Greek chorus with vaudev­ille chorus line; it speaks to an audience “already off to the bus.”91 This chapter began with the question of how Berryman transforms pettiness, maundering, and bragging. His linguistic and formal inventions, and his crossing of the dramatic monologue and the lyric, give him a varying amount of apparent distance on the attitudes he depicts. Northrop Frye, in 1951, writes that the job of the poet “is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as pos­ si­ble, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self-­ expression, and all the other navel-­strings and feeding tubes of his ego.”92 Berryman cuts the poem loose, but on a technicality; his technically fictive speaker retains all the egoism that Frye seeks to vaporize. Passing judgment on the speaker of The Dream Songs becomes harder than the poem’s confessional label and its author’s turbulent biography might have led us to expect. The poem quivers between multiple ways of reading, and its moments of obtuseness and self-­absorption are bound up with vis­i­ble prosodic and linguistic techniques. The formal and generic innovations of The Dream Songs si­mul­ta­neously pull one in and keep one at a remove. They serve as a reminder of the artifice ­behind Henry’s blurted-­out wildness. The Dream Songs also exemplifies the way the recent lyric’s par­tic­u­lar comedy involves a mixture of abjection and something approximating won­der, the feeling of surprised admiration that is an opposite to abjection. If descriptions of Berryman’s sequence stop with chaos, rowdiness, or subversion, they miss

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the ways in which it gives the illusion of being as precise as an EKG. The poem’s comedy depends not only on burlesquing the idea of a tidy, unified, audience-­unconscious lyric: it represents the “­g iant faults” of a ­human mind, as Song 79 puts it. And yet, to go a step further, descriptions of The Dream Songs as purely expressive of a coherent self miss the strangeness of its dialogues and stages. For Tucker, the dramatic monologue can remind us of “the play of verbal signification whereby character is engendered in the first place through colliding modes of signification”; Berryman’s exploration of character—in several senses—­takes place in pages where autobiography and fiction and per­for­mance jostle.93

Ch a p ter  2

Robert Lowell The Noise of One’s Own Voice

In the following letter, from the summer of 1961, Robert Lowell is performing for Elizabeth Bishop; he relays a hung­over and uncaffeinated trip to a Staten Island literary conference: Lunch: ham mostly fat and terrible ­things, egglike, that look like ­they’ve been through a steam laundry. A joint conference on drama, poetry and fiction in which the conference director, a Mr. Rust Hills, makes more and more surly references to my colleague Saul Bellow’s heroes. Mounting explosive heat. I side-­step the conference nymphomaniac. Swimming. Something has gone wrong with the tide, at ­every six inches ­there are deflated contraceptives. Boys of five blowing them up like balloons. Hideous blue and bloated ­things floating. The ­water striped with reddish algae that stains. Red sand on the beach, that also stains. . . . ​Stifling sleepless heat, sounds of intimacy, outrage and drinking. A young bearded poet announcing that he is the best poet of 24 in Amer­ic­ a, then rapping each dormitory door with a toilet brush.1 Even the weather is supernaturally bad, the tide having dredged up t­ hose literally unspeakable “blue and bloated ­things floating.” To someone familiar with a rough outline of Lowell’s life and work, comic passages like this one, which heaps up the most hellish snapshots of a long August weekend, come as a bit of a tonal surprise: Lowell is still taken as an archetype for unrelieved 52



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gravity and egoism.2 But reading him this way is to overlook a kind of humor central to his poetry: the self-­deprecating, sometimes morose, consistently deadpan pre­sen­ta­tions of one’s self and one’s surroundings. ­These pre­sen­ta­ tions involve per­for­mance even when sincere or most desperate. Lowell’s poems make more concrete a dynamic suggested by The Dream Songs, namely how the sense of being si­mul­ta­neously dislocated from and saddled with one’s uncertain self—of finding oneself playing a part one finds shameful—­can turn comic when addressed in a poem, itself so tugged between generic definitions and ideals. The postwar lyric, as John Limon suggests of stand-up, finds comedy in what it makes of abjection: the embarrassing or humiliating feeling of being defined by something encrusted on one, by a role “that has become your only character.”3 Berryman, for example, seems to drop his relatively literal feelings of abjection into a quite literal character he calls Henry, acquiring a technical distance from himself that is manifestly very ­little distance at all. What threatens to become Lowell’s only character? One gets some inkling by considering how he is represented by ­others: as sepulchral, public, excessive yet square (like a monument, or like his thousand-­page Collected Poems). From Norman Mailer’s vignettes in The Armies of the Night, where Lowell’s face itself “speak[s] of the g­ reat Puritan gloom in which the country was founded,” to Sadie Stein’s vision of him sitting dolefully in an unairconditioned subway car in August 2014, to Patricia Lockwood’s “Diagnosis of the Maladies of Poets of the Modern Age,” in which he is the only poet mentioned by name and has acquired rabies from a skunk, Lowell as brooding, eminently serious yet outré figure has been a source of something amusing.4 Throughout his life, that threatening role entails Lowell’s being Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, someone enveloped in im­mense amounts of privilege; being a descendant of an elite New ­England ­family makes him the “luckiest poet” Bishop knows (though she qualifies it with “[i]n some ways”) and makes him an emblem for postwar white Amer­ic­ a, for formalism, for confessionalism.5 It also entails being Robert Lowell: someone who experiences bouts of manic psychosis regularly, who is humiliated and depressed in recovery. And it entails the embarrassing encumbrances of how he appears in a poem: that he writes about t­ hese deeply personal experiences, and is subject to extreme self-­ exposure and self-­absorption.6 The concept of abjection is central to Lowell, and has not been studied as such. While the forms of abjection that charge Lowell’s poems shift over the years, they tend to have something to do with how a Lowellesque style—­ something like him, but not fully him—­presses into ­every poem he writes. He is on the cusp of self-­parody. At moments it is tempting to see Lowell’s

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work as funny ­because it is so serious and so over-­the-­top; but that explanation would not get at the odder comic plea­sure in his work, which is a ­little like watching someone try and almost manage to run up a descending escalator. It is also a l­ittle like stand-­up: he is performing Lowell. Lowell was troubled by what he called “the noise of my own voice,” in an expressively dissonant phrase: slightly dislocated yet still his, as disconcerting as hearing a recording of oneself.7 Voice, a term that Lesley Wheeler has described as connoting “originality and the continuity of identity over time,” takes in not only one’s way of speaking but one’s way of being.8 Examining Lowell’s recurrent changes of style, Helen Vendler observes that “A disgust for one’s former self and the creation of a new style are inextricably twinned phenomena”; in Lowell’s poems, though, one hears a disgust, or at least unease, regarding even the current self, copresent with the headiness of a new style.9 ­Whether he is writing in strict couplets or ­free verse, the noise of his own voice comes through, announcing itself as Lowellesque. (­Here Lowell differs from Berryman, who uses a highly stylized version of minstrelsy to change his voice completely.) The self-­presentation in Lowell’s letters is obviously comic. The letter to Bishop draws comic energy out of all the dismal objects one encounters on Staten Island, while also admitting that it is Lowell, a magnet for the dismal, who sees them that way. But the same tones are at work in the poems; even the dourness is folded into the comedy. T ­ here is a strain of self-­dramatization throughout Lowell’s poetry, and to miss how it is built into the lugubriousness or grandeur is to miss something central. In each new book, each new form, Lowell sets out to be completely dif­fer­ent and is not. It is as if he has a shell that he tries to scuttle away from, yet finds himself under­neath, again and again. The result involves an ironic rattling between an ac­cep­tance of one’s style, and a sense of next time I’m ­going to write something dif­fer­ent; it involves a perpetual rhythm of undercutting or overplaying a style.10

One Laughs Out in Church The severe, top-­heavy pentameters of Lord Weary’s ­Castle (1946) helped define Lowell as a formidable young poet working in the vein of Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. While Lowell himself l­ater deprecated the book’s surface as “stiff, humorless and even impenetrable,” its early reviewers admired its uncompromising sternness.11 John Berryman stacked physical verbs to express how t­hese early poems “writhed crunched spat against Satan, war, modern Boston, the Redcoats, Babel, Leviathan, Sodom.”12 Randall Jarrell declared that



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“the coiling vio­lence of the rhe­toric, the harshly stubborn intensity . . . ​come from a man contracting e­ very muscle, grinding his teeth together till his shut eyes ache.”13 But both of t­ hose reviews channel something faintly comic. Between the archetypal “Satan” and “Sodom,” Berryman inserts the particularity of “modern Boston,” as well as the anachronistic “Redcoats,” as if the British are still patrolling the increasingly degenerate city. Jarrell’s review goes on to identify a kind of mundane specificity that w ­ ill persist in Lowell’s work through the de­cades of stylistic transformation to follow. Observing that “The poems’ wit is often the wit of ­things,” Jarrell calls attention to less ­g rand images, t­ hose of relatives “sipping sherry / And tracking up the carpet,” and of a “corn-­fed mouse” who “Reined in his bestial passions.” Berryman and Jarrell point to a lack of proportion: that timeless abstractions of evil and a slightly stuffy New ­England city are equivalent, and that the tiny “corn-­fed” rodent should have ambitiously Latinate “bestial passions.” “One laughs out in church,” Jarrell declared.14 An early sense of abjection—of the way one sees oneself performing, but cannot stop performing—is lurking ­under Lord Weary’s ­Castle. Lowell is taking on, in poem ­after poem, “the role of almighty judge,” as Jahan Ramazani writes.15 And over and over, through an overdone style overdoing itself, through language that is inadequate to or in excess of its subject, authority is undercut. In the following lines, from an elegy Lowell wrote for his grand­father, the general atmosphere is minatory and vatic; the details, however, suggest an “inability to hold the key of inspiration,” as D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee said of the bathetic poems they had anthologized in The Stuffed Owl (1930).16 Lowell’s speaker begins a long sentence, knotted with relative clauses, by telling his grand­father to observe the pond of the Boston Public Garden, where The bread-­stuffed ducks are brooding, where with tub And strainer the mid-­Sunday Irish scare The sun-­struck shallows for the dusky chub This Easter (CP 23) The decorum of Lord Weary’s ­Castle lapses in unlikely and unpromising places. This Boston cityscape is pulled between Miltonic portentousness and an implication that its ducks have eaten so much as to become immobile. Turning to the kind of concrete, unnecessary specifics that w ­ ere ridiculed in The Stuffed Owl, Lowell fills his ducks with bread, and his symbol-­heavy, lofty directive with several literally low creatures. In ­doing so, he flouts Eliot’s idea that a literary

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work can express emotion by some “external facts” that “­shall be the formula of that par­tic­u­lar emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”17 ­Here the objective correlative, through which an individual’s private emotion can be reproduced in a reader, falls flat. To say that this motion falls flat does not quite catch at all its bizarreness, though. Of course, when Lowell’s glance sweeps from the nominal swans of the tourist-­filled boats, down to the dark realms of the a­ ctual chub, it is an exemplary case of incongruity (as well as a truly literal example of bathos). But ­these thing-­studded apocalyptic pages also suggest that even a deeply inappropriate line requires something ­else in order to topple into humor. What is potentially funny within Lowell’s forbidding, rather macabre elegy might be described as not simply dissonance (say, a clash between the symbolic and concrete, or any number of the “high-­low, soul-­body, mind-­matter, artificial-­natural” pairings that Alenka Zupančič summarizes and finds insufficient to explain laughter), but a dissonance so drastic that it seems a perfect opposite.18 Once situated in his poem, ducks do not simply not belong ­there, they become an ultimate emblem of not belonging, a fittingly unfitting t­hing, setting off a constant perceptual vibration between what seems right and what does not. Perched between satiety and ominousness, they are out of step yet in keeping with Lowell’s elegy. Rather than a sharply delineated contradiction, this incongruity is more embrangled: it is itself striking against an opposite, asking one to see the wildly out-­of-­place as somehow fitting. Bits of particularity in overdressed language occur almost systematically in early Lowell. And again and again they converge into a comic internal agreement, as when he punctures another heavi­ly symbolic, religious landscape by picturing “The loveless harems of the buck ruffed grouse, / Who drums, untroubled now, beside the sea” (CP 98). An acknowl­edgment of poetry’s inevitable shortcomings appears in ­these ­bubbles of the concrete: the poem cannot remain at prophetic, Pindaric heights. Even the individual syllables—­“the bréad-­stúffed dúck,” “the búck rúffed grouse”—­bulge out of their prosodic units, as if the meter itself is registering the strain of indecorum. As unlikely as it may seem to hear traces of a comic presence in early Lowell, I want to reiterate that comedy’s doubleness is vis­i­ble in ­these poems: if their incongruities kindle into comedy, it is b­ ecause they also seem to fit their context in some way. When Lowell declares, for example, that “only Armageddon ­will suffice / To turn the hero skating on thin ice” (CP 48), it is not just a cliché undermining the vatic. Rather, it is an oddly mimetic coincidence: his language collapses into flimsy commonplace, a linguistic thin ice of cliché and redundancy (Armageddon destroys the world, to say nothing of ice). Lit-



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eral words are tugged ­toward figurative senses, and the figurative comes to seem oddly literal. Trite phrases infiltrate the poems’ most intense scenes of judgment. When one speaker crashes a car into a church, he renders the chaos around him through a tumult of verbs with one peculiar lapse: “The shocked stones / Are falling like a ton of bricks and bones” (CP 47). That stock figure of speech, frequently used for lesser weights, adds not force but its reverse: it momentarily diminishes the fall. That princi­ple, in turn—­vio­lence undercut by stylistic vio­lence—­suggests how Lowell asserts and undercuts what at this point is most Lowellesque: his own seriousness and confidence. Early critics noted what Louise Bogan called a “tendency ­toward moral rigidity and emotional morbidity,” and Stephen Spender’s review of Life Studies found Lowell’s “weakness [to be] a judgment sure to the point of rigidity and lacking in a certain freedom: the freedom which allows that the judge might not be 100 ­percent right.”19 But this censorious perspective is destabilized by its own inconsistencies and extremes, its strangely over-­and understating language; l­ ittle internal parts continually upset their declamations. As Lowell remarked in a late interview, “I had a mechanical, gristly, alliterative style that did not charm much, ­unless . . . ​something slipped.”20 What slips in this book is decorum. The rhe­toric is perforated by the slang, puns, incongruous meta­phors, sonic oddities, and bathetic particularities within it, and by how such aberrations end up seeming of a piece with their frames. The comic undercurrent of Lord Weary’s ­Castle is not inherently redemptive or transformative. Rather, it is as erratic as the uncontrollable impulse to laugh out in church; it rebels against every­thing, including its own brutality. Its main use lies in how it ­counters the tendencies that could overwhelm Lowell’s writing: it tilts his poems away from the threat of any one dominating view or tone. Humor’s ability to achieve a tentative, disconcerting balance appears on larger scales in the years to follow. It ­will undercut the isolation of Life Studies, the unrelenting structural expectations of the sonnets, and the losses of Day by Day. In that last book, Day by Day, Lowell realizes that his ­mother’s “exaggerating humor, / the opposite of deadpan, / the opposite of funny to a son, / is mine now” (CP 789). His initial way of being funny, then, was to be “deadpan”: to give no sense of how inconsistencies like ­those of Lord Weary’s ­Castle are to be taken. For Lowell, though, to be deadpan is not simply to keep an impassive surface; it is to lay stress on the opposite of humor, to be manifestly not jocular. In a poem that begins at a nightclub and culminates in eternal damnation, he can announce, “I am a fallen Christmas tree” (CP 47). That sentence splices an often-­tragic I am construction—­heard when Shakespearean

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characters declare “I am a feather for each wind that blows” or “I am a tainted wether of the flock”—­with an image of con­temporary domestic disaster: he is not a fallen man or even a fallen oak, but a mess of tinsel, electric lights, and glass balls, lying prone ­until hauled upright.21 And yet a second ­after this inappropriately festive meta­phor is out (in the same line, in fact), the dramatic register resumes. ­There are several reasons for this deadpan, for the way Lowell does not pause over or point at his bizarre utterances. First, he associates obvious high spirits with m ­ ental instability, “the old menacing hilarity” that would intensify as he grew manic.22 One morning begins with the ominous realization that “I grow too merry, / when I stand in my nakedness to dress,” an image that links humor with vulnerability (CP 819). Second, Lowell is repelled by self-­ satisfied laughter, by the snowballing amusement of a group, pre­sent in Henri Bergson’s declaration that the comic arises “whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence.”23 Lowell hears that laughter when bullied and bullying as a young boy, and remembers it l­ater in “St. Mark’s, 1933.” In his fifties, he hears it from ambulance ­drivers who “with jocose civility,” “laugh at every­thing I say” as they inspect his rooms before taking him to a hospital (CP 821). As a response to the ­drivers’ dismissive amusement, he turns to defensive mockery, calling them “fat beyond the call of duty,” and implicitly connecting them to the cows outside, which “ruminate in uniform, / lowing routinely like a chainsaw.” That kind of abrasive and monotonous laughter does not serve to encourage second thoughts: it is heartless and also rather mindless. And when Lowell is neither threatened by his own dangerous “hilarity” nor the object of o ­ thers’ entertainment, he still associates some laughter with hostility. In a sonnet that imagines the evolutionary sequence from virus to dinosaur to hominid (“the neanderthal, first anthropoid to laugh” [CP 423]), laughter is another weapon, like teeth or legs; one laughs in triumph at the evolutionary stage reached. Audible laughter is explic­itly brutal in several early poems: a king with a “Breughel-­peasant laugh / Exploding” kills a pet dog on a whim, for example (CP 43). Recognizing that laughter can be coercive or complacent, and that tyrants can have hearty laughs, Lowell tends to downplay his own sense of humor; the outer, obvious signs of humor involve something quite the opposite of what he is attracted to in it. An overtly jocose style would be too close to the smug laughter of Bergson’s group, or to the untethered, estranging laughter of a manic episode. Although the comic itself is a disrupting force, Lowell needs to temper it with something ­else, or it ­will be as monolithic and monotonous as sheer gravity would be. As he turns from his early verbal vio­lence,



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and ­toward the repre­sen­ta­tion of desperate personal situations, humor w ­ ill continue to operate below the surface.

Stuffed Owls, Ducks, and Loons As Gillian White remarks, “American Confessional poetry has been constructed both to prefigure and in some sense to serve as the ultimate example of con­ temporary ‘expressive,’ lyric poetics often assumed to be rooted in Romantic practice”; in 1959, with the publication of Life Studies, Lowell became the icon for Confessional poetry that he remains t­ oday.24 Just before the final and most startlingly autobiographical section of Life Studies, he implicitly considers his work in relation to Romanticism, modernism, and the critical desiderata around him. In d­ oing so, he considers also the potential failures and embarrassments of his new style. Begun years e­ arlier (in 1946, as “To Delmore Schwartz’s Stuffed Duck”), “To Delmore Schwartz” is arguably the first poem of Life Studies into which an identifiable Robert Lowell intrudes, situated in a par­tic­u­lar place: a mustard-­color ­house that he shared with Schwartz in Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts. Remembering a night of heavy drinking and intellectual conversation, it would almost be more at home in the last section of the book, except that it has no I. All we, our, you, your throughout, as if Lowell has not quite tipped into a poetry centered on himself. In “To Delmore Schwartz,” Lowell is self-­conscious about intensifying what he sees as a genre of feeling into a genre of tumultuous solipsism; t­ here is a portrait of a particularly dissipated-­looking Coleridge on the wall, and Schwartz misquotes Words­worth’s Immortality Ode, as if to show literally what Confessional poetry appears to do. (As recent scholarship has demonstrated, this view of Lowell’s generation relies on how modernists reduced Romanticism into a self-­expressive tradition.)25 The center of the poem, however, looks over at the men’s other roommate: Your stuffed duck craned ­toward Harvard from my trunk: its bill was a black whistle, and its brow was high and thinner than a baby’s thumb; its webs ­were tough as toenails on its bough. (CP 157) It is as if the incompatible features of Lord Weary’s ­Castle—­the bread-­stuffed ducks, the buck ruffed grouse—­have taken over. Before looking more closely at this duck, however, I want to suggest that Lowell has in mind a piece of avian taxidermy mentioned in passing e­ arlier: The Stuffed Owl, the twentieth

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c­ entury’s most famous anthology of bathetic poems. It is a collection of cautionary tales, starting with Cowley and getting considerable mileage out of Tennyson. If you are filled with passionate intensity on the subject of the London drain system, or George III, or an umbrella, you may write one of the worst poems around. The anthology’s title comes from one of Words­worth’s sonnets, in which the poet describes a w ­ oman named Anna; ill and confined to her h ­ ouse, she retains her powers of imagination. As the coda explains: Yet, helped by Genius—­untired comforter, The presence even of a stuffed Owl for her Can cheat the time; sending her fancy out To ivied ­castles and to moonlight skies, Though he can neither stir a plume, nor shout; Nor veil, with restless film, his staring eyes.26 ­ hether Lewis and Lee first seized on the rhyme of “comforter” and “for her,” W or on the weird periphrasis of “stir a plume,” they took the owl for the title of their collection, perhaps in part ­because he is so unlike the birds that had come to embody lyric achievement by the end of the nineteenth ­century.27 He is an unwitting reminder that one opposite of the soulful ascending lark would be not simply a bird that neither sang nor flew, but a bird that is not even alive. Stuffed birds—­mute, inglorious, unable to get off the ground—­appear with increasing frequency in the early twentieth c­ entury, as lyric is idealized, to use ­Virginia Jackson’s term. A few poems explic­itly evoke that crushingly bad anthology; ­others reflect a general inability to sing, fly, or come to life. William Carlos Williams, writing in the late 1920s (before he could have encountered the anthology), declares he w ­ ill “make one g­ rand final expression! All the scattered parts of beauty s­ hall be collected into one perfect w ­ hole! (For men to stare at as if it ­were a stuffed bird, I might have added.).” In 1935, Isidor Schneider gives voice to “the stuffed birds,” ridiculing bourgeois lyric for being pretty and inert, for having drunk “embalming fluid labelled pure-­hundred-­ poetry.” Nissim Ezekiel’s 1953 “The Stuffed Owl,” written ­after “reading much bad poetry,” sees “The lyric impulse frozen” and “the poet” as “a bore.” W. D. Snodgrass spends “ages / peering like a stuffed owl / at ­these same blank pages” while the rest of the world teems with a­ ctual birds d­ oing birdlike ­things.28 Joining this tradition of imagining poetic failure as a particularly lifeless bird, Lowell embeds an overdetermined figure of how an ­actual poem is abjected, in relation to its ideals. His duck is not only “pickled” (as in Sylvia Plath’s im-



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age of lifeless poems as pickled fetuses) but pickled in a “wastebasket.” And it specifically evokes Words­worth’s sonnet about the transcendent powers of genius. Like that stock-­still, ­silent, wide-­eyed owl, the duck is immobile: it has aspirations (perched where Lowell writes, it stretches t­ oward an institution and prestige) but is stuck. Its bill is an instrument from which only a shrill whistle could come. And Schwartz has gruesomely “propped” the duck’s “eyelids with a nail”: it stares as glassily as Anna’s owl.29 As the owl “can cheat the time” for Words­worth’s invalid, the duck has briefly “cooled” the “universal / Angst” and turbulence of ­these self-­appointed successors of Romanticism and modernism. Like the ideal, resolved, unified poem (“one perfect ­whole!” as Williams exclaimed), it seems a composite of disparate t­hings, part whistle, part baby, part toenails. Indeed, the poem ends by d­ oing further vio­lence to the duck (and to the line, and to ideas of unity or revelation), positioning the foot like an unilluminating candle in an empty ­bottle of inspiration: we stuck the duck -’s webfoot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we’d killed. (CP 158) What is funny in “To Delmore Schwartz” has something to do with how much energy seems to come from the dead duck, who embodies all that might be inert in a poem. Rei Terada has noted that “Lowell’s poems often imply that finished or published writing is epitaphic,” that “writing exposes language’s interior deadness”;30 in the “Rabelaisian, lubricious, drugged” duck that stares at Lowell and Schwartz, literal deadness is crossed with something uncannily animated. All the puns (the duck, “pickled” in a “wastebasket of rum,” looks “as if it’d died dead drunk”; the gin is “killed”) not only play up the ste­reo­ type of expressive poet as self-­destructive, but reinforce the poem’s peculiar sense of liveliness. The poem is also animated largely through its highly vis­ib­ le failure to gather parts into a w ­ hole. Tate wrote to Lowell in 1957, advising him not to publish Life Studies, in part b­ ecause the poems w ­ ere “composed of unassimilated details”; ­here details that one cannot make sense of are swarming.31 Lowell is writing against ideals of order articulated by the New Critics, as well as by ­earlier writers like George Santayana. In Santayana’s account, “perfection requires that order should be pervasive, that not only the w ­ hole before us should have a form, but that e­ very part in turn should have a form of its own, and that ­those parts should be coordinated among themselves as the ­whole is

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coordinated with the other parts of some greater cosmos.”32 The poem, almost a third of which centers on bad taxidermy, finds its coordinated form not in pervasive order, but pervasive disorder, in inconsistent meter and disjunct meta­phors. A similarly muted and self-­deprecating humor is at work in Bishop’s 1965 “First Death in Nova Scotia,” a poem wary of how one tries to make the personal cohere. It depicts a child’s view of a wake and the room the wake took place in, with significant attention to a “stuffed loon / shot and stuffed by” the ­father of the narrator’s dead cousin.33 While the loon is a plausible bird to encounter in a Canadian parlor, it also calls back to Lowell’s duck, and perhaps to Words­worth’s owl. Like them, the loon is prominently ­silent and fixed, fixity that is echoed in Bishop’s step-­by-­step redundant language of “stuffed” and “stuffed by.” The narrator also observes, blackly, that the loon has not “said a word” since “­Uncle Arthur fired /a bullet into him”; instead he “ke[eps] his own counsel,” noiselessly, like owl and duck. He ­later resurfaces in an audible move into rhyme, in which the cousin’s coffin is likened to “a ­little frosted cake”: and the red-­eyed loon eyed it from his white, frozen lake. White has observed how Bishop’s unsettling of a unified lyric voice emerges in this poem, through its pieces of discourse that cannot readily be pressed into the notion of a single speaker.34 I’d add that the loon, like the duck, stands ­here as a faintly comic image of poetic failure, and more specifically as an image of how midcentury poetry about the self takes stock of what is seen as a Romantic inheritance, a legacy in which one’s work only uncomfortably fits.35 Bishop, like Lowell, mentions both the cause of death and mode of preservation, the texture (a grotesque hodgepodge, in Lowell’s case, or grotesque and beautiful, in Bishop’s), and the eyes—­each stiffly gazing, one assisted by nails and one by “red glass.” One “crane[s]” away from its trunk, the other “st[ands]” on a t­ able, though loons are practically unable to stand in real life, as Bishop would know. Both duck and loon are tampered with by ­humans; it is as if the marks of effort and personality are all over what in Words­worth is pure inspiration, where the power of genius seems sufficient to transport the poem beyond the ordinary self. ­These ironic reworkings and self-­commentaries indicate a wry self-­consciousness about the act of writing in an age when poetry is increasingly idealized as private, sealed-­off, and unified. Both stuffed birds seem to embody a failure to make sense, to keep decorum, to be unified,



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to have an objective correlative. They exemplify how the postwar and con­ temporary lyric can express a sense of discomfort that turns comic. At a 1977 reading, Lowell prefaced “To Delmore Schwartz” by explaining that his friend had once de­cided to help him become a Briggs-­Copeland instructor at Harvard. In Schwartz’s view, this pro­cess entailed a number of complicated po­liti­cal steps, the last of which was to meet with Henry Ware Eliot. In his customary halting, melancholy voice, Lowell relays how we had Henry Ware Eliot and his wife over, and it was a doomed day. The furnace s­ topped burning and, uh, we had a dispute who could fix it, and neither of us could. And, um, then the refrigerator was rather a peculiar one, and it began to stop d­ oing anything, and letting out noxious gas. And, well, it got rather cold, and we had to open win­dows so the gas would escape. And the Eliots arrived, and all they wanted was tea, and we d­ idn’t r­ eally have tea and had to fake it. . . . ​What did we do ­after the failure that eve­ning, we drank a lot and got profound.36 What Berryman once called Lowell’s “quarter inch of mordant humor” is closer to at least a half inch of humor h ­ ere.37 Although my interest in Lowell concentrates on complex verbal kinds of humor that are more readily noticed on the printed page, one can hear him undercutting his work quite audibly in his live per­for­mances. His long, meandering preface to the Schwartz poem calls to mind Christopher Grobe’s account of stand-­up’s evolution, in which comedians circa 1950 began to perform “in a loose, amateurish way, as if all they ever meant to do was just stand up and talk.”38 The comic moments heard when Lowell reads aloud add an embodied dimension to the abjection already identified in his writing, and to his tendency to undermine his writing. Lowell’s voice as preserved in recordings does not sound energetic, even when he reads from his early work, where on the page constantly enjambed couplets suggest momentum. He reads, and talks, rather slowly, almost ruefully, tending to drift and falter. Unlike Berryman, who reads with theatrical flourish and confronts his audiences directly (“Are you ready to feel bad?”), Lowell approaches the act of reading a poem as if he would like to stave it off as long as pos­si­ble, and to manage his audience’s expectations by deflating his work. Before reading all of “Between the Porch and Altar” (a series of dramatic monologues about sin, guilt, and damnation) at Berkeley in the spring of 1957, he sums up the plot, sheepishly explaining that it is “a poem in four parts with all the vices, or as many as I can get into four parts.”39 In this rendition, the poem is not vatic but like a moving van, vices crammed in wherever space permits. Lowell chips away at the resonances of what he is about to read:

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at a 1966 reading in San Francisco, he says that “­there are no symbols in this poem. . . . ​When I’m speaking of a stuffed duck I’m not speaking of the Holy Spirit,” diminishing both his ­earlier religious poetry and the prosaic objects that have replaced it.40 A year l­ater, to listeners at Harvard, Lowell announces that he ­will read a poem with “a very beautiful title, it’s called ‘Skunk Hour.’ ”41 Wryly deprecating remarks like t­ hose ones, consistently undermining what they introduce, are characteristic of the live per­for­mances; Lowell tends t­ oward shambling digressions that almost derail their poems. In 1977 at Stony Brook, he explains that “Skunk Hour” “ends with the skunks, and um, where I lived, if you put out garbage pails, ­these rather magnificent and very large creatures would come and chew up every­thing inside the garbage pails. And sometimes you’d have raccoons.”42 He continues for several more minutes; he even flattens the interpretive effort o ­ thers put into reading his poems, telling the audience that “John Berryman said [the skunks] represented a state of  . . . ​catatonic terror, and Dick Wilbur’s position was to sense an appreciation of nature.” Such quotations suggest that many of Lowell’s readings are dominated, or at least congested, by passages that sound like his deadpan 1961 letter to Bishop. On some occasions, Lowell’s recordings of “To Delmore Schwartz” (he recorded the poem frequently, changing the prefatory material from reading to reading) included Henry Ware’s unfortunate fate—­“I’m afraid he went home with flu”—­ and a more specific fate for himself and Schwartz: “we finished a b­ ottle of gin and got very profound and depressed.”43 Thanks to the parallel of “profound” and “depressed,” the caricature of a poète maudit is even stronger; the poem has been downplayed and sabotaged before it even begins. On the other end, too, Lowell’s discomfort with his own work seems audible in his inconclusive ways of stopping. ­After reading the last lines of “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (where the gangster idles in his cell, the only t­hing in his f­uture the electric chair), he hesitates, says “I’ll leave you on that note,” and ends.44 Besides attaching his poems firmly to the ground, t­ hese rambling prologues and abrupt, bumpy endings, which riddle ­every per­for­mance I have heard, bring the dismal into prominence, as if to increase preemptively what is funny within what is Lowellesque.

What Use Is My Sense of Humor? What is funny—­and uneasy and embarrassing—in “To Delmore Schwartz” also has something to do with how much Lowell infiltrates a poem where he does not once single himself out. This embarrassment and ambivalence about the personal is exacerbated by the advantages that come with being a Lowell. Though evident in the machismo of “To Delmore Schwartz,” Lowell’s uneasy



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references to his status are most vis­ib­ le in the prose narrative of “91 Revere Street,” where his childhood self wants to be a girl and is fascinated by the image of the half-­Jewish Mordecai Myers (both ­because he detects the way his WASP ­family avoids Myers’s background, and ­because he is already searching for something more in­ter­est­ing than his f­amily).45 A similar interest appears in the monologues spoken by w ­ omen (one is Marie de’ Medici, the other began as a version of Elizabeth Hardwick, his wife) and by “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich.” Like Berryman, Lowell seems to be turning to ­these ­others partly for more extreme, direct utterances: their exclamations and slang are heightened (to “walk the plank” [CP 116], to “punch the clock” [CP 118]), and they speak into a vivid pre­sent tense. They also expand Lowell’s comic range. Sex comes up repeatedly; Marie de’ Medici remembers how she “kicked the pillows and embroidered lies” (CP 115), the unnamed con­temporary w ­ oman has a husband who “stalls above me like an elephant” (CP 190), and the soldier, in a garish rhyme to “Her German language made my arteries harden,” declares that “I chartered an aluminum canoe, / I had her six times in the En­glish Garden” (CP 110). That speech in par­tic­u­lar calls to mind Sianne Ngai’s idea of animatedness, an affect linked to American notions of “the racialized subject as an excessively emotional and expressive subject,” and an affect Lowell channels through his frenetic language.46 The soldier, as Kevin Young notes, is “a ­g rotesque—­a gargoyle that allows Lowell his own madness”: seeing the soldier as spontaneous and unrestrained and au­then­tic in a way that he himself cannot be, Lowell uses him to put a mask between his poem and his ­actual mania.47 (For example, the linking of sex and madness suggests that “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” is a version of “To Ann Adden,” the disturbing early drafts of what would become “Waking in the Blue.”48) Several of the dueling strains in Life Studies emerge h ­ ere. Christopher Grobe has remarked that “Privileged poets identify with marginalized o ­ thers only in order to credential their own feelings of angst and alienation, feelings they harbor in spite of (or, all the more, ­because of ) their extraordinary privilege”: the kind of privacy about which Lowell is ambivalent “belonged only to upper-­ class whites.”49 As a w ­ hole, Life Studies chronicles an inherited tendency ­toward what “Skunk Hour” calls “hierarchic privacy” that turns into alienation—­ from the snobbery of the cousin’s genealogical book in “91 Revere Street,” to the layers of insulating, sequestering elitism most frequently expressed by his ­mother.50 As a child, Lowell “skulked in the attic” with his military books (CP 172); the adult fi­nally declares, standing in the dark on a desolate hillside, “I myself am hell; / nobody’s ­here” (CP 192), though he is partly contradicted by a ­family of skunks.

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Lowell chronicles this upper-­class solitude, and tries to perforate it. But d­ oing so tends to reflect the way his own voice pervades what he writes. I have already mentioned the critical truism that no ­matter who he is translating or imitating, Lowell ends up sounding like Lowell; while the rate of slangy idioms is higher in “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” and “A Mad Negro Soldier,” they are still of a piece with Lowell’s lifelong habits of dropping into cliché and mixing meta­phors. Unlike Berryman, who uses marginalized voices to give himself a thoroughly new one, Lowell tries on the situations of ­those who are not male or white (or straight, in the case of “Words for Hart Crane,” the last monologue before Part IV of Life Studies). But ­here as elsewhere, he cannot scrape off his verbal tics and preoccupations. The final section of Life Studies takes up an unhappy childhood and overwhelming pre­sent. ­Toward the end of 1958, Lowell began a long period of hospitalization, and remained in McLean Hospital most days u ­ ntil late May 1959.51 “Waking in the Blue,” written near the beginning of that spring, is one of his few sustained pictures of his time in a locked ward; it also addresses the question of how a “sense of humor” might be of use. The poem begins with the image of a college student on night duty in the ward, his head “propped on The Meaning of Meaning” (CP 183). While it then becomes more personal, it does so by looking outward, through an “agonized blue win­dow,” projecting suffering onto every­thing in a ­limited range of view: Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence! My heart grows tense as though a harpoon ­were sparring for the kill. (This is the h ­ ouse for the “mentally ill.”) (CP 183) Though even the golf course itself seems immobilized with fear, Lowell summons up enough detachment to end this first stanza with a l­ ittle parenthetical explanation of where he is. (­Here and in subsequent chapters, I w ­ ill sometimes conflate author and speaker when biographical context invites it.) Playing up a modern euphemism with quotation marks and a nursery-­rhyme rhythm, his couplet flattens the explicit pain and increasingly tragic grandeur that came before it. But this mocking attempt to dismiss ­mental anguish elicits a wry and desperate question, which begins a new stretch of jagged f­ree verse: “What use is my sense of humor?” As if in tacit reply to his own question, Lowell turns to “grin” at one of the other patients at McLean’s. That patient, Stanley, remains s­ ilent in his bath, preoccupied with keeping “his figure” and with “slimming on sherbet and



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ginger ale.” Then a second patient enters, as active as Stanley is listless, though (like Stanley) he appears to be a Harvard alumnus: Porcellian ’29, a replica of Louis XVI without the wig— redolent and roly-­poly as a sperm ­whale, as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit and h ­ orses at chairs. (CP 183) This is the kind of sketch one makes when one does not want to get very close to one’s subject. Lowell does not describe the men’s ­faces, or the color of their hair: he notes bits of their résumés, clothes, and be­hav­ior. They are seen not as real ­people—in ­actual life, Stanley might be catatonic; “Bobbie” is naked and violent, ­whether it is playful or agitated vio­lence—­but as energetically stylized pieces of figurative language. One is a muscular “ramrod,” the other “swashbuckling”; one a seal submerged in a tub, the other a ­whale thrashing on land. Lowell pre­sents the men as stock characters in a double act (small and large, like Laurel and Hardy). ­These phallic descriptions embody the most defensive kind of humor in Lowell’s poem. They are followed by a one-­line statement, surrounded by white space, as if to underscore isolation: “­These victorious figures of ­bravado ossified young.” The upper-­class white men in Lowell’s unit have ­developed severe cases of what Henri Bergson called “a certain rigidity of body, mind and character, that society would still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the greatest pos­si­ble degree of elasticity and sociability.”52 For Bergson, who believes that laughter shames ­people out of mindlessness or fixity, the patients would be obvious targets; they lack the self-­checking ability that a sense of humor reinforces. Lowell’s “grin” at Stanley evokes that superior, Bergsonian perspective. If “I grin at Stanley” is used in the sense of “I grin at a joke,” it is derogatory and protective, implying that the person with the sense of humor cannot be in the state of the truly mad. But one might grin at another for the same reason that one smiles, to show one’s good intentions and to get some kind of response. Though this attempt hangs in the air, unacknowledged, it speaks to one of the tensions animating the poem (and indeed the book): “Waking in the Blue” is poised between ironic detachment and uncomfortable intimacy. The poem’s humor goes beyond the caricatures of the patients, but to understand how, one needs to see Lowell’s fleeting portraits as thoroughly—as literally and as figuratively—as pos­si­ble.

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Lowell thought in images, and visual connotations ­were alive to him. Stanley’s slightly foppish “crimson golf-­cap,” for instance, is set on a “kingly granite profile,” suggesting a famous face-­like cliff that was a New ­England icon.53 Bobbie transforms over and over within his few lines. Night lights “bring” him “out”: he is attracted like an insect, or exhibited like a performer. Moments ­later, as a “Porcellian ’29,” he seems to be a pig handled with Latinate grandeur. Lowell’s term is biographically accurate (the patient being described belonged to the Porcellian Club at Harvard in ­actual life), but the nearby phrase “without the wig” calls up the old nursery rhyme of “I met a pig, / Without a wig,” helping to create an irrelevant but insistent porcine image. The subject of this description soon metamorphoses again, however, first into the exuberantly alliterative figure that is “redolent and roly-­poly as a sperm ­whale,” and then into a large baby, as he “swashbuckles about in his birthday suit.” To swashbuckle comes from the act of clashing one’s sword against a buckler, a small shield: at first this figure has armor, but a few words ­later he has only the slang of “birthday suit.” As one begins to see this array of meta­phors at a closer level of magnification, a dif­fer­ent (if also unsurprising) answer to “What use is my sense of humor?” emerges: Lowell’s sense of humor ­counters the boredom that rises to occupy what­ever space is vacated by fear. “Waking in the Blue” begins with boredom—­the night attendant cannot stay awake over his book—­and is preoccupied with time and enclosure, with “the limits of day” in which “hours and hours” pass, again and again. U ­ nder the attendants’ bland supervision, time is repeatedly fast-­forwarded, rewound, and paused. Just ­after Lowell explains “the way day breaks,” he turns to the “night lights”; and yet the poem ends barely ­after breakfast, with the rest of the day still to be faced. Years and dates are dwelt on: Stanley is in “his sixties,” trying to maintain “the build of a boy in his twenties,” wearing his cap “all day, all night.” The monotony is made still more literal by the “crew haircuts / and slightly too l­ittle nonsensical bachelor twinkle / of the Roman Catholic attendants”: even their hair is uniform. The ward’s tedium is relieved by the poem’s intertwined words, which pay no heed to linear motion. Take the image of the “mare’s-­nest,” that head of unruly hair resting on I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden’s linguistic study The Meaning of Meaning (1923). The term can refer to a mess: in this case, both ­actual tangles and the befuddlement of an undergraduate faced with that difficult study. It can also refer to a seemingly extraordinary but in fact non­ex­is­ tent finding—­such as the book itself, the title of which is enough to snarl the reader in circles of interpretation. (A mare’s-­nest, according to the Oxford En­ glish Dictionary, is “an illusory discovery, esp. one that is much vaunted,” cautioning any attempt to unlock the meaning of meaning.) But the phrase also



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extends outward. In its role as image of the sophomore’s shaggy hair, it joins other t­ hings on heads: golf cap, non­ex­is­tent wig, innumerable crewcuts. In its role as a zoological hybrid, it joins the poem’s transient animals: the man likened twice to a seal, the man compared to a “­whale” who then “horses” at chairs, a “catwalk[ing]” attendant, “thoroughbred” m ­ ental cases, and a “cock of the walk” in his “turtle-­necked” shirt. Why such connections are a source of humor, though, or why humor should be of “use,” is not yet fully clear. Another facet of an answer comes from a poem composed de­cades ­later. In it, Lowell speculates once again about the role humor played in his writing, trying to remember the circumstances in which he created “a humor for myself in images, / farfetched misalliance / that made evasion a revelation” (CP 831). The humor he remembers is highly visual, and arises from surprising linkages—­most evidently ­those of figurative language, an “evasion” b­ ecause it calls ­things by other names. What’s especially helpful, for my purposes, is that seemingly redundant phrase “farfetched misalliance.” It is apt for “Waking in the Blue,” where t­ hings that would normally have no relation are drawn t­ oward each other like magnets. ­These discrepant connections recall the comic princi­ple advanced by Zupančič, who argues that in a comic moment, the edges of a fracture (the fracture made, for instance, when an accurate drawing gives way to fragmented cartoon) gather into something both less and more than a unified ­whole. That is, the comic involves not mere incongruity but opposites folded over onto themselves, and thus, as Zupančič and Limon have both suggested, a constant lively irresolvable oscillation between opposites.54 (If to be abject is to be mired in a role, aware of how one is living out a caricature of one’s self, the constant if ­limited movement of oscillation is a kind of opposite to that experience.) And Lowell’s way of printing likeness into dissimilar t­ hings is a formal equivalent to Zupančič’s fusion of congruent and incongruous ­things: his images are both disjointed and cohesive. Limon claims that “jokes are successful to the extent that they impose the form of thought on disarray”: ­there is a trace of a joke in the relationship between thought and disarray in “Waking in the Blue,” where all the animals and headwear link together despite a lack of rationale.55 Within this private “humor for myself in images,” are t­here any signs of how such “farfetched misalliance” can be of “use,” to use Lowell’s own phrases? One provisional answer—­the first of two I ­will add—is that misalliance helps Lowell depict his m ­ ental and existential situation. In an essay written about the aftermath of one manic episode in the 1950s, he repeatedly described the way his mind “hunted for the clue to the right picture of itself.”56 The farfetched misalliances in poems like “Waking in the Blue” help represent the

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physical brain that humiliates one and on which one depends, that produces both the hyper-­thinginess and the nightmarish instability. For Lowell, the physical brain itself can be abject in a Kristevan sense, the source of “one of ­those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the pos­si­ ble, the tolerable, the thinkable,” and a source of shame.57 Nikki Skillman has described Lowell’s fear of his unsteady ­mental state, which entailed talk therapy and electroshock therapy, hope in lithium, astonishment that madness could have been caused by a salt deficiency, relapses. The brain seems estranged and yet brutally interfering; it is abject in the sense of exhibiting a frightening lack of control or autonomy. The many-­pronged connections of “Waking in the Blue” trace that mind in action, both its instability (“the damaged physiological circuitry that makes imperfect sense of the given,” as Skillman writes) and its abiding tendency to perceive the world as more intricately associative and patterned than a photo­g raph can capture.58 “I see non sequitur,” Lowell wrote in one sonnet (CP 538): t­ hose non sequiturs of seeing are captured h ­ ere. Most of the time, the world is drained of vividness in our ­mental pictures; Lowell’s ­mental pictures seem to intensify, in part through how they oscillate between disjointing and cohering. Second, the way that atmospheric details begin to cling to o ­ thers, rather tantalizingly, relates to the highly tentative way that Lowell represents his isolation, how he is dominated by an erratic mind and a tendency to position himself as wholly separate from ­others. Life Studies documents how one regards, affects, and is affected by ­others, in a way that Lord Weary’s ­Castle generally did not. The self Lowell pre­sents in Life Studies is troubled, trapped, isolated, but—in part through its way of noticing unexpected connections— it is also enmeshed with the world. At the end of “Waking in the Blue,” Lowell’s ­actual inset self-­portrait begins as another set of Dickensian external features, like ­those of the idiosyncratic patients and indistinguishable attendants. He has eaten a “hearty New ­England breakfast” and apparently weighed himself, evincing an interest in diet and figure that echoes Stanley’s, while his entrance faintly recalls Bobbie’s: Cock of the walk, I strut in my turtle-­necked French sailor’s jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky f­ uture grow familiar in the pinched, indigenous ­faces of t­ hese thoroughbred m ­ ental cases, twice my age and half my weight. (CP 184)



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Self-­deprecating jocularity nearly vanishes when Lowell looks in the mirror, expecting what should be a perfectly accurate image of his self, only to see the other patients instead. Marta Figlerowicz has noted how mirrors are linked with intersubjective hopes in John Ashbery’s poems; mirrors help Ashbery’s speakers realize, “with mixtures of disappointment and fear, just how dependent and solipsistic is the kind of self-­understanding they are trying to reach.”59 The metal shaving mirror in the McLean ward offers a similar reprimand: seeking a h ­ andle on his own mind, Lowell sees himself dissolving into the other ­people he renders. Though he stages dismissive, defensive wit once more, with a slightly flippant they–­I comparison—­“twice my age and half my weight”— he ends the poem by linking himself to the other men locked in the ward, with a we and an us: “We are all old-­timers / Each of us holds a locked razor.” While the poem begins in isolation, it ends in the knowledge that Lowell is in the same situation as the men he views as grotesque. This ending does not offer solace: Lowell remains at a distance from the patients and attendants. But his interlocking echoes ­counter his tendency to remove himself from his surroundings. While caricature exaggerates and singles out a few attributes for mockery, farfetched misalliance puts caricature into a world composed of such heterogeneous characteristics. Its connections embody sympathy in the word’s older sense, in which two ­things draw near each other and work together ­because of some affinity—of incidental sounds (“Victorian,” “victorious”), or explicit echoes (the tense “heart” and the “hearty” breakfast), or category (golf, football, baseball, sailing). Sympathy in the more common sense of the word, of syn-­and pathos (shared suffering or shared feeling), is pre­sent in “Waking in the Blue” as well. Just as ­these verbal echoes pay no heed to linear motion, they pay no heed to hierarchies: they level, and make the poem a place of unexpected horizontal links. Lowell is defined by a sailor shirt as Stanley is by his cap; like the other “Bobbie,” he is large, the “cock of the walk.” Such movements t­ oward an uncertain sympathy run throughout Life Studies. Its characters share habits and descriptions, relentlessly. Stewards “tiptoe” through a train as Lowell’s f­ather “tiptoe[s]” down stairs; de Medici’s infant son’s fin­gers are “dimpled” (CP 116) as Lowell’s d­ aughter is “dimpled with exaltation” (CP 185). They are almost literally cut from the same cloth, despite changes of fashion: Col­o­nel Theodore wears spats of “pearl gray plush with pearl buttons” (CP 148), while Lowell’s five-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old self is put into “formal pearl gray shorts” (CP 164). T ­ hese tiny links, unfolding across lines and poems, classes and generations, constitute the book’s comic, echoic tissue; its plea­sure lies in unexpected jointure. On a superficial level, ­these sometimes revealing, more often tantalizing links ­counter the trajectory of isolation. They show Lowell considering his sit-

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uation, sometimes alongside that of someone who is not an upper-­class, white conscientious objector. Look at the echoes between the vet in “the black forest of the colored wards” (CP 118), and the “thoroughbred ­mental cases” in McLean’s: the former have “no knives, no forks,” the latter must use a “locked razor” (CP 184). The statement that “It’s time for feeding” in Munich rings with a “hearty New E ­ ngland breakfast” at Belmont; the soldier’s declaration that “­We’re all Americans” anticipates the Harvard “all-­American fullback,” as well as Lowell’s “We are all old-­timers.” Such formal bridges, at once self-­serving and self-­questioning, suggest a way in which Life Studies quietly works against the lonely solipsism it documents, though the effort nevertheless circles around the humiliated subject. Rather than reflecting “some greater cosmos,” to use Santayana’s phrase, ­these farfetched misalliances show how Lowell’s way of seeing suffuses what­ ever it comes into contact with. Rather than bestowing order on the mind and world, Life Studies creates a shaky, artificial kind of order, where a precarious mind almost merges with its weirdly charged, fluctuating surroundings. Though Lowell is writing about extreme melancholy, his highly self-­conscious forms press him to self-­stage as a comic figure; abjection is central ­because he sees himself as the person writing the poems and as Robert Lowell. Both Life Studies and the volume that followed it, For the Union Dead (1964), find a formal counterpart for farfetched misalliance in erratic rhyme and meter. Sometimes Lowell evokes a five-­beat line, only to squelch it; other lines stretch into prose. An inset r­ ecipe for “shandygaff, / which Grándpa máde by blénding hálf and hálf / yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer” (CP 164) is unobtrusively funny not only b­ ecause it moves into pentameter to list the ingredients of a drink, but ­because meter then falls off immediately, as if it simply cannot be maintained once sarsaparilla comes in. This mixed beverage is suited by its mixture of pentameter and prose, its piecemeal rhymes that let “half and half ” join “shandygaff ”; such rhymes repeatedly pull poems out of the pure territory of ­free verse into something closer to doggerel. While they can visually resemble the effortfully mismatched couplets of Ogden Nash, Lowell’s rhymes more often appear unsought, out of nowhere, like the returning connections of meta­phor. Such rhymes make vis­i­ble Lowell’s ambivalence about formalism and about poetry more broadly. Explaining why he forsook rhyme and especially meter in Life Studies, he said that a regular form “became rhetorical; it said, ‘I’m a poem.’ ”60 But an irregular form whispers “I’m a poem” when it returns to pentameter, or to a bizarre rhyme (“­There ­were no undesirables or girls in my set, / when I was a boy at Mattapoisett” [CP 172]). They are reminders that one is yet again putting the personal into a form, and again rendering a much larger world through one’s repetitive voice.



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A Broken Clamshell Labelled Man I have suggested that Lowell wants to escape his abject self and the voice he cannot help but write in. The most dramatic repre­sen­ta­tion of this predicament appears at the end of the 1960s, when he writes against the grain of a new form, yoking blank verse to the sonnet. This farfetched misalliance of structure traps a stichic form, usually of no set length, in what Donne called the sonnet’s “pretty rooms.” ­Doing so presses a vehicle for narrative into a container that normally holds a single complex reflection. Such contradictions define Lowell’s sonnets—­repetitious and outré, sprawling within what is usually an intricate armature. It is a bit perverse to write sonnets in loose, unrhymed pentameter. Ransom faulted even Shakespeare’s sonnets for being “ill constructed,” since “the logical pattern more often than not fails to fit [the metrical pattern],” and Paul Fussell, whose dicta ­were uncannily relevant to Berryman’s stanzas, once remarked that one of “the occasional, tiny defects of taste in Paradise Lost would sink a sonnet.”61 Lowell’s blank verse sonnets did sink, according to many reviewers, who found them automatic, arbitrary, cobbled together.62 Some of ­these poems resemble fourteen lines of detritus and trouvailles, stacked without a clear direction. Bathetic epigrams are everywhere: “I am an iceberg melting in the ocean,” one speaker declares, facing his “six Rolls Royces snowed with parking tickets” (CP 584). “I have ripened on remorse like Stilton cheese,” says another (CP 588). A bathtub’s stopper is designed for “the weight and pull of William Howard Taft” (CP 551). No rhymes pull t­ hese sonnets forward from one end-­word to the next, and Lowell magnifies the resultant lack of momentum: “I ate and bred, and then I only ate,” an aging guinea pig declares in a moving, strange, funny monologue (CP 633). As ­these lines suggest, self-­ deprecation, often to do with one’s ludicrous physical body but also with the ludicrous self, is constant. Lowell sees himself as “a broken clamshell labeled man”: not even a living mollusk, but part of a shell exhibited in a natu­ral history museum (CP 503). (Fifty years l­ater, Natalie Shapero, who recalls Lowell in some re­spects, sees a conch shell as “truly me,” a “stupid pink turned-in ­thing”: white, female, self-­involved, self-­weary, and inert.63) The perpetual threat of flatness—of a sonnet with no structural integrity— is registered in the sonnets’ many images of obstruction. Looking out of his New York apartment, Lowell declares that his “win­dow, five feet wide, is raised a foot, / most of the view is blanked by brick and win­dows” (CP 603), like Herman Melville’s comically terrible office win­dow that “commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade.”64 A sonnet set in Boston flattens through repetition: “Four win­dows, five feet tall,

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soar up like win­dows” (CP 616); as Nick Halpern remarks, “Simile usually offers a hope of escape: similes like t­ hese awaken that hope to thwart it.”65 That illusion of escape is central to the sonnets. Their publication history (first Notebook, 1967–68 [1969], revised into Notebook [1970], then revised and split into History, For Lizzie & Harriet, and The Dolphin [all 1973]) itself speaks to a large-­ scale sense of being stuck. Writing to Seamus Heaney in 1975, Lowell mentions being “long netted” in the sonnets.66 In a way, t­ hese short swaths of blank verse are even more l­imited than the tight octosyllabic couplets of Near the Ocean, since they invariably cut off at the same place. Lowell has “a dread of more of the same,” as he once put it, but the sonnets offer more and more of the same: same voice, same structure.67 ­Here comedy arises from setting what can feel like a heavy, repetitious self into a world of dynamic pro­cesses. Though they pre­sent win­dows onto national turmoil and onto centuries of history, they also pre­sent the poet ­going on—­that is, both perpetually moving t­ oward the end of a sonnet and perpetually continuing to hold forth, to write yet another sonnet. The remnants of the sonnet’s structure are key, h ­ ere. While reaching the f­ourteenth line constitutes an escape from the box, the buried structure’s memory of a volta can also often underscore stasis. Whereas form and formlessness in Life Studies captured Lowell’s unreliable relation to his mind, surroundings, and the unified poem, the sonnets tend to dramatize obstruction, with rare moments of ­limited and tentative pro­g ress. ­There is actually a striking sense of escape in the first sonnet I ­will consider, though. In “Returning Turtle,” where a turtle is taken back to its w ­ ater (it was rescued “on the road to Bangor,” according to the preceding poem), senses of enclosure and of release are almost palpable. The poem begins with a pronounced quatrain, made tighter by syntactic parallels. It delicately conveys the perspective of the turtle, who has spent “Weeks hitting the road, one fasting in the bathtub,” and who shuns the hamburger now “mossing in the watery stoppage”; even the tub is blocked up (CP 635, ll. 1–2). As Lowell describes the acrid smells permeating the bathroom, he shifts into a ­human perspective: “no one shaved, and only the turtle washed” (CP 635, l. 4). T ­ hese lines, though witty in how their elegant parallels describe an absolute mess, engender a strong desire to see the turtle elsewhere. This feeling of confinement becomes more tangible through a delayed volta—­the moment where, in the platonic ideal of a sonnet, some kind of change would take place. No change occurs just ­after the eighth line, ­here. Instead, Lowell sees the many-­colored turtle as an aesthetic object, and then has him repeat a resigned, ironic aphorism from Spotted Tail, the Lakota leader who told the US government it might as well put his ­people “on wheels” so as



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to move them about at its whim, into less and less space.68 Although the delay is only a line long, it magnifies the relief when the tenth line fi­nally begins the return. The “we” of the speaker and his ­family bring the turtle back to the river, where they see him rush for ­water like rushing into marriage, swimming in uncontaminated joy, lovely the flies that fed that sleazy surface, a turtle looking back at us, and blinking. (ll. 11–14) This ending brings out an acutely felt mixture of ironic recording and “uncontaminated joy,” with “lovely” and “sleazy” occupying the same line: at last the turtle can “rush” for ­water and nutritious flies. Though he may be rushing at about a quarter of a mile per hour, ­these lines have a sense of speed, several of them charged at the outset with stressed syllables. Freedom seems most fully realized in the last line, which invites anthropomorphism (when the turtle seems to make grateful eye contact with Lowell’s f­amily) only to escape that, too: “blinking” is a low-­key reflex, simply ­going on steadily. Lowell’s speaker is delighted to watch something escape, even though his own self cannot. The ambiguous grammar of the title suggests how strongly this association is felt: as gerund and object, “[we are] returning [the] turtle”; as participle and subject, the turtle himself is “returning” to his ­water, with more volition. The title also plays off turning turtle, to capsize: a flipped boat would look like the turtle, but the returning turtle is now at complete ease, having gotten out of Lowell’s tub and the sonnet’s nine-­line octave. ­Those containers offer a good example of how the sonnets can make vis­ib­ le a sense of entrapment. Although it may seem that a sonnet with only traces of a traditional structure cannot raise expectations to surprise, Lowell repeatedly uses his form’s conventions to have poem ­after poem stage interminability (and, occasionally, breaking loose). Sometimes Lowell staves off the invisible volta, as in “Returning Turtle,” pushing it to the tenth or eleventh line. At o ­ thers, he flips octave and sestet completely, so that his sonnet itself is upended.69 The meditation of “Flounder” plays up a recognizable octave-­and-­sestet form, but confounds the expected sense of resolution, and avoids a recognizable punchline. Lowell uses this structure, and huge changes of scale and decorum, to capture a state of mind where one’s thoughts circle without clearing. His first blocked-in quatrain, outlined by identical rhyme, begins by looking at the sky and by evoking high modernism. Its nightscape of “Northern Lights” and “doomsday dawns” might have been glimpsed in Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn”; the morning’s foggy London rush-­hour recalls Eliot’s

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commuters and the “brown fog of a winter dawn” in The Waste Land. This brooding opening gives no indication that the sonnet w ­ ill, in its next sentence, move into ludicrous territory: wash me as white as the sole I ate last night, acre of whiteness, back of Folkestone sand, cooked and skinned and white—(CP 675, ll. 6–8) “Flounder” is a reminder that Lowell’s dark, clotted poems occupy an intriguing point on the spectrum of w ­ hether or not one is aware of being funny. At one end, ­there is the act of making a joke, of being visibly aware that one has made a joke, and of making sure o ­ thers get it as well. At the other end is the situation in which one is completely unaware that what one is saying has a comic edge. Somewhere in between are writers like Lowell, who know they are indecorous, but who do not spell it out. Lowell’s comedy is appealing in large part ­because he does not acknowledge it, even when saying something over the top; this deadpan relates to his stance of continually being stuck in dramatic, serious, Lowellesque roles. In his treatise on laughter, Bergson warns that “the hero in a tragedy does not eat or drink,” for “no sooner does anxiety about the body manifest itself than the intrusion of a comic ele­ment is to be feared.”70 Such a comic intrusion is at the heart of “Flounder,” but Lowell does not seem to be trying to entertain, does not seem self-­congratulatingly funny at all, despite his sudden petition to be washed “as white as the sole I ate last night.” It is a version of Psalm 51’s prayer to be washed “whiter than snow,” with rhymes that intensify to something between jingle and chant. In a way the request makes sense: when desperate, one reaches for what is at the front of one’s mind, in this case the white flesh of the fish. But the flounder is also the least sublime of Lowell’s many aquatic creatures, as the last six lines make clear: Soles live in depth, see not, spend not . . . ​eat; their souls are camouflaged to die in dishes, flat on their backs, the posture of forgiveness— squinch-­eyes, b­ ubbles of bloodshot worldliness, unable ever to turn the other cheek—(ll. 9–13) In considering how a bottom-­dwelling sole and equally profound soul are like each other, Lowell takes a patently logical structure and puts something less tidy on top of it. The poem’s two quatrains are clearly marked by rhyme; then a new sentence (“Soles live”) begins exactly at the moment of a conventional



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volta. This structure seems to promise that Lowell w ­ ill work out the conceit of the soul and sole, with a slightly ponderous set of ruminations. Flounders are as passive as lilies that “toil not” in Matthew 6:28. They do not “see” or “spend.” What do they do?, his ellipsis asks: they “eat,” bathetically, like Lowell himself. They are so passive that they cannot “turn the other cheek” as Christians are told to do in Matthew 5:39; t­ here is no other cheek to turn, since both their eyes slide to the one side of their face. The pun of that last line would have made an obviously ironic end to a religious meditation that descends to look at the unprepossessingly arranged eyes of a flatfish. But for his a­ ctual final line, Lowell turns to an abrupt and somewhat enigmatic image: “at sea, they bite like fleas what­ever we toss.” The fish is back in its natu­ral, secular environment, in neither a dish nor a metaphysical conceit but an open space. Lowell, meanwhile, still seems “at sea” himself, having ruminated on the fish’s resemblance to the Christian, only to find that symbolism falls through; his thoughts cannot gather into a de­cided judgment. Both of the fish’s names pun, tellingly: if “sole” can be elevated to “soul,” the “flounder” of the sonnet’s title evokes the verb for struggling, for being perplexed. In the late 1960s Berryman, too, was thinking about his confounded, prostrated self in similar terms: as Dream Song 233 puts it, “Henry flounders. What is the name of that fish? / So better or­ga­nized than we are oh.” The nominal organ­ization of Lowell’s sonnet serves to underscore its lack of conclusion; adhering to the basic outline of an octave and volta sets his impasse into stark relief. Sonnets, where the structural expectation is that an insight w ­ ill be developed, give Lowell a formal equivalent for the noise of his own voice. He interrupts the sonnet’s traditional progression and closure with piecemeal aphorisms and apparent digressions. He amplifies inertia and ruts. But also, sometimes, he finds last-­minute ways of getting past stasis. One of the clearest instances of this dynamic appears in “­After the Play,” which begins in another bounded space, a restaurant where a drunken man has been telling his life story in clichéd slang. In this aggressively prosaic scene, “Ben” stumbles out of the bathroom “seven times in twenty minutes” u ­ ntil his irritated “fellow power man friend” leaves (CP 584). Once again, an obvious volta seems to appear where one would expect, at the ninth line; but the next four lines enact a series of unsuccessful efforts to alter topic and style. The first turning point, in the ninth line, could not be more emphatic: “This, this. They left Ben confessing to the toilet. . . .” (CP 584, l. 9). A literal departure, it abandons Ben to his “confessing,” a word that by the mid-60s had come to define Lowell’s own revelations. The line that follows—­“To hell with artists painting C ­ romwell’s warts” (l. 10)—­tries even more vigorously to change

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direction, dismissing realist art in decisive pentameter. But ­after Lowell rejects the practice of painting life’s blemishes, he continues listing them: London bluedays, sidewalks smeared with dogmess, pekinese and poodle, poodle and pekinese— sometimes the palisades of garbage bags are beautiful sunlit playgrounds of plastic balloons. (CP 584; ll. 11–14) It is as if he cannot extricate himself from the sordid and ordinary. His attention to “dogmess” fails to be even defiant slang: it is a euphemism that lacks the redemptive rudeness of “dogshit.” A ­whole line is occupied by the names of two particularly overbred lapdogs, creating yet another box (­here a chiastic one). In the last two lines, however, Lowell decides that he is in a dif­fer­ent kind of sonnet: not Petrarch’s octave and volta, but one that ends with a couplet, like Shakespeare’s. Though dogmess still besmirches the sidewalk, the sentence lifts off. As trash transforms a fence into a realm of translucent balloons, Lowell takes the plosives heard in “thĕ pálĭsádes ŏf gárbăge bágs,” and turns them into a more dance-­like rhythm: “béautĭfŭl súnlĭt pláygrŏunds ŏf plástĭc băllóons” is a sonic chiasmus, which allows for change rather than sheer repetition. In Lowell’s farfetched misalliance, garbage bags—­a shapeless container for detritus, somewhat like the sonnets themselves, in the eyes of early critics—­ are temporarily metamorphosed. We have seen plastic trash in Lowell before, though: in that 1961 letter where he watches condoms wash up on the beach, to be made into balloons. He is careful, at the end of this sonnet, to use the word “plastic,” to keep the ending from becoming overly affirmative or transcendent. This kind of balancing runs throughout his loose, baggy sonnets: at the core, their comic delight comes from how they misally formlessness and form, what is fixed and ­free, at once.

How We Differ—­Humor The sonnets continue to demonstrate why Lowell linked his sense of humor to the idea of “evasion,” an act of escape (originally e and vadere, to go out). As a means of bearing with the disconcerting, humiliating self that one cannot escape, that sense of humor persists into his final book, Day by Day. The volume is weighted with estrangement, loneliness, aging, ill health, and the deaths of friends; its style is attenuated, faded, and fragmented.71 Faced with representing his “pre­sent paradoxical state, of being wildly alive and yet cer-



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tain of death,” in the words of Helen Vendler, Lowell describes the signs of aging in language that is tinged with comedy.72 “Bright Day in Boston,” for example, opens quite jubilantly: “Joy of standing up my dentist, / my X-­ray plates like a broken Acropolis . . .” (CP 794). To stand someone up is usually to fail to keep a date; Lowell declares that he has stood up his dentist, of all ­people, and escaped into the Boston sunlight. Aligned with the shattered classical columns, his ruined teeth are venerable and beyond repair. (Their topical abjection collides with what is upright: Lowell himself, striding across the city.) Three de­cades ­earlier, Jarrell had noted Lowell’s “wit of t­ hings.” ­Here objects become a way of representing both the aging body and one’s strug­gles to comprehend that aging—­how it feels as if it is not happening, or is happening to another person. For instance, Lowell displaces the aging pro­cess onto the landscape, through loose syntax: “I lie staring u ­ nder an old oak, / stubbly, homely, catacombed by ants, / more of a mop than a tree” (CP 778). The modifiers refer to the tree, and yet the tree (with its “clumsy boughs,” its “weak, wooden heart,” and its stubble) also communicates the state of the person. “Age is the bilge / we cannot shake from the mop,” he writes elsewhere in Day by Day, seeing the ­human as a pile of dirtied yarn, as something to wipe the floor with (CP 717). Decay leads to rueful wit in the assertion that “We are at least less run-­down / than Longfellow’s ­house on Brattle Street” (CP 811). With the self-­deprecating gloom characteristic of his letters, the most Lowell can say of himself is that he is not yet as decrepit as that Cambridge h ­ ouse, which had been handed over to the National Park Ser­vice in 1972. And the deteriorating ­house augured further disintegration: the “We” of that poem also includes Caroline Blackwood, with whom Lowell had been living in Kent. Early in 1977, their marriage strained to the point of breaking, Blackwood moved from ­England to Dublin. Lowell did as well, but as he walked through the h ­ ouse that had been put up for sale, he ­imagined that the building itself felt betrayed: “when I go into a room, it moves / with embarrassment, and joins another room” (CP 783); although one room “joins” another literally, it figuratively shrinks from him. Amid this loss and estrangement, Lowell continues to think explic­itly about the tentative ethical or poetic “use” of humor. Now he actually describes laughter as something desired and missed. When he tells Blackwood that “I d­ on’t need conversation, but you to laugh with” (CP 783), he seems to think of laughter as more intimate than talk, something involuntary and incoherent—to “laugh with” someone is briefly to put aside one’s logical faculties, for something more intensely shared. The line recalls Georges Bataille’s assertion that when two ­people laugh, “they are no more separated than two waves,” though the momentary intimacy Bataille sees in laughter is, like a wave, quite brief:

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the “unity” of the two is “undefined, as precarious as that of the agitation of the ­waters.”73 While Lowell knows that humor creates only tenuous, momentary connections, he has come to value its intersubjective possibilities. Above all, humor helps him think of something beyond his self, as made explicit in a late elegy for Berryman. The elegy, which reflects on the two writers’ friendship, shared milieu, and competition, as well as how they ­later fell out of contact, touches on Berryman’s death only briefly, shortly before the poem’s end. From reading a Dream Song that had just been published in Berryman’s posthumous Henry’s Fate (1977), Lowell has discovered how we differ—­humor . . . even in this last Dream Song, to mock your catlike flight from home and classes— to leap from the bridge. (CP 738) The Dream Song, written two days before Berryman killed himself, included both an admission of failed attempts and an anticipation of his ­actual death. Berryman’s sense of humor was evident “even” ­there, in raw, corrosive mockery. When Lowell singles out humor as the main way the two writers diverge, he is identifying a difference of volume and kind. He had been one of the first readers of the clownish, boisterous, self-­lacerating Dream Songs, and so if a new understanding of Berryman’s humor comes to him only now, it has something to do with that last, self-­taunting Song, where Berryman makes so evident an effort to view his situation as absurd or banal. Lowell himself could not so directly make suffering risible: he softens Berryman’s violent jump into a “catlike flight” (an echo of “Pussycat” or “Kitticat,” nicknames Berryman gave his Henry persona) and then to a “leap”—­a verb that admits horror but does not follow it through to the end. Through that mention of humor, Lowell moves from memories of Berryman’s life to the fact of his death. And in the poem’s last four lines, humor allows him a moment of intimacy, ­here with the dead; he ends by addressing Berryman directly: To my surprise, John, I pray to not for you, think of you not myself, smile and fall asleep. (CP 738)



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Conventionally, Lowell would be praying for Berryman’s soul in Purgatory; in language so s­ imple as to seem childlike, and with italics that emphasize the simplicity, he finds himself praying “to.” T ­ here is an implicit grim connection between the freedoms of death and of falling asleep, but what is striking h ­ ere is how the thought of Berryman allows Lowell to elude the burdens of “myself,” grief, and even consciousness (in a book of poems full of insomnia). Lowell knows that laughter can take over the mind, briefly but completely; that it can momentarily obliterate self-­consciousness and self-­involvement, even when one’s self is the comic object. He knows also that an instant of shared humor creates something as reciprocated as direct eye contact, a ­counter to the overwhelming losses of Day by Day. ­These moments that spark off one’s sense of humor generate what Alice Rayner calls “a dimension of mutuality in excess of or beyond the mutual understanding that created the joke or humor in the first place.”74 The work of A. R. Ammons w ­ ill press further at how the comedy of the postwar lyric is entwined with a sense of mutuality. Ammons seems to speak directly to a reader, against the supposed isolation of lyric. In chipping away at lyric privacy, Ammons is somewhat like Berryman; somewhat unlike Berryman, Ammons’s long, colloquial poems ­will bring in kinds of linguistic waste that have traditionally been excluded from poetry. He sees in such waste—or noise, in a dif­fer­ent sense from Lowell’s “noise of my own voice”—­a tenuous opportunity to be more truthful to a potential listener. And yet with Ammons, too, the con­temporary lyric product is very much like the stand-up product: it heightens the self-­contradictions inherent to writing, the poses one finds oneself in.

Ch a p ter  3

A. R. Ammons Comic Badness

Lyric as Comedy has focused so far on a current of postwar American poetry that takes up the embarrassments of one’s self and of assembling a self in a poem. For John Berryman and Robert Lowell, a comic stance is an almost inevitable result of trying to write in a period compounded by a set of increasingly nebulous generic expectations, and in a time of intense evaluation and connoisseurship. The rowdy sequence of The Dream Songs reacts quite truculently to t­ hose expectations, though Berryman also depends on and hopes to please the establishments he wants to shock; Lowell’s self-­consciousness about his style is audible his ­whole life. I have also suggested, though, that the comic moments in t­ hese poems tend to be intricate in ways that our main generalizations about comedy do not fully address. What happens in The Dream Songs cannot be summed up by theories centering exclusively on aggression or transgression or subversion: the poem is also bound up with expressive accuracy. And though Lowell undermines his own writing at ­every turn (a princi­ple that might seem best explained by the theory of incongruity), his self-­deprecating acts of puncturing are twisted up with their opposite, cohesion. This chapter considers ineptness, a constant presence in popu­lar comedy and in the work of A. R. Ammons. Ammons’s per­for­mance of ineptness takes shape as unabashed garrulity, as discourse that does not always resemble poetry; his gleeful relation to midcentury poetic ideals is indicated by Tommy 82



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Pico’s remark that “I used to read a lot of perfect poems, now I read a lot of Garbage // by A. R. Ammons.”1 But what one of Ammons’s titles announces as Garbage is deliberate; it is achieved with delicacy and luck, and it pre­sents an opportunity to take a closer look at the idea of comic badness.2 From the perspective of lyric theory, the poems of this chapter—­which moves from the midcentury to the 1990s, then briefly into the early twenty-­ first ­century—­embody the comedy of the postwar lyric as filtered through a more overtly experimental poet, one who is acutely sensitive to the twentieth-­ century connotations of writing about one’s self. As Ammons puts it in Garbage, my daffydillies are efforts to excuse the presumption of assumption, direct address, my self-­presentation:3 ­ hether speaking to another (his mature poems are full of a “you” in a way W Berryman’s and Lowell’s are not) or talking about himself (­these poems are also full of an “I”), Ammons makes up for such overtly poetic, self-­aggrandizing devices through “daffydillies,” which seem to cross Words­worth’s daffodils with daftness, foolishness, frivolities. Like his friend John Ashbery—­who slackens the same Words­worth into “She hovers, lonesomely, like a zeppelin, over downcast / vales and trees, a ­free spirit, or something / like that”—­Ammons partakes in a more postmodern view of lyric.4 Though several scholars have addressed his postmodern side, an image of Ammons as unselfconscious, transcendental writer has lingered (partly b­ ecause his most-­taught and most-­anthologized poems are some of his most visibly serious ones). Andrew Epstein remarks that “Ammons has been pegged as a latter-­day romantic, as a nature poet with ­little interest in ­human interactions or social experience, and as an ‘Emersonian’ poet,” characterizations which have “obscured his connections to avant-­garde poetics, postmodernist writing, and other currents in postwar avant-­garde poetry and art.”5 In obscuring how Ammons responds to the more experimental discourses around him, such accounts have also obscured some of the more probing aspects of his humor.6 This chapter contributes to an understanding of Ammons’s innovative poetics by drawing out the deliberate good badness in some of his long poems, as well as in one of his tiniest ones. As part of his lifelong interest in ideas of quality, he plays with the self-­seriousness of multiple critical institutions; he takes up the possibilities of unpromising language and forms, while exploring the ways in which personal poetry can communicate.

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Ammons was initially quite desperate to write good poetry. He worries about his limitations in several early journal entries: “It’s a shame that a person should want to write as much as I do and not have the ability to do it. . . . ​For what a torture it is to be constantly setting goals and proj­ects for oneself which for lack of intellect cannot be attained nor carried out.” L ­ ater in the same month—­ March 1951, he was twenty-­five—he derides himself as inadequate, referring to “we who have l­ ittle power in effectively expressing ourselves.” Although his dejection occasionally gives way to cockiness, such moments lead promptly back to self-­deprecation: “the moment I begin to feel that my work is impor­ tant, a ­little valve inside closes and I’m doomed.” In a 1954 letter, he laments “The belief that I have something to say and can say it thrown into the misery of self-­question. And the rejections. . . .”7 Unlike Lowell, who was born into a f­ amily with several generations of literary significance ­behind it, or Berryman, who took undergraduate prizes from Columbia and a degree from Cambridge, Ammons grew up in rural North Carolina, in poverty sharpened by the G ­ reat Depression. He had few books, and “was / brought up on ‘I ­ain’t got nary’un’ instead of ‘I / ­don’t have one’ ” (CP2 454).8 He began writing poems in his late teens, from the deck of a ship in the South Pacific during the Second World War. When he returned to civilian life he planned to become a doctor, and majored in General Science at Wake Forest University, but could not afford the further study needed. Though he subsequently went to Berkeley to do an MA in En­glish, he s­ topped before completing and took a position at his father-­in-­law’s glass factory in New Jersey. For the next de­cade, he used his off hours to write, ­until an invitation to read at Cornell led to a teaching position ­there. Ammons came to lit­er­a­ ture, then, from a periphery, and his sense of being irrelevant or ignorant was not easy to dispel—­perhaps especially in the face of a movement with the impression of judgment and ranking that the New Criticism sometimes displayed. (One can see his attempts to catch up in his college notebooks, where he tells himself to look up “Mr Cleanth Brooks, ‘The Well Wrought Urn,’ ” and “Modern Poetry + the Tradition.”9) That idea of being peripheral is essential to Ammons. It is not only that he works outside any recognizable poetic school, or that he is painfully shy. Rather, he is able to think on scales—­the molecular, the galactic—­where an individual person means very l­ittle. He can see himself and all h ­ uman life as “an absurd / irrelevance on this slice of curvature,” h ­ ere for a brief span (CP2 464). ­After Ammons became agnostic, he was estranged not only from the religious communities of his ­family, but from religion’s consolations: the idea of existence ­after death, of permanent reunion with the ­people he knew, of contact with an understanding deity.10 Although he can remember his childhood be-



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liefs as absurd (“So ­there we ­were eating feathered dinosaur / meat for Sunday dinner and expecting the // return of Jesus Christ any minute” [CP2 732]) and suggests that he had his doubts about them even as a boy (he worried that ­there would be “nobody left ­behind” ­after the rapture “to look ­after the // ­little dinosaur biddies”), that loss of faith registered across his life. Its absence heightened his sense of solitude, and his fears about all that he might fail to do, understand, or document, a feeling made vivid in a 1957 letter: “I’ve got (1) a sense of the meaninglessness and unreality of ­things, (2) a sense of immediacy and fright, (3) a vast need for love and ­little capacity for it, (4) a sense, at times, of absolute isolation.”11 His sense of humor threads through acute loneliness and anxiety. For Ammons, lyric is a m ­ ental drama where, a l­ittle like stand-up, t­ here is nobody on stage but the speaker. And yet, like stand-up, the speaker is talking outward, to someone. Ammons admits that poetry may be a solipsistic genre— he sees it as true to life, in that we are all leading solipsistic dramas—­and his staging of comic badness stems in part from not knowing if he has anything worth saying, or if anyone ­else ­will listen or understand. This chapter looks at how Ammons moves from a poetry of austere isolation to something more obviously talkative and human-­pervaded, where noise (the randomness and superfluity of the brain, and of everyday conversation) helps make the poem a space to involve a similarly inept or uncertain reader. Its last pages turn to Pico’s long poem Junk (2018), which continues questioning notions of poetic quality codified by and descending from the New Criticism.

I Effuse While the notebooks from Ammons’s time as an undergraduate at Wake Forest are often light-­hearted (in one poem he won­ders at length about ­whether ­there ­will be peanuts in Heaven, and decides he does not want to go ­there other­wise), this side is not immediately evident in Ommateum, the small book he self-­published in 1955.12 An ommateum is the compound eye of a fly, implying that the poet aspires to a more-­than-­human field of vision. At times the book seems serious to the point of self-­parody; the imposingly titled “Orthodoxy with Achievement” is spoken by a literally bloodless protagonist: S­ ilent as light in dismal transit through the void, I, evanescent, sibilant among my parts, (CP1 30)

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­ hese portentous lines pile one abstract Latinate phrase on top of another. A T journal entry from the spring of 1954 rec­ords Ammons’s frustration at the result: “Ommateum: cold as a dead fish in moonlight. Why! ­can’t the ­thing live and breathe? Even a long poem does not demand so much dullness.”13 In the five years a­ fter its publication, it sold sixteen copies. But as with Lowell’s early grim poems, this bardic dullness admits moments that undermine it and give it life. Speech that is both ordinary and inadequate intrudes on sublimity: I broke a sheaf of light from a sunbeam that was slipping through thunderheads drawing a last vintage from the hills O golden sheaf I said and throwing it on my shoulder brought it home to the corner O very pretty light I said and went out to my chores The cow lowed from the pasture and I answered yes I am late already the eve­ning star The pigs heard me coming and squealed (CP1 5) Ammons succeeds at the impossible act of carry­ing off a sunbeam by finding its perfect verbal equivalent: that late-­in-­the-­day, late-­in-­the-­season “sheaf of light.” But by the time he reuses his own good word (“O golden sheaf I said”) and rather matter-­of-­factly lugs the sheaf away, words start to become more homely, even a l­ittle childish. His second address (to the “very pretty light”) is not so striking; and his next attempt at poetical language, about the eve­ning star, is interrupted by the pigs’ squeals. In this passage, where beauty and everyday “chores” contend with each other, literal illumination gradually withdraws. The language of Ommateum is interrupted or thwarted, from its opening lines. In the book’s first poem, Ammons attempts prophetic self-­definition—­ “Turning to the sea I said / I am Ezra / . . . ​and said / I am Ezra” (CP1 2)—­ but is defied by the ele­ments, which drown out his words. The next poem ends simply, “and I said Oh / and fell down in the dust” (CP1 3); in the words of Nick Halpern, “Not only can the prophetic figure not dominate the space, he can hardly stay upright in it.”14 As a general rule, any appearance of “I said” ushers in something a ­little phatic or a ­little insufficient, such as “Bathing in



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the morning river / I said Oh” (CP1 8), or the speaker who addresses the sun by declaring, “I said / It’s very hot in this country” (CP1 6). An “Oh” that is inconsequential rather than vatic, an “I said” that leads not to sublimity but to a remark on the weather: language does not seem to be rising to any occasion. Vocatives and inset dialogues let Ammons frame his inarticulate efforts to reach an interlocutor. “[B]rother, / I effuse, hot / weather ­we’re having!” he calls to a spider, making fun of his own unrestrained Whitmanesque addresses while still employing them (CP2 200). Even ordinary speech itself fails to communicate much, ­here. Within a few years of t­ hose early, dispirited journal entries, then, Ammons is beginning to exaggerate the insufficiencies of his own language, and turning to speech that unerringly fails to suit the situation, ­either by being too low or too high. In the opening of “Ballad,” Ammons’s aspirations and an aggrieved, practical tree are mutual foils: I want to know the unity in all ­things and the difference between one t­ hing and another I said to the willow and asked what it wanted to know: the willow said it wanted to know how to get rid of the wateroak that was throwing it into shade ­every after­noon at 4 ­o’clock: that is a real prob­lem I said I suppose and the willow, once started, went right on saying (CP1 745) ­ ere a slightly windy beginning is cut off by the willow’s more down-­to-­earth H desire to “get rid of the wateroak”; the hope of “unity in all ­things” is toppled by a wordy gripe about a neighbor. But as one reads ­these lines, it becomes less clear who is being mocked: is it the ambitious h ­ uman speaker, or the willow, who resembles a chatty colleague answering the question of “how are you?” in more detail than one had wanted? What’s comic ­here comes from playing both ends of the scale off each other: the mundane and the ethereal, the practical and the visionary. Such comic instability blurs where the sublime drops and badness arises. This vein of humor, in which both high and low seem full of h ­ uman shortcoming, is part of Ammons’s reaction to the institutionalization of lyric values and to the resultant avant-­garde skepticism. To a more obvious degree than Berryman or Lowell, Ammons has affinities with William Carlos Williams (seen then as striving to loosen his poems from the complacent first-­person self, so as to focus on the external world) and with Williams’s followers.15 He would have read Charles Olson’s 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse,” which

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asserts that “Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul.”16 In Ommateum and other early poems, Ammons often seems to be striving for the absence of individual ego, for the almost disembodied speaker in the wilderness. But that immediacy is already beginning to snag on “lyrical interference.” It w ­ ill be everywhere in the books to come, where the self Ammons pre­sents—an identifiable, talky I—­evades categories of relatively institutional practice (e.g., of studiously impersonal formalism, or of confessional writing), and pared-­down avant-­garde alternatives. The idea of lyrical interference plays a comic role in the subject which came to define Ammons, for many readers: his poems about the natu­ral world. That the willow is overshadowed at “4 ­o’clock” is characteristic of his famous attention to ecological cycles and systems: he keeps an eye on one quince bush in Ithaca for years. But when describing nature, Ammons often resorts to phrases that verge on the inarticulate. Natu­ral ele­ments, from icicles to pheasants, become comic as he fastens them to human-­made similes. The Snow Poems, for example, turns an overcast sky into a sonorous breakfastscape: “the whey-­g ray whey ­rose / shutting off from earthly / view the fine white / cumulus heights (yoghurt)” (CP1 962). It is an interestingly overwritten description: in the space of three monosyllables, this sky is described as both whey-­colored and as ­actual whey. Ammons himself seems unsure if he is seeing the sky as his breakfast, or breakfast as the sky, since he feels compelled to round out his meta­phor with an elbowing parenthesis. Unlike his con­ temporary Amy Clampitt, who finds a similar image for the changing weather in “Fog all day, skim / milk to gruel / and back,” Ammons does not hesitate to nudge.17 His wording, which leaves l­ittle to inference, sinks the end of the line in the yoghurt itself. ­After a snowfall, Ammons’s “pear tree looks like lime sherbet with whipped cream // topping” (CP1 693): not whipped cream, but the imitation becoming popu­lar in the 1950s, its advertising language stressed by a pronounced line break. To illuminate Ammons’s deliberate badness, it is useful to consider Ashbery’s nature poems, as described by Stephen Ross: they “propel themselves along a third way of writing apart from both New Critical and avant-­garde value systems,” troubling not only the former’s desiderata but the latter’s “desire to create ‘nature not its substitute.’ ”18 Ashbery’s poems expose poetry as unnatural: “Bad nature poetry is disastrously anti-­mimetic; rather than conjuring up a compelling illusion of nature-­in-­text, it destroys it, and threatens to make more accomplished nature poetry seem fake as well.”19 Ross’s point about how Ashbery does not fit ­either polarized end of postwar critical discourse speaks to Ammons’s interest in badness, and the disastrously sub-­



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mimetic seems epitomized in Ammons’s pear tree as lime sherbet. But I would distinguish Ammons’s intentionally awkward similes from Ashbery’s meditations on fakeness and sentimentality and kitsch (e.g., the zeppelin replacing Words­worth’s cloud, or the parody in which “my youth was spent, under­neath the trees / I always moved around with perfect ease”).20 Ammons wants to capture a view of the natu­ral world, ­whether rural or suburban, at least as much as he wants to interrogate poetic values. And in his openly effortful meta­phors, it is not that the lofty is undermined by the low, but that the categories of lofty and low themselves are thoroughly undermined: what is in some ways antimimetic is also a vivid imitation. This comedy centers on apparent ineptness that—­when turned slightly—­ shines brilliantly. On a clear day, Ammons attaches a rather consciously motivational declaration to the sight of a beautiful morning, asserting that the only ­thing to do “is / slice it and eat / it, cake / blue, radiant, / frill green, also / just-­right cool” (CP1 966–967). Now, a blue and green cake likely calls to mind substantial amounts of frosting, and especially a dessert that sits in the refrigerator of an American supermarket for a week. Initially, that meta­phor, at odds with the unpolluted early spring day that Ammons praises, might seem an example of Henri Bergson’s description of verbal badness, in which “the rigid” and “the ready-­made” are imposed on what should be fluid and lively: a cliché, for example, bears out an “absentmindedness in contrast with attention.”21 But although Ammons’s meta­phor might involve Bergsonian impercipience, it also entails a perfect clash and a perfect convergence. First, the meta­phor offers an opposite: to something entirely natu­ral, something literally confected. Second, it offers a likeness: the colors of a robin’s-­ egg-­blue sky and bright green fo­liage are actually quite close to ­those imparted by food coloring. In welding precision and unsuitability together, Ammons’s cake reminds me of how Alenka Zupančič twists Bergson’s theory of laughter: rather than the low triumphing at the expense of the high, or the fluid prevailing over the rigid, such opposites exist together, within each other.22 When nature spurs Ammons to inarticulate similes, they flaunt their constructedness, but also their luck. To find something as sensuously appealing as nature, the poet has to resort to images of pro­cessed dessert, and yet ­those desserts reveal something about the beauty of the twentieth-­century natu­ral world. His work thereby demonstrates a kind of poetic badness that’s not simply parodic or inadequate, though it is also certainly not sublime, nor smoothly mimetic. When Ammons flourishes his meta­phorical shortcomings, they are comic ­because they are also visibly serendipitous: they balance between incompetence and felicity. Somewhat unlike Williams’s apparently clear-­sighted studies

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of nature, or Ashbery’s flagrantly botched ones, Ammons is both celebratory and ironic: finding that his poetry cannot be wholly stripped of a subjectivity, he both presses into that subjectivity (looking for what the speaking subject in all its haplessness might add to a poem), and tries nevertheless to get nature right. He wants to depict what he sees, but he gets his fingerprints all over it. ­Here beauty exists comfortably alongside—or even within—­the ungainly. While Ammons does not let sublimity go undeflated for long, neither does he isolate comedy from the aesthetically striking, as when he becomes a modern Danaë, whom Zeus seduced as a shower of gold coins: this after­noon I thought Jove had come to get me: I walked into a corridor of sunlight swimming showering with turning shoals of drift pollen and not yet knowing it was pollen thought perhaps I was being taken or beamed aboard but saw over the roof the high swags of the blue spruce swaying and felt stabilized from won­der: I would still rather beget (though I ­can’t, apparently) than be begotten upon, I think I’m almost sure, but I ­don’t know that a vague coming of a shimmery gold coating would be so bad: I sneezed: my eyes watered: the intimacy was sufficient: nothing is separate: (CP1 694) Nothing is separate, and this encounter with the divine does not end simply in an obvious deflation by a sneeze. Ammons modulates from the idea of the sauntering poet’s being pursued by Jove, to the oceanic beauty of the pollen-­ filled “corridor of sunlight,” to the cartoonish science-­fictional rapture of “beamed,” to a parenthetical allusion regarding his own low sperm count, to “I sneezed” (the climax of his three-­stanza relation with pollen), to the Latinate “sufficien[cy]” of the encounter. Near-­constant shifts between modes—­ especially between deflation and enthusiasm—­help define Ammons’s comic impulse, and his attitude ­toward poems. In responding to an avant-­garde avoidance of self and to formalist ideals of control, Ammons plays up a lack of filter. “Renovating,” from Uplands (1970), is about midlife bodily decay. While Lowell describes the X-­rays of his teeth as a “broken Acropolis,” Ammons turns to his painful gums, and to a mixture of precision and sloppiness that transforms the unpoetic. He needs a “good periodontist,” b­ ecause he cannot even ­handle his breakfast cereal ­until it becomes sufficiently mushy:



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I have to let my cornflakes sit and wilt: the niacin leaks out before I get it in and the ten p­ ercent daily requirement of iron rusts: I’ve got so mashed potatoes best accommodate my desire: my gums before them relax and, as it ­were, smile: I have bad dreams that snap, crackle, and pop (to switch seeds) have built an invisible wall soggy-­resistant: what I could use with my gum line is like a new start or at least a professionally directed reversal or arrest of what has become abrupt recession. (CP1 521) ­ ere we see an unpromising subject, given life by its unpromising language. H ­These lines are bloated by phrases like “accommodat[ing] my desire,” and infiltrated by Snap, Crackle, and Pop, the mascots of Rice Krispies. A meaningless “like” leads to an affirmatively clichéd “new start,” and to a dentist’s euphemistic advertisement for a “professionally directed reversal.” Wanting to reveal e­ very detail about the state of his gingival trou­ble, Ammons grasps at ­every kind of language available. He also turns to the remnants of traditional rhythms. Though he rarely grounds himself in pentameter, his five-­stress line about the state of his gums (“I have to let my cornflakes sit and wilt”) amplifies the lugubriousness. So too in the labored six-­beat line, describing how “the niacin leaks out before I get it in.” When “the ten ­percent daily requirement of iron / rusts,” a line break adds doleful suspense before the pun: like Berryman’s spatial caesura, it is a way of waiting for a second before dropping a joke. The substanceless speaker of Ommateum has been replaced by someone inhabiting a deteriorating American body. Ammons’s development from abstraction to grossness does not mean renouncing abstraction; abstraction w ­ ill still be pre­sent in Bosh and Flapdoodle, some forty years ­later. Rather, he adds the humor of the gross to the humor of the abstract, in an aggregative and inventive pro­cess.23

Something about My Inner Life Ammons’s literal jokes and embarrassing topics return us to the connection between postwar lyric and the popu­lar genre with which it might seem almost to converge. Broadly speaking, American poetry and stand-up comedy follow

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similar trajectories across the first half of the twentieth c­ entury. When modernity hits verse, established forms give way to forms in which a sense of certainty or control or authority is much less stable; t­ hose formal changes give poets somewhat dif­fer­ent spaces in which to make their own flawed minds a comic subject. Meanwhile, American popu­lar comedy around 1900 is still composed largely of variety theater and vaudev­ille, where the jokes are already arranged, many of the characters stock, and the comic routines set. By the late 1950s, however, comedians have begun to turn to the solitary stand-up per­for­mance, shifting “away from the transposable joke telling of vaudev­illian comics . . . ​to humor contingent on the revelations of the comic’s stream of thought,” as Matthew Daube puts it.24 They depend on the seemingly free-­ flowing associations that come to life through nuances of language, inflection, pacing, gesture, and so on. This genre sounds quite close to what we have been seeing in Ammons. As Daube notes, a comedian like Mort Sahl “engages the audience as ­silent partners in a comic conversation.”25 Ammons, likewise, refers constantly to a “you,” sometimes an open-­ended you that might be muse, lover, scientific concept, or reader, and sometimes an informal but corporeal you, one who is warned that “if you bite me in the ear, I w ­ ill knee you in the nuts” (CP1 674). Both stand-up and the poems we have been examining involve illusions of naturalness, authenticity, and familiarity. Both are observational: what­ever objects swim into the speaker’s stream of consciousness tend to be in­ter­est­ing not in and of themselves, but ­because of how the speaker thinks about them, as one idea leads to another. Both center on an inner life and a personality. And stand-up comedians, at least, seem explic­itly aware of their proximity to poetry: Christopher Grobe, examining the confessional impulse shared by midcentury poets and comedians, remarks the way comedians enjoyed targeting and even incorporating poems.26 References to stand-up in the twentieth-­century lyric, however, are almost non­ex­is­tent. It is not an obvious case of snobbishness about cultural categories. Berryman, for example, considered trying to get ­actual jokes published in Reader’s Digest; Lowell sees Harold Lloyd’s glasses on his own f­ ather and describes Laurel and Hardy as “geniuses.”27 Nor is it a generational difference: Ammons mentions watching not only Hee Haw and The Flintstones but Seinfeld (suggesting that although one’s comic allegiances might be formed mostly in one’s first few de­cades, ­these writers are open to new genres in ­middle age).28 By the twenty-­first ­century, poems ­will draw on stand-up comedy, as they draw on other genres that foreground per­for­mance and spontaneity, but I am struck by the absence of postwar references to stand-­up—­especially since, as Jahan Ramazani has documented, poems quite readily take on other genres



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in general.29 One pos­si­ble reason, suggested indirectly by Ammons’s example, is that much midcentury poetry is still facing up to its relation to a listener, as defined so influentially through John Stuart Mill. Stand-up shreds the fiction of talking to one’s self. Think of how Joan Rivers, upon hearing laughter from one corner of the hall, whirls around, points, says “I know, right?,” or of how Richard Pryor confronts his audience with the jokes they told about him in 1981. For Ian Brodie, this “dialogic” genre requires “the immediate presence of someone . . . ​to react and thus move the per­for­mance along.”30 John Limon, noting that comedians need an audience’s laughter to make a stand-up per­for­mance fulfill its generic raison d’être, suggests that comedians “hate their audiences b­ ecause they are not, as performers, entirely distinct from them.”31 Limon’s sense of hostility seems apt on another level, too: while each individual in an audience might feel a connection with the performer, each is also a part of the audience, and thus gathered to some degree against the performer. They laugh not only with but at. Accordingly, an awareness of being part of a group involves manifest responsiveness: as one hears and sees ­others’ reactions, however fleetingly, one is influenced by them. (Recall Lowell’s unease about collective laughter: laughter in a group, however genuinely delighted, involves coercion.) On the one hand, stand-up offers the sensation of immediate contact with and response to an audience; on the other, its speaker is actually up on a stage, in view of many, in a vertical relation to one’s listeners. Ammons neither wants that relation nor sees it as pos­si­ble for his writing. He is an example of how postwar poems can be both insubordinate and wistful about a Mill-­inflected idea of the poem, where communicative power resides in isolation; he is self-­conscious about what he calls “direct address” and “self-­presentation,” about how one figures one’s self and one’s readers. Ammons sees himself as speaking “if to anyone to another / alone, one to one,” to “single threads unbraided” (CP2 534). He spelled out this idea in interviews repeatedly: his i­magined audience was “other lonely p­ eople,” ­those like himself unable to form or join groups.32 Asked once why he did not write fiction, he said it was b­ ecause “I have a lot of prob­lems with interpersonal situations, and I’m very lonely in life, in myself, and deeply afraid that what I feel about ­things is a minority view”: his explicit loneliness is entangled with an uncertainty as to how much one can understand another person, or can make oneself understood to another.33 ­There are few ­people in his work, far fewer than in Life Studies or even The Dream Songs, and t­ hose who are pre­sent are rarely more than named and glimpsed; Ammons’s poems create a self so solitary and asocial that its solitude is usually tacit, taken for granted. So for Ammons, the position of stand-up does not quite fit in that re­spect (it is a better fit for Berryman, who does invoke stages and spectacles). For

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Ammons, the act of public performing, which makes one see oneself being watched, reiterates how alone one is, and involves an illusion of collective enjoyment that he distrusted or could not achieve; it would be a reminder of what he hopes to avoid. But Ammons cannot fully partake in the ideal of a speaking subject that turns its back on the listener, e­ ither: we often have listeners, and when we do not, we sometimes imagine them. Ammons seems aware, for example, of what Patrick Colm Hogan calls “audience-­directed internality,” the way in which our thoughts are not simply neutral but geared ­toward a par­ tic­u­lar ­imagined listener—­a friend, a politician, someone ­else on the subway.34 He imagines conversations constantly in his poems, which makes the idea of seeming incognizant of an audience even odder. As to ­whether one can in any way converse with another person through lyric, Ammons seems unsure; he is too permeated by doubt to take an understanding readership for granted. But he is conspicuously aware of that you. Whereas Berryman captures someone explic­itly performing for an audience, ­these chattier, more unbuttoned poems seem to talk to one person. They seek a ­middle ground between talking to the self and exhibiting the self. Ammons conveys the fluctuating muddle of intersubjectivity while also bordering on conversation: at one moment he seems to be in a private diaristic mode, and in the next he directly addresses a reader. Although stand-­up’s fusion of private consciousness and collective spectatorship may be a kind of uncanny valley for the postwar lyric, Ammons does approach something akin to stand-up, in his partial transcriptions of a ­mental life. For him, comedy is achieved when badness is shared: he finds relief in knowing that he is not the only one subject to dullness, indecisiveness, and other va­ri­et­ies of h ­ uman inferiority. He explains this relief in the following passage, entwining his own suppositions with ­those of a reader whom he addresses directly: I suppose you would like to know something about my inner life: well, it stinks: no, no, I ­don’t mean that, I’m kidding: what I mean is that I think you would like to think that my inner life stinks, it is so comforting to know that other ­peoples’ inner life also stinks: (CP2 653–654)



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The “comforting” recognition that other ­people’s interiors are also trivial propels many of Ammons’s stylistic choices. As with Berryman, Ammons’s developing of a style that encompasses badness is expressive, to a degree: such minutiae can convey a disor­ga­nized, contradictory mind. T ­ hese ungainly sentences allow him to disclose a confused self more clearly. Take for example the ungrammatical phrase “other p­ eoples’ inner // life”: although “­people” asks for a correspondingly plural “inner lives,” the speaker lumps them all into a single one, as if he is not quite thoughtful enough to register that each other person has their own inner life, like he does. It is a beautifully perceptive pocket of impercipience. Ammons’s comedy frequently draws on precision both from and about the unpromising: it involves delight not only in finding that another inner life is subject to chaos, but that one can convey that chaos so well. Elsewhere in Glare, Ammons asserts that “splendor lives by itself in a place // of icy mirrors and chilling rooms,” an unfunny world of perfection and of polished, self-­reflexive formalist poems, with their stanzaic rooms (CP2 516); austere palaces retain ­little of the person who lives ­there. (The styles favored by some of Ammons’s avant-­garde pre­de­ces­sors seem inhospitable, too: that passage from Glare would not seem to answer Olson’s demand for a poem to be “at all points, a high energy-­construct and, at all points, an energy-­ discharge.”)35 By the same token, one way to work against loneliness might be to incorporate every­thing that is less than splendid, to make a room full of the clutter of one’s shabby self. Ammons seeks to incorporate the ­whole mess and then indicate more mess—­not just to track unproductive, dithery trains of thought (as when Berryman contemplates theology and then sexual rejection in Song 57), but to show the mind’s inapplicable and unused data. Such mess can convey how one’s “inner // life also stinks.” Although Ammons dwelled on his “lack of intellect,” he makes that feared lack a source of intimacy. Between Tape (1965) and the posthumous Bosh and Flapdoodle (2005), he exaggerates a comedy of inefficient or inadequate thought. He represents labored calculations, ­mental ruts and potholes, irrational associations, and undignified impulses. Taking up audaciously flabby language in admissions like “I feel approximately like that: also, / I d­ on’t feel good” (CP2 621), he enacts even the inability to know how he feels, except that he ­doesn’t feel good. It pulls me in, somewhat as Jonathan Winters’s awkward, stumbling “I, uh, did a t­ hing that a lot of us prob­ably would like to do, a few of us d­ on’t, I d­ on’t know, I’ll just have to ask you” pulls me in. To perform such ineptness, and to make something more open to unlyrical, prosaic noise than Berryman’s long poem is, Ammons turns to waste.

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Windbaggery, Snag-­Gaggling, Yakety-­Yak, Fuss Ammons’s first book-­length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year, arose by accident: while drifting through a hardware store, he chanced on a two-­inch-­wide roll of adding machine tape, and fed it through his typewriter. In one of his characteristic gestures of self-­deprecation, it collected in a waste basket; that connection between writing and waste runs through the de­cades of work that follow. Waste brings together several of Ammons’s preoccupations. T ­ here is the idea of poetic failure, of the poem ending up in the bin. T ­ here is the ­actual environmental threat (as in Pico’s work, references to the trash swelling landfills seem pre­sent partly as an admonishment; it is something that poetry is ­doing nothing about). ­There is the lingering sense of his background, of being “tobacco country trash, high-­principled Scotch-­Irish, // poor white, redneck, riffraff trash” (CP2 444). And ­there is the concept of entropy, from which stem aging, death, and intensified loneliness. In a mordant image from Bosh and Flapdoodle, Ammons pictures old men as “rubbish” next to a dark river, outside the periphery of the lighted town. Being one of ­these men, he sees himself as a kind of memento mori for the young, the a­ ctual citizens (CP2 692). To put it in blunter terms than Ammons himself would use, rubbish—­garbage, waste, trash—is a reminder of one’s ever-­present context of mortality. In the face of this knowledge, he develops a comedy that foregrounds waste and turns it into meaning. This interplay has already appeared in his meta­phors, which join sloppiness and precision; it appears more fully in the relationship between the midcentury’s idea of a coherent, meaning-­saturated lyric and noise. Tape shows expressive inarticulacy quite clearly. The poem has been seen as a gimmick, a view expressed a ­little acerbically by Ian Sansom: “With the tape’s length and breadth determining its shape and size, Tape for the Turn of the Year quite literally invites readers to never mind the quality but feel the width.”36 While the lineation insists that the work be seen as a poem, the format is closer to a journal: Ammons would type the date, and then what­ever he wanted to report. By the time he reached the end of the roll, roughly two months a­ fter he began, he had around seven thousand lines (and thirty-­three sections, an impertinently Christological number).37 As Sansom implies, the roll proclaims a pre-­set and arbitrary form. But a few months before beginning Tape, Ammons became curious about the relationship between form and expressivity. As he reveals in a 1963 letter to Denise Levertov, he had asked Hugh Kenner “about Yvor Winters’s ‘Fallacy of Expressive or Imitative Form’ which always both­ered me a lot.” Kenner replied by suggesting that Ammons look up Williams’s 1930 poem “As the cat,” which consists of a sentence



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which printed as prose would serve as its paraphrase; but [note] that the poem, despite the fact that it contains the same words in the same order as its paraphrase, is not identical with its paraphrase; and the difference between the two is what I call the poem’s form. Nothing to do with stanza pattern or lineation, though t­hese serve as indications that one d­ oesn’t look at the sentence but at the poem. Difference rather of direction. The sentence rec­ords information; the poem on the contrary enacts.38 Ammons, who asks Levertov where he can find Williams’s poem, seems to have been struck by Kenner’s account of how form and “enact[ing]” relate. Tape, a poem at times as slender as Williams’s, enacts the inefficiency of a mind, to get some of one’s incompetence across to a reader also mired in incompetence. To understand the full mischief of Tape, it is worth revisiting how Ammons keeps himself at odds with both mainstream and experimental movements, avoiding formalist closure and postmodern openness. Winters, whose dictates set off the exchange above, has no patience for expressive sloppiness; he disparages imitative form as “merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to ‘express’ the loose and sprawling American continent.”39 Ammons, in contrast to Winters, certainly appreciates looseness and sprawl. But he also parts ways from postwar avant-­garde movements whose nemesis was “ ‘closed’ verse,” what Olson called “verse which print bred.”40 Tape is bred by print: the narrow shape compels ­every haphazard or incidental line break to bear something that looks like meaning. Viewed in one light, Ammons’s line-­breaks do bear meaning. Levertov herself ­later argued for a relationship between the formal and existential changes of twentieth-­century poetry, suggesting that its focus on “the pro­cess of thinking” and “feeling” stems from the open-­ended line-­break, which “can rec­ord the slight (but meaningful) hesitations between word and word that are characteristic of the mind’s dance among perceptions but which are not noted by grammatical punctuation.”41 ­Free verse heightens uncertainty about how a thought is g­ oing to unfold. And as Levertov observes, it can invite close-­ups so delicate that they evoke synaptic activity. Such activity—­including its randomness and waste—is expressed in Tape; initially, Ammons’s pursuit of ineptness aims for transcription, and seems to achieve it even on the level of the line. Tape rec­ords the inner life of a writer who is often at loose ends, full of talk but not of inspiration. One example of both this aimlessness and the expressivity around it occurs in the entry for December 17, where Ammons sits around the h ­ ouse, naps, thinks about d­ oing errands, and then sits around again instead. When he decides at last to go pick out a Christmas tree, it spurs him

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to several pages of wandering thought. First he notes that he ­will have to keep the not-­yet-­purchased tree “in garage,” so that its n ­ eedles ­will not fall off before Christmas. Wondering why the trees are chopped down in October leads him to imagine and ventriloquize an exasperated tree farmer, who responds with slightly hokey spelling. cut’em around October: why they cut’em so soon? transportation: it’s merchandising: dealerships to work out: farmers to contact: red tape: whatd’ya think? they can just appear up down ­here fresh two days before Christmas? sheez! some kindova nut: grows on a tree, a tree is part of   Nature, Nature is beautiful & thank you for the   compliment: (CP1 218–219) To express the voice of the surly fictitious farmer, Ammons turns to spacing, which affects timing and pushes the passage ­toward spoken language. For example, the minute omission of a space in “cut’em” seems to transcribe his own ­imagined elision; several other words have lines to themselves, which invite indignant emphases (the idea that trees could “just appear up / down ­here / fresh”), or pauses of deliberation. The push to the right at “red /   tape” delays the pseudoaccidental return to the poem’s title: h ­ ere space works as a knowing delay, much in the way you might say “wait for it” before a bad pun. Another vertical gap, a­ fter the dismissive “sheez! / some kindova nut,” gives Ammons himself a moment to find a response, a quick series of step-­by-­step faux-­logical premises to his ­imagined interlocutor.



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Across the rest of December 17, Ammons first drifts into reminiscences; almost a hundred and fifty lines l­ater, he realizes he has not completed his ­actual task: “2:29 p.m.: (still sunny) // I better get out of / h ­ ere & go / get that tree” (CP1 221–222). But instead of getting the tree, he types out two ­little rhyming quatrains, and then describes how he drowsed on the couch and thought up the poem; the tree that has been the subject of an entire after­noon’s musings remains unacquired. By setting ­those quatrains into his long poem of daily life, Ammons implies that poetry may be the apogee of time-­wasting; years ­later, when his anx­i­eties badger him sardonically, they ask him “Boy!, are you writing that ­g reat poem / the world’s waiting for” (CP2 220). At first glance, as I have suggested, the limitations of the tape seem expressive: they influence how the poem sounds. The spatial fluctuations of Tape are so slight as to function like punctuation marks; t­ here is a difference, though one of microseconds, between a direct, uniformly aligned descent and a passage that is more vertically and horizontally scattered. Like many talk-­centered comic performers, Ammons depends on timing and tone, and he activates ­these qualities through constrained ­free verse. At the same time, however, the waste that appears on the level of plot also appears in form. This drama is full of what might seem to be bluffs, or flukes—­that is, coincidental and sham expressiveness. Though Tape resembles Berryman’s half-­transcriptive proj­ect, its use of an arbitrary form goes further, exploring the far borders of notation. Noise and meaning invite misreading, or overreading. Since any change in the pattern necessarily becomes the center of attention, ­there is likely to be an insignificant shift for ­every significant, expressive one. It becomes uncertain w ­ hether form consistently enacts information, as Kenner’s letter put it. For example, Tape sometimes recalls sentence diagramming, where the logical relations between words are expressed spatially: by indenting, Ammons can demarcate relative clauses, or can align a series of parallel nouns. This pseudo-­diagramming is often spurious, however: while the poem seems to be ­doing something precise with its spaces, it often simply crams words into the two available inches, starting new lines out of sheer necessity. Ammons does not disguise how arbitrary his lineation can be: as he views the seemingly unending roll of tape that remains, he types, with a trace of iambic pentameter, “Well / if / it / must / be / onward / to / the / end, / let’s / get / t­ here / in / a / hurry: or / is that cheating?” (CP1 199). Is that cheating, as one might cheat in a game or a crossword puzzle. This narrow constraint welcomes what would conventionally be considered verbal badness, such as the perfunctory or meaningless or automatic.

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Where Berryman plays with the sestet’s expressive possibilities, Ammons tinkers with the significance of his margins. In this spirit, he does not simply itemize his less-­than-­sensuous meals, but arranges them on the page: lunch: hot dogs and baked   beans again: swell:   2/23: 11½¢ a can: cheap:   hotdogs run you around—    oh let’s see:   this morning’s coffee &   a choco­late fudge cookie:   maybe 30¢ altogether:   & all   that energy turned into verse (CP1 180) In a tele­vi­sion interview, William Carlos Williams was once told that his ­elegy for his m ­ other sounded like a “fash­ion­able grocery list”; Williams then quoted both interview and grocery list in his epic Paterson (1946–1958).42 But Ammons is still more impertinent. His unpoetic references to prices receive the same fine-­grained typographical treatment that his own thoughts do: a minuscule indentation ­here, a seemingly deliberate line break ­there. ­These tiny kinds of interference, bestowed on prosaic subjects, invite and flummox attention. Though pacing might be b­ ehind the millimeters of additional indentation before “oh let’s see,” one cannot give a reason for e­ very spatial adjustment; it is sometimes a m ­ atter of ­running out of space or of hitting a certain key. Ammons is not exactly following Olson’s belief “that right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively pos­si­ble extension of content ­under hand.”43 And yet he insists that his less-­than-­exotic lunch is not simply edible: it is poetic material emphatically “turned into verse.” So too the mind, in its moments of plodding, banality, or blankness, is material: this poem includes not only thinking, but moments of barely thinking at all, of unaccountable ­mental blips. Ammons is moving from a Berrymanesque expressive unruliness to even more inclusivity, more noise. This poetry is not focused on prob­lems of character in the way The Dream Songs is, where formal hijinks tend to focus on the self as morally flawed (wordiness, for example, is associated with vanity or a lack of proportion). Rather than stressing moral failure, Ammons indicates the way one’s neurons take in and pass along superfluities. Drifting through mess and sprawl is simply what a brain does, much of the time.



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This interest in the disobedient vagaries of a mind comes out most vividly in The Snow Poems (1977), which continues Tape’s expression of a pedestrian inner life through inventive forms and typography. H ­ ere Ammons experiments with multiple columns of type, a format that can show the activity of a “bicameral mind,” as Helen Vendler has noted.44 It leaves room to zone out; it can express disruptive, unwanted thought. In one passage, for example, where the left-­hand column busily discusses a tree, the right is blank except for an isolated “give / up” (CP1 796), as if to suggest the defeatist thought waiting in the back of one’s head. In another, the right column whimsically notices how the words “snow” and “crow” match sonically but not visually (CP1 807), enacting the brain’s pointless associations. And another, an almost page-­long, single-­ sentence query ­going down the right side—­“only / where / we / are / to / lose / all / are / we / to / have / . . . ​/ a / trifle” (CP1 849–850)—­captures yet one more unwilled thought, unfolding despite the pleasanter distractions of the left-­hand column. The question of space, however, is a reminder that Ammons’s construction of a speaker is deliberately inconsistent. While he creates what is to my ear a generally coherent persona, someone who keeps track of bean prices and likes choco­late fudge cookies and has a North Carolinian accent (“why they cut’em so soon”), he also pokes at the illusion of a speaker: a page that sometimes sounds like talk can, at another moment, look more like something print bred, or even like a concrete poem. When Ammons mixes spoken and writerly En­ glish, mingling eye dialects (“kinuva,” “sez,” “git,” “splennid”) and typewriter-­ like abbreviations (“bk,” “sd,” “yr”), he is interested, as are many of his experimental contemporaries, in print itself and in how it makes the poem look.45 The illusion encouraged by a spoken “sez” is gummed up by the impossible-­to-­speak “bk,” something dictated by the width of one’s paper, or invited by the machine one is typing on.46 As critics as disparate as Perloff and Vendler point out, much in The Snow Poems could be called doodling on the page, sometimes quite literally, as when Ammons types out layers of asterisks and tildes to represent the strata of his lawn.47 So while the minutiae of Tape or The Snow Poems draw us into a drama centered on the workings of a comically inefficient mind, t­ hese poems are profligate in their misdirections, in the way seemingly meaningful t­ hings can fail to mean. Ammons achieves a sense of intimacy through a mixture of expressive inarticulacy and expressive fakeouts: the bizarre alignments and faux diagramming create a space where precision, randomness, and indiscriminateness jostle together. It becomes difficult to draw the line between signal and noise, a difficulty that Ammons sees as accurate: as one of the twentieth-­century poets who “have become more vividly conscious of the biological systems that

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mediate inner life than the poets of any other era” (in Nikki Skillman’s words), he wants poems to encompass irrelevant ­mental static.48 In the long poems ­after Tape and Snow, which are mostly in loose couplets or tercets (and are mostly composed on wider rolls), Ammons gives up intense typographic work and its idiosyncratic forms. He instead relaxes his lines still further, bringing them away from the sense of quality around a poem, putting them into units that almost sit between poetry and prose. But his language continues to acknowledge a mess of contradictory and poorly understood impulses. Just as our thinking can be more or less articulated, Ammons swings between almost unvocalized thoughts and t­hose that are said aloud, or ­imagined as said aloud. His aggressive mixture of dictions admits that one’s identities are changing and contingent, that both one’s language and one’s thinking might be changed by an advertisement on a truck, or by a Bible verse. To suggest the workings of a brain that is not consistently rational, sophisticated, or polished, Ammons often turns to inefficient constructions—to linguistic waste, in other words. One such device is the tiny appositive exclamation: “­today is full of t­hings, / so many” (CP1 151). This quick, tacked-on commentary shows someone reacting with awe to both humdrum and dazzling sights, appending his modifiers in one rapturous breath. In Garbage, a day is “so bright, so // clear” (CP2 263); in Glare, the poet considers “a neutrino, so tiny” (CP2 498); Sphere, listing inhospitable planets, judges “Venus too hot, so much // extravagance of waste” (CP1 668). As ­these quotations suggest, ­there is something a ­little childlike, or awkward, about Ammons’s so. It is being used as an intensifier, rather than (as is standard in writing) a comparison. H. W. Fowler labels this use as the “appealing so . . . ​more suitable for conversation”; in printed text, he suggests, “it has a certain air of silliness, even when the context is favourable.”49 Ammons uses this “certain air of silliness” to show something that is more a sensation than an articulated thought. But as Fowler suggests, it also seems to come from the realm of conversation: it is a verbal habit Ammons shares with the more visibly sociable poems of Frank O’Hara. (The same animation and talkiness is apparent when O’Hara writes that “Joe is restless and so am I, so restless,” or sees that “even the traffic halt so thick is a way / for p­ eople to rub up against each other.”)50 Such tiny devices steadily draw Ammons’s poems to a register of uncertain but hoped-­for intimacy. Another way that Ammons gets at the mess of cognition is through his use of a diluted but, that is, a but that is not actually markedly contrastive. In t­hese long poems, the conjunction can occur half a dozen times on a page, often beginning several clauses in a row. Enacting the real-­time imprecision of a mind uncertain what it is ­going to say next, it often retracts or modifies a statement, and continually strings clauses together. But is often explic­itly linked with ­mental floundering:



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“but it’s not my feelings / but how can I change them,” he won­ders (CP2 517). ­Later, his sentence dissolves into confusion about what he has said or means to say: “but / now I’m trying to remember a memory, . . . ​but // I’ve already told you about my memory / but I figure when I xerox the strip” (CP2 590). Early twentieth-­century grammar textbooks take a dim view of such repetitions (“Two ‘buts’ used successively are likely to cause incoherence,” observes one manual) but Ammons’s comedy depends on such incoherencies.51 It is a useful connector for a mind that constantly stages its slightly jumbled, slowly emerging thoughts. ­These seemingly insignificant, unnecessary, or unwieldy snippets of language reiterate that one comic sheen in Ammons’s style comes from how he suggest the bogs and ditches of an inner life, while bringing such quasi transcription near conversation, as well. His syntax is a patchwork of complex clauses, phrases tossed loosely together, and ungainly interpolations that might keep ­going for two pages. His inordinately capacious parentheses create digressions so long that he himself nearly becomes lost in them; and ­after such digressions, he often repeats a word, as if trying to remember what his point was. His associative play with words’ sounds show trains of thought derailed by the trivial and illogical, by inset doggerel and earworms. Out of nowhere, amid his typical unrhymed lines, his mind begins humming to itself, remembering a folk song about “old molly hare” and improvising a new verse about “runnin thoo the cotton patch / fartin like a bear” (CP2 570). This is the territory of Ellen DeGeneres, of losing the thread of one’s subject for twenty minutes, of realizing that “Your head just d­ oesn’t stop; your brain just goes and goes. . . . ​It’s just you, just your thoughts: that was a good restaurant we went to t­ oday,” of ­going on to more of the same.52 The ­going and g­ oing of a brain is performed in Ammons’s mature style; it is a form of deliberate ineptness. This mimetic verbal flotsam also extends to Ammons’s constant, irreverent allusions, which encompass Star Trek and Shakespeare. Most obviously, his conversations with high-­modernist precursors revel in the failure to be sublime, as when Wallace Stevens’s serene image of a bird whose “fire-­fangled feathers dangle down” becomes extremely corporeal: “the abs lose their trained ruffles, and the / flesh-­flabby dugs dangle down.”53 Binding Stevens’s image to the “wrinkled dugs” of T. S. Eliot’s Tiresias, Ammons places both allusions in the context of an aging body, succumbing to gravity. But this brazen parody also makes one aware of how poems become a part of a bookish person’s everyday m ­ ental life. Allusions are assimilated into other thoughts ­here, semirandomly; they testify to how much one’s perceptions are ­shaped by what one has read, as when Tape turns W. H. Auden’s elegiac “O all the instruments agree” into a statement about an a­ ctual forecast (CP1 173). Lines from Berryman’s valedictory Song 385 (“My h ­ ouse is older than Henry; / that’s fairly old”)

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become “my memory is about as long as // your dick: that’s fairly short, hiccuped Henry” (CP2 609), which prob­ably would have amused Berryman. Ammons takes up every­thing that falls short of the vatic: the vulgar, tautological, jargon-­ridden, inane, commercial (even choco­late fudge cookies, mentioned three times across Tape). And he plays up the ways in which his mind falls short of logic, self-­awareness, and ­every other humanist ideal. His poetry reflects his suburban yard and his inner life more expressively than badness would usually seem to be able to do; it does so through devices that consistently embody both awkwardness and grace. In the fake diagrams of Tape, and in the devices I have skimmed in the ­later poems, waste appears in what can seem to be largely mimetic forms: in literal procrastination, tiny inset quatrains of m ­ ental doggerel, garrulity, illogical thought pro­cesses. But I have also suggested that Ammons takes the idea of waste beyond expressiveness, to what r­ eally does seem waste or redundancy. Perhaps the best example of how he draws comedy out of what would usually be unwanted in a poem is one not obviously connected to subjectivity, but to style more generally: the way ­these poems are shot through with deliberate, odd repetitions. Again and again, Ammons alights on linguistic scraps that have already been used or used up. Despite the extraordinarily varied vocabulary available to him, the language of Garbage and of the other long poems often shows unexpected constraint, as if it is obliged to patch new clauses with bits from previous ones. Ammons returns (sometimes several times in a line, sometimes across half a book) to the same quasi-­incidental words and images. In three successive cantos of Garbage, for example, a worker associated with waste disposal—­a dumptruck driver, a bulldozer operator, the Commissioner of Sanitation in his Cadillac—­approaches the edge of a landfill and contemplates the scene, creating a late-­twentieth-­century version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (ca. 1818), or of the prophet amid the sublime landscapes of Ommateum. A passage from the fourth canto watches the bulldozer operator heave a b­ ottle into a landfill; a­ fter a page of scientific epiphanies (about air moving within air, about the light in the b­ ottle) it ends not by soaring but by lumbering off:

all is one, one all:

hallelujah: he gets back up on his bulldozer and shaking his locks backs the bulldozer up (CP2 235–236) When the driver gets himself “back up” onto his seat, vertically, and sends the bulldozer off, horizontally, the same two words of direction are rearranged and



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condensed into two similarly sturdy, matter-­of-­fact motions. ­These clusters of flashy reuse are one of the most pervasive devices in Ammons’s l­ater poems. A “house, paid for for // twenty years, is paid for” (CP2 221); he has enough money “to live / from now on on” (CP2 220); and as his grimmest statement about reaching financial security puts it, “we already have it, except ­we’ve had it” (CP2 709). Ammons gets all he can out of even unremarkable parts of speech, doubling and dislocating phrases so as to vivify insubstantial particles. Such repetitions speak to a comedy that is not based solely in a near-­ transcription of thought. Rather, this level of comedy is more about verbal ineptness, as it is in the spring day compared to a cake. Just as Ammons perpetually exhibits and reworks his inability to transcend the individual or describe nature or even to communicate at all, t­hese moments topple badness into something satisfying. They occur on a bookwide scale, and they resemble the repetitions of stand-up, as when DeGeneres’s throwaway reference to a car-­pool lane in The Beginning (2000)—­ants carry other ants so as to be able to bypass congested traffic—­happens to return when she mentions a blow-up doll she bought for the same purpose. ­These moments create a flicker of premeditation within the illusion of spontaneity; in Ammons they are a reminder of artfulness and luck. Terns flying around a landfill, for example, first have wings that are as “white and clean as angel-­food cake” (once again, a dessert; once again, an absolutely accurate simile) and then, half a dozen pages l­ater, are “designed ­after angels or angels / ­after them” (CP2 232, 235). My own favorite instance is in Glare, where Ammons twice remarks “surprise! surprise!”—an exclamation that usually begins a party, when p­ eople jump out with balloons and pre­sents. In the first instance, he is caught off-­ guard: so ­here I am fist-­diddling in the poot-­shanty when my grand­mother appears at the door—­surprise! surprise! she frowned (this is my grand­mother poem) and my sex education was off to the races: (CP2 568) Masturbation is encountered frequently in other genres—­from Philip Roth’s 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint, to Pryor’s 1982 memory of his ten-­year-­old self in a tub, to a 1992 episode of Seinfeld—­but in poetry it is less common, especially in this unerotic, slightly puerile way. Ammons heightens the weird diminutive impudence of “fist-­diddling” by putting it close to the regionalism of

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“poot-­shanty,” and by treating it as a subject to bring up quite comfortably. It “is my // grand­mother poem,” as if his version of Lowell’s f­amily portraiture in Life Studies. (Pico’s speaker, in Junk, makes a confession in a similar key when he asserts that “I’m masturbating in the bathroom like // a common teen.”54 Though the nouns that follow “like a common” are usually pejorative, “teen” is relatively innocuous; as with Ammons, the silliness is stressed.) The surprise of “surprise! surprise!” returns when Ammons comes back to the phrase for an entirely dif­fer­ent subject, so many pages ­later that the exclamation might have been forgotten: well, it’s Easter morning right now, with a nor’easter, out-­of-­whack, whipper-­jawed, eight-­inch dump load of snow on the ground, and it, as they say, agoing to snow: surprise, surprise! (CP2 601) The unlooked-­for return merges the pre­sent weather report with the out­house memory, while not fully hiding an innuendo about orgasm. Unwilling to waste a joke by using it only twice, Glare also reuses the exclamation of “big surprise”: 150 pages a­ fter a sardonic “so / the big surprise is, fall has come” (CP2 559), the literal “big surprise” of an elephant’s penis appears (CP2 669). The way ­these superficially connected exclamations link up resembles an extended pun: one phrase is reused for very dif­fer­ent, incongruous notions, as if sex w ­ ere as acceptable a topic as weather. T ­ hese echoes often seem accidental, in that the resemblance does not obviously speak to some profound meaning: it is more that they underscore the inevitable bits of self-­repeating in a long poem. But they are frequent sources of delight. Such moments involve the plea­sure, as Catherine Chauvin puts it in her study of stand-up callbacks, “of recognizing something that was heard before,” which promotes not only formal connections but connections between speaker and audience.55 Ammons’s comedy is grounded in the deliberately unprepossessing, in an inability to find the transcendent language to which one might aspire. Failures of decorum, concision, and sublimity are announced in titles like Garbage, as well as in ­those of countless unpublished poems like “Mostly Junk,” “Slush or Trash or Slime,” “Clabberbabble.”56 Ammons fills his poems with “windbaggery, snag-­gaggling, yakety-­yak, fuss,” as Sphere puts it (CP1 649). The emblematic songbird of lyric sounds more like this: “it’s hard to keep Feeding the Fucking Sparrows Day from / becoming also Feeding the Fucking Starlings Day and // Feeding the Fucking Grackles Day,” culminating in a “Day called



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Listening / for the Sparrows to Cut the Fucking Cheese Day” (CP2 436). T ­ here is product placement, and t­ here are copies of grocery bills, and all of it—­ redundancies and circumlocutions, confused syntax, jargon transplanted from one field to another, terrible puns, nonstandard spellings, and brassy coinages— is framed as poetry. Ammons’s ineptness bears out one half of a doubled princi­ple observed in the preceding chapters: ­these poems grow comic through moments that are recognizably bad and, in the same moment, right. “I’m soaring ­today like a // dead mole,” he announces in Bosh and Flapdoodle: “I have as much get up and go as a / rock bottom” (CP2 714). But ­those line breaks—­will I soar ­today like a // winged soul, as poets have dreamed of ­doing for several centuries?—­ allow for a brilliantly expressive thud: the promise of ascension, a heavy landing on the earthbound next line.

But, You Know, It’s Only // Me For an emblem of how Ammons turns poetic failure into comedy, and of the loneliness that runs ­behind it, consider “Their Sex Life.” It reads as follows: One failure on Top of another. (CP2 216) This looks like a flippant joke, an enjambed cliché, a game where each line has exactly three words and twelve characters. But it is also about the lyric subject, about feeling, and about self-­regard. Although Ammons calls it “Their Sex Life,” the title’s indirection itself suggests that he might refer not to that of some merely observed or ­imagined ­others, but to our sex life, the speaker’s own. While the witty remark gives him some distance, the poem also passes judgment, sadly and drily; it sums up a part of one’s life. It is b­ itter about sexual activity; it may also be ­bitter about the relationship—­the line break that turns the phrase into a couplet also serves to separate the one person from the other, demonstrating that one is always isolated, that one failure ­will never fully understand its partner. And Ammons may also be ­bitter about his quasiconfessional plaintiveness and about his own quip: the poem itself is literally composed of “one failure on top of another.” But this dead cliché folds back on itself to create something unlooked for, something that becomes animated on the page. It is both clever and painful. Throughout Ammons’s poems, sex has a special relation to comedy: it is a field of life where in some sense every­one feels awkward, where t­here is no

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perfection, where loneliness and disappointment may well be pre­sent. Sometimes sex is a vehicle for abstract meditation, as in the first line of Sphere, which claims that “The sexual basis of all t­ hings rare is r­ eally apparent”; it launches a book about “integration’s consummation: a com-­or intermingling of parts, / heterocosm joyous” (CP1 646). But it is more often relentlessly corporeal. Early in Tape, Ammons panics when he has sat typing too long, and decides he needs to make sure his testicles have not somehow dis­appeared: “two cool tight weights! / thank you: / thank you very much:” (CP1 180). That kind of repeated thanking usually comes from a performer on a stage; ­here it foregrounds the uncomfortable intimacy he exaggerates throughout his work, which includes every­thing ingested or excreted. It is not clear if Ammons’s thanks are directed ­toward his body, or the God he had by then ceased to believe in (in Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor says he thanks God ­every day “for not burning my dick” in the 1980 disaster), or the readers who have sat through his per­for­mance, but he is mindful of a listener even when d­ oing something quite private. In Bosh and Flapdoodle, Ammons’s last book, sex and the body become a way to register the deprivations, embarrassments, and fears of aging. He brackets the first line of “Good God” with an unspecified “it,” suggesting an object so impor­tant that it need not, or o ­ ught not, be named. His lament, continually impeded by commas and sagging phrases (“you know,” “so to / speak”), itself becomes plaintively flaccid: the poem associates impotence with a comically expressive lack of verbal ability, and perhaps with a lack of poetic inspiration: It used to flick up so often, I called it flicker: but now, drooping, it nods awake or, losing it, slips back asleep: I say, stand up t­ here, man, but, you know, it’s only me, and it takes no threat to heart, so to speak: it’s lazier than a sick dog that ­won’t lift his head to sniff the wind: (CP2 697–698) Erectile dysfunction produces a variety of unpromising meta­phors. Vari­ous figures of speech, seemingly thought of spontaneously, clash: the “flicker” (a woodpecker) turns into a “man” and then to a “sick dog.” The weak exhortation of “I say, / stand up t­ here, man” is a feeble version of Rochester’s threats to his similarly disobedient penis, the “Base Recreant” who “darst not stand” in “The Imperfect Enjoyment” (ca. 1680).57



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As Ammons graphs his drifting associational thought pro­cesses, g­ oing on too long and then veering from his point, the result continues to be like the most arresting stand-up in its unexpected tonalities (the bit in Chris Gethard’s ­Career Suicide [2017] that describes antidepressant-­induced impotence would be a good comparison). Within a few couplets, Ammons’s mind turns from impotence to death: or perhaps the ­thing, long asleep, has fallen out of use: a day of radical separation, a realization that puts you back before the world began—­alone: the walls of the grave your only embrace, and the soil you lie on all that lies on you: my goodness: fortunately, ­there are remedies— implants, injections, dirty magazines: the world is sometimes so well provided with 2nd or 3rd chances, we must be amazed at the thoughtfulness of so many applied to so wide a scope of possibility and give the pisspoor ­thing a chance. . . . (CP2 698) The idea of death has barely registered (in that insufficient ­little exclamation of “my // goodness”) before it is left b­ ehind, with the initially jolting remark that “fortunately, t­ here are remedies.” For a moment h ­ ere, it seems that Ammons refers to a cure for death itself, though by the time he reaches “dirty magazines,” it becomes clear that he has gone back to his first subject, erectile dysfunction. This comic instant of misunderstanding is bound to the bleak knowledge that ­there ­will be no subsequent “chances”: anything like an implant or pornography ­will be irrelevant. That knowledge, in turn, is buried within a glum, bawdy reflection on the phallus, a literally “pisspoor // ­thing” connected to an exasperating bladder. But it suggests that what Ammons sees in death is its loneliness: that the ground is “all that lies on you,” and that d­ ying entails a “radical separation.” In the face of that loneliness, redundancy and chattiness and other ways of falling off from poetic ideals become compelling. Since one w ­ ill be solitary soon enough, Ammons thinks, who would want to write poems f­ree of ­human muddle, or to seem to ignore what listeners one might have? His comic badness allows him to assem­ble an uncertain,

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embarrassing self, one that addresses every­thing it can, even if it sometimes strays from or loses its point.

Pre­sent Wrapping This chapter has implicitly suggested that Ammons, to a greater degree than Berryman or Lowell, has what we might call a postmodern image of his mind. He sees it as constantly altered by its surroundings, irrational in its connections, communicating in handed-­down terms. Examining Ammons’s comic stance t­ oward the twentieth-­century lyric, as seen in his disputes with decorum and well-­wroughtness, helps expose his interest in what a poem can take in, and in how a poem interacts with its readers. His desanctification of lyric continues and is ratcheted up in Tommy Pico’s probing, funny, disturbing Junk, my focus in t­hese last few pages. And yet while both Ammons and Pico are visibly experimental, I want to suggest that they are both also demonstrating, albeit in dif­fer­ent tonalities, a lyric impulse ­toward abjection—­toward writing about a self in a genre that sometimes seems at odds with it. Pico, who wrote Junk in his early thirties, focuses on material at an e­ arlier stage of degradation: it has yet to turn into garbage. Pico, who is Kumeyaay and grew up on a reservation in southern California, writes with the knowledge that one’s ethnic group may be seen, when it is seen at all, as disposable: “I’m from a place where ppl became // garbage A pile to remove Junk is an upgrade” (47). That sardonic observation implies a crucial change between his subject position and that of Ammons (or Berryman or Lowell): as a young, queer, Native man, Pico is identified with multiple groups that have been socially abjected for as long as the United States has existed. But though the book rec­ords slurs heard on Brooklyn streets and the ongoing effects of colonialism on indigenous ­people, Pico gives his responses a mordant, continually unpredictable comic side. He pre­sents an embarrassing self that has impulses to overeat (“My body is a scum bag. / My landlord is a dick” [IRL, 67]), overshare, and overthink. Junk gets at the moments where one can see oneself behaving in ways one knows one should not, and at the absurdity, shame, and loneliness of personhood. Building on Ammons’s tonal familiarity and lack of decorum (and on June Jordan’s fast-­moving satires, among other influences), Pico extends self-­ exposure into new territory.58 He intensifies what is seen as a quintessentially lyric proj­ect, that of writing about the personal; at ­every turn he heightens the uncomfortable intimacy and self-­consciousness of that proj­ect. The embarrassing self is made comically vivid through several interlocking techniques:



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its churning through both trivial and urgent subjects, its unpredictable stance ­toward a reader, its varyingly coherent first-­person speaker, and its repeated references to the poetic ideals it flouts. Junk relays the information overload that makes up much of one’s day, swooping constantly between scales. Ominous global headlines are adjacent to announcements about what subway trains are on fire; they are spliced with memories of former boyfriends, hookups, and tragicomically bad dates; they are spliced with a childhood on the reservation, and recent months spent living in France. The book interweaves lists of junk, especially junk foods both ­actual (­every brand of candy) and outrageous (“Bacon-­wrapped-­/ date flavored Doritos” [65]). T ­ here are tweet-­sized bits of wordplay that might themselves be a form of ­mental “junk”: spoonerisms, one-­liners, and horrendous puns, as when Pico turns the “supersonic man” of a Queen song into a “supersonic manatee” (39). The poem is steeped in con­temporary popu­lar and social media, such as Instagram, texts, dating platforms, and internet slang, but also in literal noise, as when “­those damn cicadas // w ­ on’t shut the fuck up” (27). Cicadas do keep coming back, one source of intruding sense-­ data among many. As with Pico’s first book, IRL (2016), Junk moves by apparent ­free association; it tests how much one can cover in a page, and how closely one can mix extremes of flipness and panic. Pico depicts humor as a defense and offense and brief solace, as well as a way of entertaining ­those he cares about or wants to attract. He offers, for example, an imaginary gif, which one can replay as many times as one needs:

When yr slap hand gets itchy OK whenever anybody

dumps you, just think of them as if a gif of a white dude wilding out to Wu-­Tang in a cardigan then suddenly falling into the ­ rand Canyon—­Dating is all the way dumb I ­don’t know what, G if any of this, w ­ ill reach yr peepers but I want to ask you this (and I am guilty of making ppl wade thru some bullshit b4 getting to my point): (37) First, for all its appearance of extemporaneousness and talk (like the conversational filler of “OK,” which lets the sentence restart), this passage sets up some brilliant comic intersections: someone throwing someone ­else away and someone falling a mile down into the earth, the itch of the constrained slap hand and the satisfaction of that colossal plummet. And as with Ammons, note the frequent luck of print: the leap before the thump of “anybody // dumps

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you,” the dif­fer­ent stretch of white space across “the // ­Grand Canyon.” Second, I want to concentrate on the uncertain nearness of ­these lines. They are reminiscent of Ammons’s close, familiar addresses, but spikier, more provocative, and unreliably closer. Pico’s style creates an irregular proximity between poem and reader. Whereas Ammons strings sentences together with and or colons, Pico jams sentences, clauses, phrases, and single words up against each other with l­ittle punctuation (the dash in the passage above is relatively rare). Usually a new unit is indicated only by an initial capital. Syntax and line-­ending do not often coincide, and it creates a rhythm of slight misreading, of having to go back and locate the ­actual start for the new unit. To take a minor instance in the passage above, each time I reach “all the way dumb” I run on (“all the way dumb I ­don’t know”) before realizing the “I” begins a new sentence. Whereas Ammons is garrulous and selectively inarticulate in how he talks to the reader, Pico more deliberately throws one off, amid what’s extremely personal. The passage above is a good example: ­after the speaker seems to imagine the emotional life of his reader, he reflects that he is not sure ­whether the “you” he addresses ­will see “any of this.” In an oddly intimate and rhetorical moment, that qualification both speaks directly to the reader and somehow past them, as if another recipient might be intended. When direct address continues, ­going so far as to ask a question, the monologue nearly opens up into a conversation, an impression furthered by the shorthand of “yr,” “ppl,” “thru,” “b4.” This poem establishes readerly intimacy while removing much syntactic connective tissue; where Ammons’s sentences smooth t­ hings over (almost every­thing comes from an explicit first-­person speaker), Pico’s more jagged phrase-­based units, which often lack an I, intermittently seem not so much spoken as experienced by the self. The poem takes in confession spoken outwards, the insects one hears, and ­mental blankings-­out or doodlings: “The artifice of order Predictability, // mea­sured time, pre­sent wrapping Order, Order, Pockets of / Order Or, Durham I dumped a boy from Raleigh ­today” (65). You have been transported from poetics to romantic abandonment, by way of two towns in North Carolina. This style seems to transcribe fragments of consciousness (Feedback feedback is a refrain), and then is suddenly talking directly to a you again.59 On one level this is an internal conversation, reflecting the way the voices in one’s head are made by or given to ­others. Pico remembers or quotes his ex, or imagines what his ex would say if he ­were still around. When italicized phrases intrude (“This is an epic, dummy Get yr muse” [1], or “Dummy is this the poem or the essay abt // the poem” [39]), they can usually be read as the anxious, derisive voices in one’s head. At other moments, though—­“I was ­here on the



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first date I / am the pin slid thru the boutonniere” (59)—­junk itself speaks, as if to underscore the extent to which one’s life and writing are ­shaped by ephemera. Pico assem­bles a self by perforating the idea of a private lyric, in two ways: by all the yous addressed out of the poem, and by every­thing that seems to speak within the poem. The way Pico sets up an erratic closeness between reader, speaker, and poem suggests his relation to twentieth-­century poetic ideals more broadly. For example, some references to genitalic junk lead to the thought of a­ ctual bananas, specifically to the news that standard bananas may die out, since “Commercially produced yellow // penis proxies are clones and share the same backdoors” (45). A few seemingly disconnected comments l­ater, the  poem moves from bananas to literary unity to white supremacy: “you expect me to tie bananas / into the narrative I expected my Ancestors wd b treated // as h ­ uman beings” (45). That rejected poetic norm seems of a piece with how the state has tried to eliminate difference; to assimilate t­ hings into a unified poetic w ­ hole would be to obliterate their oddness and individuality. Accordingly, Pico keeps in what seems unpolished, even retaining moments (or staging moments) where he accidentally leaves his caps lock key on: an accident like “FEELING whoops Feeling eyes / upon u” has value, and he sets it down as something that would other­wise be lost.60 As Pico writes near the end of Junk, “I’m building the // archive of a life that s­ houldn’t exist, while it still does” (72); for this poet, recording personal experience must be inconsistent and disorderly. When he thinks from “mea­ sured time” to the skipping rec­ord of “pre­sent wrapping Order, Order, Pockets of / Order,” his pun on “pre­sent wrapping” suggests skepticism of the way poetry is said to arrange and preserve one moment. He flouts the notion that a successfully ordered poem w ­ ill be able to speak universally, or be ­free of identity: Oh shut the fuck up Voices change How dare you tether me to lines I wrote in like 2009 Goin over yr Junky poems huh? Do you ever wish you cd just be always one self ? “Whole” is a privilege and a pedestal Whole Foods has a delicious hot buffet (17) ­ hese lines compress multiple forms of privilege; Anglo-­American ideals of T voice and of poetic unity slide into the store known for catering to white upper-­ class shoppers. And the manner of the slide is essential: the impatient, stagy, snarky, irreverent way that Pico goes from poetics and phenomenology to

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affirming (sarcastically?) the overpriced buffet, the way he defies the idea that any of t­ hese topics need to be dwelt on. They ­will come back around. In Junk, Pico intensifies the mundane, embarrassing, and trivial materials that Ammons incorporates. Bringing in even the background rattling of cicadas and of one’s brain, Pico builds an archive of experience and sensation, in which alienation, anger, cravings, and tenderness are swirled together. The poem’s caustic, comic stance comes from language si­mul­ta­neously typed and talky and almost subconscious, a sometimes intimate and sometimes removed I, a reader brought in and pushed away. In turning to the work of Terrance Hayes, we ­will see other forms of indeterminacy, stemming from care for what cannot be de­cided in a poem or in one’s inner life. ­Here I switch from thinking about noise to quiet, though a kind of quiet that encompasses po­liti­cal critique and reflections on poetic design, a­ ctual glitter and its sonic equivalent, and almost every­thing ­else one might want to include.

Ch a p ter  4

Terrance Hayes Floundering Interiors

When speaking at the 2016 National Book Awards ceremony—­a week a­ fter the US presidential election—­Terrance Hayes began by characterizing his experience as a black poet in the con­temporary United States. ­After quoting Elizabeth Bishop’s definition of poetry as “a way of thinking with one’s feelings” and Lucille Clifton’s recognition “that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed,” he asked his audience to “imagine twenty years of thinking with [your] feelings while someone is trying to kill you.”1 That image articulates an acute strain: one is compelled to be alert both to bluntly murderous forces, and to fluctuating emotional responses on a minute scale. Hayes responds to this strain with a rangy, effervescent comedy. His poems are entwined with feelings of outrage, fear, and anguish, and with irony and snark. They have affinities with the work of a number of comedians and satirists who came of age in the de­cades ­after the civil rights movement. Hayes was born in South Carolina in 1971, and published his first book, Muscular ­Music, in 1999; his near contemporaries include satirical novelists such as Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, and Colson Whitehead, as well as stand-up and sketch performers like Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, W. Kamau Belle, Hannibal Buress, and Keegan-­Michael Key and Jordan Peele. Each of t­ hese writers and performers has taken sharp, sometimes scathing approaches to the racist legacy Hayes addresses in “The Blue Baraka”: 115

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We go waaaaay back, Amer­ic­ a. Like mutts in the bed of a pickup. Like righ­teous indignations. Like riotous ignitions. / Like far rightwing indicators blinking white&black, white&black, white&black—­2 The position of the po­liti­cal far right is not just monotonous but outdated: car indicators are red or amber now, and have not blinked white and black since the late 1960s. In reply, Hayes’s work encompasses both glaring forms of injustice and more insidious ones, particularly that of essentialism. “The Blue Baraka” moves to the infinitely capacious “we” of which both Amiri Baraka and Hayes are parts. Some of us bag boys. Some of us Lerois, some of us Charlie too Browns too. Some of us black-­eyed, browneyed idlers. Some of us be best friends or fried fiends, but all of us be floundering interiors, be all ­these ­things at once, Amer­i­ca. ­ hese allusive (Baraka’s birth name was Everett Leroi Jones), aggressively punT ning (“Charlie too Browns”), sonically lavish (“brown-­/eyed idlers”) declarations stem from exasperation at how ste­reo­types fix ­people into one-­dimensional tokens of a race or culture.3 As Christopher Spaide observes, Hayes’s list “includes ­every instantiation of blackness plus its opposite”; it is “cumulative, combinatory, and pridefully self-­contradictory.”4 Hayes’s work imagines the “floundering interiors” that largely escape the notice of onlookers. His rebuttal of ste­reo­types is explicit in the lists of “The Blue Baraka.” It is evident in his variety of subjects, which return to masculinity, desire and friendship and marriage, ­family gatherings, all sorts of genres of ­music and visual art (Hayes entered college to study painting), Japan (where he taught for a year with Yona Harvey, his then wife, ­after getting an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh), mass incarceration, police brutality. It is implicit in his dazzlingly off-­kilter aesthetic: ­these poems are opposed to easy labelling, predictable hierarchies, and fixed perspectives. They bear out Glenda Carpio’s belief that comedy responding to the intolerable can be “both a bountiful source of creativity and plea­sure and an energetic mode of social and po­liti­cal critique.”5

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As part of Hayes’s interest in vaporizing ste­reo­types, his poems often confront the following prob­lem: How can one depict a perception that is with one frequently or almost constantly, but that does not always dominate one’s mind? Specifically, how does one do so within the tight, concentric space of a poem? In the still-­normative mode of lyric reading handed down from the New Criticism, where one finds a speaker and a situation and a tone, and seeks to understand ­these qualities as facets of one unified linguistic realm, a poem’s many edges and a­ ngles are often folded into its most evident topic: a short poem tends to be read as about and kindled by one ­thing. This way of reading can sometimes be constrictive, especially to a writer who delights in scope and in the variety of subjects a brain holds at once. Identifying a topic (especially a harrowing topic) within a poem risks subsuming all other interests and ideas into that topic. It risks simplifying a repre­sen­ta­tion of one’s inner life into that of something like an automaton, whose feelings are not only logical but predictable; it can obscure how irritation, sorrow, alarm, relief, and mockery follow hard upon each other, or exist in the same moment. As Hayes himself puts it, “what seems to be an effort to comprehend is often an effort to impose a narrow meaning or to strip meaning away.”6 The imposing or depriving of meaning is particularly relevant to a poet who documents a complex response to racism and its effects. So the comedy explored in this chapter, like t­ hose preceding it, is partly a response to such ongoing lyric expectations. ­Here forms of comic excess gesture ­toward what cannot be completely represented or de­cided: ­there appears to be an extreme amount of contingency in what happens from line to line. On an initial reading, a Hayes poem often invites one to read it as expressive of the workings of a comically wayward and uncertain mind. But Hayes also foregrounds poetic devices that cannot be fully explained through a still-­ influential lyric model grounded in the expression of a subjectivity: they are in excess of that model. In demonstrating the ways that repre­sen­ta­tions of experience are not necessarily just imitations or dramas or distillations, Hayes’s work asks one to reconsider what can be “comprehended,” and where one can confidently draw lines in the pervasive binary of inner life and outer world. It takes up the literary-­critical tendency to force poems into singular explanations, while also exploring the idea that reading a poem can be an ethical act, in which a reader seeks to understand another person. As the following section of this chapter shows, Hayes’s breaches of a lyric model gesture ­toward the ways that what occurs in one’s head goes beyond what can be explicated, graphed, or parsed: the opposite of an automaton, ­these poems suggest, might be a random number generator. Then I explore the relation between comic flourish and strong feeling in some of Hayes’s

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intricate longer works, where apparent ­mental dramas, which sometimes seem to use sheer formal extravagance to stave off the pain of remembering or acknowledging something ­bitter, pre­sent strong feeling and a self-­consciousness about that pre­sen­ta­tion. Through their vis­i­ble artifice, Hayes evaluates an ambivalence about staging emotion and about imposing poetic closure. I end with Hayes’s most recent writing (from How to Be Drawn [2015] and American Sonnets for My Past and ­Future Assassin [2018]), in which poems spoken by an uncertain, changeable self encompass meditations on po­liti­cal systems.

Shortcuts and Alternative Takes In his 2012 study The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie sets out the ways that blackness, in the United States, is taken as a sign of the po­liti­cal, social, and public—­not of an individual interiority. For Quashie, the tropes of self-­ aware doubleness that run through black American lit­er­at­ ure have often been belabored by a white-­dominated “politics of repre­sen­ta­tion, where black subjectivity exists for its social and po­liti­cal meaningfulness rather than as a marker of the h ­ uman individuality of the person who is black. . . . ​Such expectation is part of the inclination to understand black culture through a lens of re­sis­tance, and it practically thwarts other ways of reading.”7 The prevalence of this lens—­where blackness is seen as reactive, expressive, and dramatic—is useful to have in mind when exploring Hayes’s work. I w ­ ill return to Quashie’s argument ­after setting out a poem that I see as exemplifying both Hayes’s style and his interest in getting past that constrictive mode of reading. Recognizing how one takes in a wide range of contradictory, unhierarchical perspectives, “New York Poem” shows how the mind slides from topic to topic, what it tries not to think of and yet thinks of, how it assimilates and is altered by its surroundings. It begins with a statement about perspective and range, in a sentence that sweeps across the city, then back to the party where the speaker is standing: In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles of buildings where ­there are more miles of shortcuts and alternative takes than ­there are Miles Davis alternative takes.8

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Hayes’s conversational, flexible style lets him glide from vantage to vantage with seeming effortlessness; but this first sentence is brought up short by the slightly thumping repetition at its end. While a comparison usually leads to something obviously dif­fer­ent, like more alternative takes than ­there are Miles Davis recordings, ­here the starting point of “alternative takes” leads to another instance of the same t­ hing. In that very moment, however, this sentence twists, like the innumerable routes and passages of the light-­dotted city: it twists so thoroughly that infrastructure vanishes into sound. In that crossing, the statute “miles” are vis­i­ble, physical, and static; the ­music of the trumpeter “Miles” is invisible, nontactile, temporal. Doubling back on the very idea of multiple takes, Hayes delivers sameness and difference, in one swoop. If you can see streets as “aisles / of buildings” you have moved so far out as to reduce every­thing to miniature. And then, suddenly, you are at a hipster party, where spectacular trendiness is played up by sound and simile. ­ here is a white girl who looks hijacked T with feeling in her glittering jacket and her boots that look made of dinosaur skin and R is saying to her I love you again and again. Hayes’s words interact in inimitably funny ways: the irregular rhymes that dot ­these lines, heard for example between “dinosaur skin” and “again and again,” animate them. Rhyme also, however, points to the visibility of the white girl’s affect: though to be “hijacked” with feeling is to be overpowered by it, the word is sonically bound to “jacket,” so that emotion is somehow bound up in the fash­ion­able jacket itself. In remarking ­these p­ eople, whose strong emotional responses are figured prominently as exteriors, the speaker has been a quite neutral and reticent “one.” But a­ fter a few more lines of overheard small talk, he suddenly turns to an I, and, for a moment, to himself: “I am so / fucking vain I cannot believe anyone / is threatened by me” (How to Be Drawn 10). It registers one of the results of racial profiling—­the baffling knowledge that he might intimidate another person, even at this presumably young, cosmopolitan party, in this nearly futuristic atmosphere. The sentence startles in part b­ ecause of its lack of ornamentation: not part of a high-­spirited list, no meta­phor, no rhyme. It does not seem, at first glance, to be generated by any one thought preceding it: it is a thought that the speaker cannot dismiss entirely from his mind. It is not wholly spelled out b­ ecause (I think) it does not need to be; it is all too familiar.

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­After ­those short, dislocated statements at the poem’s midpoint, Hayes returns to the expansive style of his opening. (As in preceding chapters, I w ­ ill sometimes refer to the poem’s speaker by the poet’s name, but speaker and author may diverge significantly, or the situation may be completely fictionalized. In this instance, Hayes explained at a Library of Congress reading that he wrote the poem a­ fter being deserted by “R” at a party.)9 He now addresses the city and its p­ eople directly: Dear New York, dear girl with a bar code tattooed on the side of your face, and every­one writing poems about and inside and outside the subways, dear ­people under­g round in New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aisles of New York, on the rooftops of Chinatown where Miles Davis is pumping in, and someone is telling me about contranyms, how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same word looking in opposite directions (How to Be Drawn 11) ­ hese lines, which lead up to the ending, encompass even more than the openT ing ones do. The princi­ple seems to be to take in every­one in the city. Syllepsis spins the poem outward, through a set of prepositions made to work twice as much as usual: p­ eople are writing not simply “about” the subways but “inside and outside” them. (The grammatical play h ­ ere, of “about and inside and outside,” seems a microrefusal to be “about”: Hayes destabilizes even what the preposition means.) A ­ fter thereby including e­ very poet in the city, Hayes then takes in all the unpoetical ­people below ground, above ground, and at this very rooftop party. Now he actually hears ­music: whereas before Miles Davis was only part of a comparison, ­here jazz is “pumping in,” overwhelmingly pre­sent. (It is a good instance of how Hayes’s writing engages several senses at once: the ­music ­here fills the scene, like oxygen or ­water; American Sonnets for My Past and ­Future Assassin pictures car speakers “pouring fountains / Of bass upon the landscape.”)10 The moment of sharp awareness at the poem’s center conveys how the demand of functioning amid bigotry impinges on but does not monopolize one’s lived experience. Representing a burden of thought in its full potency, without letting it come off as one’s only focal point, Hayes ­here depicts both

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the stress—­the ­mental noise—of living in a racist culture and the ways the intelligence operates beyond or around that culture. “New York Poem” embodies the brain’s “alternative takes”: its long, tensile sentences show how the mind as represented in ­these poems moves widely, nimbly, and erratically. Hayes ­counters the assumption that thinking about racial oppression means that one is not thinking about every­thing ­else around one: oppression and ­music and banter are all t­here. Thus a po­liti­cal point is set within a comic subjectivity defined by verbal excess, by being “so fucking vain,” by ambivalence manifested in words that mean their opposites. “New York Poem” also glitters with irony. It brings out the ironies of reading and misreading, for example: think of the bar code tattoo, a con­spic­u­ous and distinguishing bit of expressivity that announces itself as a homogenized product, as a t­ hing that can be scanned and instantly made legible. The poem spins into comedy, though, in its intensity of involvement. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai see the comic in general as “epistemologically troubling, drawing insecure bound­aries as though it w ­ ere pos­si­ble to secure confidence about object ontology or the value of an ‘us’ versus all its ­others.”11 The familiarity with which Hayes addresses the city, and the illusion of intimacy into which the reader is brought, render bound­aries insecure as well. And Hayes also shows how the comic differs from irony partly through the ingredient of won­ der: the vis­i­ble delight of the poem, the way it seems to catch at both private and public in the same space. Its intersections reiterate that the comic is closely related to play (in its internal logic that is not our normal logic), and that the readiest examples of the comic are often puns. It is a good example of the excessive, proliferating nature of comedy. This generativeness figures into my understanding of what comedy does for Hayes’s work. Where the ­earlier poets of this book have suggested clarifications to our accounts of comedy based in subversion, incongruity, or superiority, Hayes exposes ways in which the comic goes beyond the theory of resolution, where comic plea­sure comes from “a kind of puzzle-­solving,” in John Morreall’s summary.12 The impossible, off-­k ilter coincidences of “New York Poem” do not quite become a solved puzzle: they leave me with the sense of a puzzle solved but for one extra piece. The excess of comedy, with its moments of delight that seem to exceed what­ever caused it, ­will be central to understanding Hayes’s work, and its comic indeterminacy. T ­ here is a sense that something more is always happening, both on the level of the poem and on the level of the subjectivity entangled with the poem.

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An Arrangement / of Derangements In Quashie’s argument for quiet, the “inner life is not apo­liti­cal or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness,” and “the interior—­dynamic and ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world.”13 ­These descriptions are productive for Hayes, whose centrifugal style can be brilliantly expressive of a wandering subjectivity. Reiterating that the ­human mind as he perceives it is far from rigid and not always orderly, his poems enact the motions of “floundering interiors.” And lyric, understood over the last ­century as a genre centering on a deeply private version of consciousness, might seem an ideal mode for representing such motions. Hayes’s style, however, based in excess and randomness, can trou­ble this way of reading lyric and its usual divisions between interiority and the world at large. Hayes is interested in all the ways his mind is working with that world, as well as the way other minds might briefly be working with his. To show how Hayes draws on a style that is expressive of subjectivity, I ­will single out his subjective mimesis in one of its most salient forms, syntax; then I w ­ ill turn to his meta­phors, to show how he goes beyond such expressive mimesis. Hayes’s sentences, which can be by turns sinuous and abrupt, slapdash and then precisely articulated, often seem to vivify thought. Sometimes they reflect the easy freedom of a mind’s associative trajectory, as when the second half of “New York Poem” piles up phrases about ­people in New York, and about contranyms; at ­others, distinct joints and pivots—­formal assurances that a sentence can be parsed—­set off a topical lack of logic and proportion. The beginning of “A House Is Not a Home” uses that grammaticality to graph windings of memory and blurs of impercipience: It was the night I embraced Ron’s wife a bit too long ­because he’d refused to kiss me goodbye that I realized the essential nature of sound.14 That first phrase’s definiteness—­“It was the”—­serves as foil to the turns that follow. First is the mild, perhaps inaccurately genteel “embraced”; then the object of the embrace, not herself named; then the vague, perhaps understated “a bit too long.” What would seem to be the most surprising fact occurs in a dependent clause, as an explanation (“­because he’d refused to kiss me goodbye”), and the sentence keeps moving t­ oward its almost triumphant epiphany: its grammar lays weight on the phenomenology of sound, not on the speaker’s recent be­hav­ior.

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The lines that follow, which link a pair of instant actions to sensations from hours before, activate another form of comically expressive grammar: When she slapped me across one ear, and he punched me in the other, I recalled, almost instantly, the purr of liquor sliding along the neck of the ­bottle a few hours ­earlier as the three of us took turns imitating the croon of the recently-­deceased Luther Vandross. The slap and the punch match each other word for word, like a moment from an overly choreographed film. But again, rather than focus on this moment of physical comedy, which in most narratives would be the point, Hayes subordinates it to the real subject of attention, the nearly inaudible sound.15 Though each sentence perfectly obeys the rules of En­glish grammar, each is extraordinarily expressive of unhierarchical sensation: this second one heads back in time from the slap and punch, slows down and zooms in, and then briskly relays the singer’s recent death. Although Hayes’s syntax charts wildly ranging thoughts with precision (and suggests that even when the objective world literally smacks you in the head, it might not produce the predictable reaction), his interest in not being tacked down to deterministic statement goes further. It even seems to go against the expressive, subjective grain I have just laid out: much in this aesthetically extravagant mode is not obviously related to the poem’s subjective experience. While Hayes’s comically varied style lets him convey ­mental life in all its capriciousness, this style often insists on ­going beyond the expressive, beyond a transcription or repre­sen­ta­tion of one’s mind. Its array of formal effects is not readily mapped on to our traditional way of reading lyric, to what Gillian White calls the “subjective premises institutionally dominant from the 1930s forward.”16 Hayes is skeptical of interpretive pro­cesses where the goal is to pin down a speaker, a voice, a mood, and why the speaker is saying ­things in a certain way—­the pitfalls of explication addressed at the beginning of this chapter.17 The declaration that a poem is “about” a par­tic­u­lar subject risks claiming that that one subject is the only subject in another’s consciousness. To think about Hayes’s strategies, I am drawing heavi­ly on Quashie’s consideration of how African American artists have depicted “the wild copiousness of the interior”: the aspects of personhood that evade understanding, that are neither reactions to the world nor completely sealed off from it.18 Quashie invites readers to take in tenuousness, contingency, unknowability, and other

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ways of getting past what he considers the overly prevalent lens of reaction, in which the black subject seems entirely readable. While his study centers on fiction and the visual arts, he sees poetry as a rich site in which to imagine quiet, especially in how form’s “contributions to meaning are not always clear or definitive.”19 This uncertainty, charged by the waywardness of formal ele­ ments, emerges in Hayes, especially when approached from the subjective premises of lyric reading. From “New York Poem,” I think I learn about a complicated state of mind, but a state of mind does not explain all the plea­sure in ­those crossings of “miles” and “Miles.” Hayes’s poems do not fit neatly into a mode of reading that gathers their excess u ­ nder the sign of subjectivity. Instead, their comic style heightens an interplay between subjective mimesis and what exceeds subjective mimesis. Northrop Frye has described how a pun “turns its back on the sense of the conversation and sets up a self-­contained verbal sound-­sense pattern in its place”; that idea of turning away from a topic, to an unruly self-­contained ele­ ment that’s on its own amid the conversation, is apt for many of Hayes’s efflorescences.20 Similes, for example, often seem pre­sent for their own sake; or more accurately, they seem more closely aligned with something in the a­ ctual objective world, with no special bearing on the inner life as Hayes represents it. ­Here is a hilariously lumpy and embarrassing series of recollections that opens “The Blue Terrance”: I loved Bruce Lee and a ten dollar ukulele. For my l­ittle mutt Shepherd and the saplings, I performed black Superman melodramas barefoot on the picnic t­ able u ­ ntil a toenail opened on my big toe like the hood of my ­father’s Lincoln and a fever broke. I dropped stuff. I showed Erica (my queen) McQueen my ju­nior penis. I showed Connie Simpson, I showed Meko Jackson, I showed Precious Jones, and again and again they split like pigtails on a trampoline (Wind in a Box 65) First, as an example of what humor does in Hayes’s work, this passage demonstrates that a comic moment is almost uncontainable; its similes elicit a multiplying sense of comic won­der, even though they describe ­things that are far from dazzling. As the nail “open[s],” seemingly of its own accord, I realize that it is the same wide, squared-­off shape as a 1970s Lincoln’s hood, and that the nail’s position on a toe is like that of a hood on a car: the image compresses a

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wild dissimilarity (of size and material) and a previously unseen similarity (of form). The simile knocks inaccuracy into felicity; even though viscerally painful, it creates something in excess of its parts. When a perfect likeness is struck against something inappropriate or inadequate, it grows comic by the aesthetic and imaginative spark that occurs. It happens again when the girls “split like pigtails / on a trampoline,” a lavish mixture of rightness and incongruity that sends the imagination flying in all directions.21 Second, t­ hese similes do not obviously relate to a dramatic repre­sen­ta­tion of a speaker’s subjectivity. Or rather, while one could connect them to an adult’s speaker’s retrospectively jocular or dismissive state of mind, that is not where the interest lies. This simile is expressive not of a state of mind but of something e­ lse (a toenail!), and in its comic concentration, it draws attention away from the poem’s speaker and ­toward the liveliness in external objects. This effect is everywhere in Hayes, and helps avoid the imposition of narrow meaning. (And it throws a wrench in the pro­cess by which speakers are supposed to be white, male, and universal ­unless other­wise announced, at which point they become not universal but marked, specific, and narrowed.) When the similes of “The Blue Terrance” blossom outwards, they cannot be completely explained through the premise of an expressive speaker. With ­these similes, bright and off hand as they seem, Hayes is imagining a more expansive, capacious idea of what constitutes lyric and what constitutes an inner life. They are an analogy to what Quashie describes as quiet, “a meta­phor for the full range of one’s inner life,” that which is not wholly controlled by social nor internal forces, neither self-­nor other-­determined.22 Just as what Hayes calls “floundering interiors” surpass essentialist thought (interiors that Quashie, too, sees as overlooked by accounts that focus exclusively on public expressiveness and re­sis­tance), ­these heightened devices themselves play off lyric readings. The key to the analogy ­here is in what is fixed or reduced or ignored by critical interpretation. If quiet exists in abundance, “for its own vagary,” the simile of the toenail, which is not readily mapped onto a fictional inner life, points to the ways that poems exceed their interpretations, as a self is neither sealed off from its surroundings nor completely s­ haped by the public.23 Quashie’s care for indeterminacy ­here seems shared by Hayes, who creates a poem that cannot be fully explicated through reference to an interior, an interior that cannot be fully captured in a poem (or known fully to the self ). For Hayes as for Quashie, quiet entails “a call to give up the need to be sure.”24 Another way of putting this conflict might be as follows: Hayes’s multiplicity and excess of contingency remind us that our ways of reading both comedy and lyric are designed for much smaller canvases. The comic effects that go into ­these poems do not quite fit theories of lyric that are centered on

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s­ ubjectivity. By representing an inner life that often seems to open up into or digress t­oward a putatively outside world, Hayes recognizes that the outside world (say, that of the picnic ­table and the toe) is also a part of an inner, just as listening to external sounds (of liquor sloshing in a ­bottle) is part of your subjectivity. T ­ hese poems draw on comic excess—­especially on unpredictability and apparent irrelevance—to complicate the distinction between an interior and the world; Hayes’s flourishes gesture t­ oward the way in which one takes in and is composed of a massive array of ­things. Apparent irrelevance is impor­tant as a device, suggesting ways one’s brain works that are not completely determined by the sense-­data in front of one. Throughout Hayes’s work, humor extends the poem beyond being “about” something: it entails inventiveness, luck, nonsense, correspondences based not on semantics but on sound or looks, and other kinds of play. While humor might be ascribed to a par­tic­u­lar subjective strategy (that of indicating distance, say), it still reiterates itself as formally something ­else, something more. Comedy thwarts reduction, and thwarts what we might call an essentialist reading. Rather than pre­sent a lyric as a well-­wrought urn unified by a lyric speaker whose response to input can be completely accounted for, it goes beyond paraphrase. “A Plate of Bones,” from Lighthead (2010), is a surprising example of how excess—­often a comic impulse with unclear origins—­helps make t­ hese poems not wholly interpretable. Although it takes up legacies of racism in the United States (domestic vio­lence, an interracial relationship, an older adult’s reaction, and a young child’s understanding of each of ­these subjects), it begins with the brilliantly, flashily strange. The vowels and consonants of its opening delight in and through a show of sonic force (“M y s i l k s l i c k b l a c k m u s c u l a r b a c k-­/ t a l k i n g u n c l e” [13]), then dissolve into something more ordinary: “driving me and a school / of fish corpses to church.” The variegated glints of internal rhyme preserve images almost as fixative on a sketch: heightened sound heightens image, perhaps as it is locked in the speaker’s head (it becomes apparent that this r­ ide is remembered vividly not b­ ecause of its own significance, but b­ ecause of its associations with the u ­ ncle’s frightened and angry reaction to his ­daughter’s ­going out with a white boy). But what is equally striking is the surplus, the way ­these lines hold both something I was trained to read for and something my lyric readings overlook. On the one hand, Hayes implies that this memory is imprinted on the child’s confused vision, across de­cades, while also implying a remove: sonic excess can signal artifice which can signal distance. On the other, t­hose excessive sounds go still further: ­there is a surprising abundance in how the speaker sees “t h e

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s i c k -­e y e d / g a p-­m o u t h e d b a s s,” in the coincidences of “silk” and “slick,” “sliver,” and “silver,” and in many other echoes. The same princi­ple works within poems that adopt personae, or by some other means change the speaking subject’s perspective. “All the Way Live” begins with what seems ­actual or ­imagined memory, and moves to allegory. “Do all dudes have one big testicle and one ­little tiny one?” Hieronymus asked, hiking up his poodle skirt as we staggered Down Main Street in our getup of wigs and pink bonnets The night we sprayed NEGROPHOBIA all over the statue of Robert E. Lee guarding the county court­house, a symbol of the bondage We had spent all of our All-­the-­Way Lives trying to subvert. Hieronymus’s thighs shimmered like the wings of a teenage Cockroach beneath his skirt as a bullhorn of sheriff verbs Like Stop! Freeze! and Fire! outlined us. The town was outraged: The red-­blooded farm boys, the red-­eyed bookworms of Harvard, The h ­ ouse­wives and secretaries, even a few liberals hoorayed When they put us on trial. We ­were still wearing our lady wardRobes, Hieronymus and me, with our rope burns ban­daged And our wigs tilted at the ­angle of trou­ble. Every­one was at war With what it meant to be alive. That’s why we refused to be banished, And why when they set us on fire, ­there was light at our core. ­(Lighthead 5) This poem ends with a lynching, and takes up systemic racism; its manner of ­doing so is extraordinarily strange. Hayes fuses bits of teenage prankishness (the drag, the wigs “tilted at the ­angle of trou­ble,” the words like “dudes,” the adolescent sexual curiosity) with an act against violent repression. On a linguistic level, he turns briefly to cartoon, or collage: the shimmering legs of a “teenage / Cockroach” is a good instance of a simile that w ­ ill not be assimilated, as is the “bullhorn of sheriff verbs,” which compresses sound into something so physical as to fence the teen­agers in. And on a formal level, Hayes underscores artifice with the evolving link of abab rhymes that do not advertise their presence sonically but recall a word game. ­Here isolated comic ele­ ments mix with horror, in an ending both defiantly affirmative and grimly punning (it is in part a meditation on the senses of “light” and “live”). It is easy to fall into describing t­ hese poems as a kind of tug-­of-­war between the inner and outer worlds, but the point is that “inner” and “outer” are actually intertwined constantly in Hayes’s poems; they permeate each other.

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Hayes’s extremely varied forms, for example, can express the serendipity of an inner life, of something not bound to normal logic; but they also play with the physical structure of the poem for its own sake. Hayes is interested in form as a liberating constriction, as what Auden called a way to “force us to have second thoughts, ­free from the fetters of Self ”; he shows how ­those second thoughts can emerge from a curb that might seem arbitrary.25 One such constraint appears, for example, in the anagram-­based poems of Hip Logic (2002), where the last word of each line takes its letters from the title. As Hayes mentions in an interview, ­these poems “­were attempts to capture a par­tic­u­lar slanted, intuitive knowledge/logic”: their form is both a way of getting at the mind’s lucky, associational intuitions, and a game, or a construction.26 Although “What It Look Like,” the opening poem of How to Be Drawn, announces that its speaker “care[s] less and less / about the shapes of shapes ­because forms / change” (3), the sheer number of changed forms in Hayes—­ from the expansive f­ ree verse of Muscular ­Music to the visibly constrained sonnets published in 2018—­suggests that forms change b­ ecause he cares about how they can complicate meaning. Lighthead reanimated the ghazal with invective, using its repetitions to churn out comic insult a­ fter comic insult. One of Hayes’s own inventions, a form known as “the golden shovel,” allows a new poem to spring from the end-­words of another poet’s work; an anthology in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks has already sprung from it.27 ­Others, which include fill-­in-­the-­blank gaps and lines struck out, resemble newspaper puzzles. Hayes is fascinated by the connotations of poetic forms, by the statements forms make. He considers, for example, what is read as white, like the sonnet, and what has been reinvented by black poets: Langston Hughes’s “un-­sonnet sequence in Blues,” Brooks’s “sonnet-­ballads” written for an “off-­rhyme situation,” Wanda Coleman’s stretched sonnets.28 He considers how a given form aligns one with par­tic­u­lar schools or stances, and how innovation is overlooked (or dwelt on to the exclusion of one’s subjects) when it comes from writers of color.29 Though I am focusing in this chapter on his more traditional poems, some of Hayes’s short, verbally concentrated prose paragraphs recall the multiplying puns of Harryette Mullen, with whom he studied at Cave Canem.30 Mullen’s allusive wordplay, which speaks to politics, gender, and race, is also audible in American Sonnets, where “The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk / Stumps us” (48). All of t­ hese concerns inform Hayes’s wide-­ ranging forms: no shape is too fixed or too open. And while both more experimental and more traditional forms show his interest in a range of not-­wholly-­logical, less-­than-­linear ways of thinking, they si­mul­ta­neously insist that a form cannot be attributed simply to a mimetic reading of lyric.

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For Hayes, form makes declarations in multiple ways; and it is often comic in how it disturbs meaning from all sides, in ways one cannot fully control.

Headwinds and Roadblocks I have argued that Hayes’s linguistically and sonically excessive devices suggest the scope of individual experience at a given moment, and that ­these flourishes often go beyond being read as expressive of m ­ ental range. Hayes’s scattershot effects seem to move outwards from—­and in excess of—­a poem’s meaning; ­there is something centrifugal, something that declines to be tacked down to meaning. At the same time, however, t­ hese poems often center on deeply personal experiences. Asked in an interview about humor, Hayes explained that it is often an effect of strong emotion: “I ­don’t set out to be humorous per se . . . ​I think I’m just reaching for feeling.”31 In reaching for feeling, Hayes also explores the way that presenting feeling is tied up with evasion, delay, flourishes, and irony. The poems I now turn to each address a mode of expression that seems first to hide and then expose its point. On one level, “How to Be Drawn to Trou­ble” depicts a memory of domestic vio­lence, approached reluctantly. The poem draws together two main subjects: the anger and stress of the speaker’s m ­ other, glimpsed briefly, and James Brown, remembered primarily through his 1956 R&B hit “Please, Please, Please.” Hayes plants both subjects in the first few lines, which move easily between short, disjointed sentences and expansive ones that wind over the bound­aries of stanzas: The p­ eople I live with are troubled by the way I have been playing “Please, Please, Please” by James Brown and the Famous Flames All eve­ning, but they ­won’t say. I’ve got a lot of my ­mother’s ­music In me. James Brown is no longer a headwind of hot grease And squealing for ladies with leopard-­skinned intentions, Stoned on horns and money. (How to Be Drawn 7) Brown’s song—­a desperate, exaggerated plea on the verge of breakdown—­sets off the poem; it has been playing “all eve­ning” (to play it repeatedly is extremely repetitious, since the word “Please” occurs seven times in the opening bars alone). And t­hese lines begin the movement that ­will continue for the ­whole poem. A ­ fter any mention of f­amily history, the subject changes and goes to something showier, more extravagant, something that distracts. When this

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brief, clipped aside about his m ­ other’s tastes in m ­ usic leads to a set piece on Brown’s stage persona, it is a miniature per­for­mance: the “headwind of hot grease,” for example, conflates Brown’s pomade and his form of locomotion, how he flies to the center of a stage, seeming to move without moving his feet. In such moments, “How to Be Drawn to Trou­ble” obscures confession with embellishment, nonchalance, and indirection. A few lines ­later, when the speaker remarks that “Once, my ­mother bit the wrist of a traffic cop / But was not locked away b­ ecause like him, she was an officer // Of the state,” he sets down the incident in the briefest pos­si­ble language. ­There is no explanation of what happened, and barely any explanation of why the speaker’s ­mother was not “locked away.” The quick account given (that she was a prison guard) promptly opens onto a longer account of how the prison she worked at was the one where Brown was “briefly imprisoned” ­after a car chase. And now the language moves not only to verbal and visual frivolity but to explic­ itly comic relief: “­There had been broken man-­made laws, / A car chase melee, a roadblock of troopers in sunblock” (How to Be Drawn 7). To uncover what makes this poem so odd and so moving, one should notice that last sentence: its mixture of realism and invention, and the way the stiff, stilted passive of “­There had been broken” gives way to something more like farce, conflating ­humans and automobiles. While a melee is usually a hand-­ to-­hand scuffle, and a roadblock is formed by police cars, not officers themselves, ­here the roadblock consists of white troopers, who must be protected not only by weapons but by the bathetic sunblock. Their implied stockiness finds a sonic equivalent in the near-­spondees of “a car chase melee,” followed by a strug­gle between compound nouns and t­ riple rhythms; the comic willfully digresses on the nature of language, where “roadblock” stops cars, but “sunblock” stops sun. In other words, language becomes most playful just ­after it hints at the ­mother’s instability. The page and a half that follows continues to switch quickly between memories of the two ­people, drawn together by the prison and, it emerges, by the overpowering emotions to which James Brown gives voice: If I was a black girl, I’d always be mad. I might weep too and break. But think about the good ­things. My ­mother and I love James Brown in a cape and sweat Like glitter that glows like ­little bits of gold. (How to Be Drawn 8) Hayes’s odd imperative—­“But think about the good ­things”—is from another Brown single, in which the singer tells a ­woman leaving him, “Think about

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the good t­ hings I done for you, / Now think of all the bad t­ hings I tried not to do.” While a Mill-­inflected, private version of lyric might see the speaker as addressing himself (as steering himself ­toward “think[ing] about” any other, happier subject), Hayes’s poems are more outward-­facing, more curious, and warier of their self-­staging. As with A. R. Ammons, “audience-­directed internality” might also be at work ­here, in that this line could be said ­toward a par­ tic­ul­ ar person, someone the speaker wants to reach.32 ­There is ambiguity and self-­consciousness in how Hayes thinks of who might overhear the remark. Another form of uncertain excess, it is central to how he pre­sents a strug­gle between a kind of confession and a kind of avoidance. He makes an especially manifest turn away from the personal, and ­toward linguistic frivolity, in that image of the singer “in a cape and sweat / Like glitter that glōws like little bits of gōld.” This image is perfect for Brown, whose onstage exertions and gold lamé costumes had him sweating within the first minutes of per­for­mance. Hayes’s shimmering figurative language draws not simply on one simile (“sweat / Like glitter”) but a doubled one that increases its glittering by short-­circuiting. Sweat on skin u ­ nder stage lights looks like glitter; glitter, though plastic, is supposed to look like ­little bits of gold. But the very act of being so par­tic­u­lar exposes a difference: a­ fter magnifying glitter into “­little bits of gold,” the contrast between sweat’s fluidity and the artificial particles is made large. At the same time, the sense of rightness in that nested simile is enhanced by the words themselves. As bits of flat metal combine at dif­fer­ent ­angles to suggest a glittering surface, Hayes’s echoing consonants and vowels suggest a kind of sonic coruscation: “glitter,” “glows,” “­little,” “bits,” and “gold” seem variants of a single substance. And while it seems unnecessary to compare a comparison: if you lost the redundancy, you would lose that glittering oscillation between scales.33 ­After that moment of vis­i­ble deflection, the speaker begins to draw near the anecdote that ends the poem, and that binds all its disparate ele­ments together; he does so through another reference to the time that his ­mother met James Brown, ­after his arrest:

In the photo she took

With him, he holds her wrist oddly, prob­ably unintentionally Covering her scar. (How to Be Drawn 8) The scar has not been mentioned previously, and its history is revealed only in the last two stanzas. The singer is “Covering” that scar in the moment Hayes’s poem uncovers it, so casually as to make the reference quite marked. T ­ here is

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a sense of tenderness in how the speaker almost sees Brown as concealing the scar on purpose.34 ­There is also cautiousness, I think, about how that tenderness is handled so delicately, so beautifully: the wound is an apt emblem for the suppressions and disclosures of this poem. Still winding back and forth between memory and James Brown’s m ­ usic, the speaker now explains the story of the scar a bit more fully: it happened early one morning, when his ­mother came home and broke a win­dow ­after “we”—­the speaker and his f­ ather—­had refused to unlock the door:

My ­father might have said Please

When my m ­ other was beating the door and then calling to me From the win­dow. I might have heard her say Please just before Or just ­after the glass and then the skin along her wrist broke. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, that’s how James Brown says it. Please, please, please, please, please, Honey, please ­don’t go. (How to Be Drawn 9) This ending continues to weigh the memory and its repre­sen­ta­tion. The same syntactic control that heightens the speaker’s distance also heightens acute feeling: ­these keen memories of his m ­ other are slipped into dependent clauses, and the moment where the wrist is gashed exists simply as half of a zeugmatic ­couple (in the instant that “glass” breaks,” “skin” breaks as well). As with “New York Poem,” on one level this poem acquires quiet comic resonances in how precisely its extravagance renders a feeling difficult to capture: the feeling of recollecting the vivid details of the turmoil one is now separated from. Its two seemingly disparate themes interlock: although the speaker does not foreground his own feeling, his references to Brown’s Please allow him to capture his parents’ desperation, and his own childhood trauma. It renders a half-­suppressed memory of familial disaster. But Hayes is also thinking about how one relays such disasters. He buries an acknowl­edgment of artfulness in how the poem begins by switching between a lack of expression (the ­family or roommates who “­won’t say”) and the expressive outpouring—or theatrical performance—of Brown. He is thinking about how poetic construction ties material in a knot, about formal solace and epiphanies, about the way a violent incident becomes a site of poetic closure (the poem comes together just as a­ ctual skin breaks). In this re­spect, Hayes’s work shares interests with Paul Muldoon’s: “How to Be Drawn to Trou­ble” has affinities with the way “sis” is fatally rhymed to “metastasis” in

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the last word of Muldoon’s sonnet “Hedge School,” and with the hundred-­ line sentence that comprises “Turkey Buzzards,” a poem that acknowledges the s­ ister’s cancer by staving off mention of it.35 While Hayes’s tones differ from Muldoon’s brittler or shiftier nonchalance, both poets reflect on questions of poetic likeness, on the uncertain ways in which coincidence or manifest indirection might help one make a ­limited sense out of one’s world. ­There is something both flippant and earnest in how Hayes seems to chart a mind evading, sidestepping, wandering down cul-­de-­sacs of quotation and energetically stylized rhetorical structures. But ­these devices eventually—­ self-­consciously, and self-­critically—­turn back to a memory that seemed resisted, or to an idea not fully articulated e­ arlier. The comic stance h ­ ere, beyond the sometimes literally funny descriptions, is again a kind of seeing “the impossible happen,” as Philip Fisher writes of won­der: it arises from how the ele­ ments of such a stylistic mélange come together to convey strong feeling, the distance of years, and the distance of poetic form.36 The poem disturbs the pro­cess of identifying the points at which pain, self-­consciousness, and irony have been soldered together.

Trying Not to Look In suggesting that Hayes’s playfulness has to do with his interest in scope, I have emphasized the generative and excessive powers within his comedy. But Hayes’s relationship to the comic is intensely ambivalent. The history of comedy in the US consistently involves white degradation of black Americans, as Brooks’s “downtown vaudev­ille” sonnet remembers: she begins by remarking “the hush that coughed / When the Negro clown came on the stage and doffed / His broken hat,” a per­for­mance by an entertainer whose ­actual talents are overlooked by “the sugared hoot and hauteur” of the audience.37 The cover of Paul Beatty’s 2006 anthology of African-­American humor, Hokum, composes a smile out of a watermelon rind; a sonnet in Hip Logic simply repeats “We sliced the watermelon into smiles” for fourteen lines, making a form usually associated with an emerging thought iterate a racist trope and painfully fixed grin.38 Hayes’s exasperation with how white culture uses blackness and African American lives for amusement is audible in “Squawk,” where a Sesame Street character pulls off his Big Bird suit to reveal “a tiny black man,” who exclaims, “We’ve spent our lives making you laugh, / and I’m tired of it” (Hip Logic 17). Also audible in Hayes’s work is a skepticism about one’s own sense of humor and irony—of how they can allow one to avoid facing situations. Several of his

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poems take up how one is pulled between the impulse to document the effects of the institutionalized racism lived with each day, and the impulse to resist the burden of always being responsible for documenting what one lives with each day. The evasive mea­sures of comedy are dramatized in “Carp Poem,” one of several poems responding to mass incarceration. The speaker has just arrived at a New Orleans jail to read his poems, but his thoughts keep moving away from what confronts him: the sight of young prisoners initiates a comparison that takes off. They are like fish in a crowded Japa­nese fishpond, itself so full “that a lightweight tourist could have crossed // the water on their backs / so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread to drop into the mouths” (Lighthead 31). That notion leads in turn to a pos­si­ble explanation of Jesus’s walk on w ­ ater and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Hayes’s long-­lined couplets juggle images faster and faster, as if trying to stay away from the jail as long as pos­si­ble. As the speaker goes “along each corridor trying not to look,” each of ­these long lines gets further away from the ­people whom he avoids looking at; the meta­phor moves from New Orleans to Japan, then two thousand years away.39 “Carp Poem,” which makes a tourist walk on ­water, and fish jump up Jesus’s sleeve, represents a state of mind wanting to defy gravity, in both senses of the word. T ­ hese images of literal levity are self-­reflexive figures for the comedy in Hayes’s lines. But just as imaginative flourishes seem to have left b­ ehind the ­actual world entirely, they swing back to it, again through meta­phor: the “footbridge of carp” is “packed tighter // than a room of boy prisoners waiting to talk poetry with a young black poet, / packed so close they’d have eaten each other had t­here been nothing e­ lse to eat” (Lighthead 31–32). The way the prisoners desperate for ­mental sustenance have “wait[ed]” through Hayes’s page and a half of meta­phors is a quiet rebuke. So are the poem’s twelve couplets, which embed a formal recognition of the “two dozen black boys” whom the speaker eventually cannot avoid facing. The speaker now refers to himself not as a distanced I but as “a young black poet,” at the prison for the purpose of “talk[ing] poetry” with the ­people ­there. While the most vis­i­ble comic strain in “Carp Poem” lies in the extended, digressive meta­phor, the comic h ­ ere doubles back on itself in another sense: it is as if the meta­phor makes its initial subject all the more impossible not to see. In “Carp Poem,” humor is presented as a byproduct of consternation; in “The Avocado,” it stems from irony, a tendency to make fun of what is significant but (to the speaker’s ears) overdone. It is set in Black History Month, a month remembered in several of Hayes’s poems. In Wind in a Box, the speaker describes the “annual Black History Month / Talent Show where my roommate and I sang / ‘Lift E ­ very Voice and Sing’ shirtless and baby-­oiled” in what accidentally becomes a travesty. When the roommate begins to forget the

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song’s words, he substitutes “Baaaybay, Baaabay” and gyrates in the direction of the audience: “though every­one laughed . . . ​I knew we’d lose, cursed by the ghosts // of Black History Month Decency” (8). In “The Avocado,” that irreverence asserts itself and turns back on itself relentlessly: “In 1971, drunk on the sweet, sweet juice of revolution, a crew of us marched into the president’s office with a list of demands,” the black man tells us at the February luncheon, and I’m pretending I h ­ aven’t heard this one before as I eye black tortillas on a red plate beside a big green bowl of guacamole made from the whipped, battered remains of several harmless former avocados. (Lighthead 27) Hayes’s first response to the man’s speech is a fragment of a phrase usually used for jokes: stop me if ­you’ve heard this one before. He then joins it to a pastiche of Modernist poetry and to an allusion to the Pan-­African flag, as Douglas A. Jones Jr. notes.40 It is not the first time that the optimism of that flag has been deflated: the novelist Fran Ross, four de­cades ­earlier, dreamed up a pair of red, black, and green “liberation pumps by Gucci (red for the blood of black ­people, black for their race, and green for the money Gucci was making from this style).”41 ­Here Hayes makes the flag into food, and as he does, he runs an echo of a slender William Carlos Williams poem—­the short lines about the red wheelbarrow besides the white chickens—­into one long horizontal one. Just as the echo materializes, it vanishes, supplanted by violent, subliminal images from another realm, that of the “whipped, battered remains.” But then the sentence coasts: an immediate line break puts space between that phrase and a run of unexpected iambic pentameter, to arrive at the titular avocados. What kind of speaker would deliver a sentence as off handedly and disconcertingly jocular as this one? Perhaps a speaker born in 1971, as Hayes himself was. Trey Ellis, writing of this generation, notes that “a telltale sign of the work of the [New Black Aesthetic] is our parodying of the black nationalist movement.”42 Americans coming of age in the late twentieth c­ entury, according to Mark Anthony Neal, have been “denied access to the bevy of communally derived social, aesthetic, cultural, and po­liti­cal sensibilities that undergirded much of black communal strug­gle throughout the twentieth c­ entury.”43 Hayes portrays himself ­here as someone who has heard civil rights stories before, and whose interest in lunch heightens his lack of interest (or a mild degree of skepticism, or scorn) in the lecturer’s story. The remainder of “The Avocado” continues to set one voice (that of the poem’s first two and a half lines, an older civil rights activist) against a second,

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internal one, that of the “I” who is already listening only slightly, who is “eye[ing]” the food, improvising meta­phors about avocado, and admiring his wife’s hair. When the older man’s voice again cuts through his consciousness a bit further down the page, the list of demands has moved on to “Three: we wanted more boulevards / named for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Three: absorbed in the contemplation of every­thing but the speech, the listener has missed the second item on the list entirely; ­after another extended internal meditation on the avocado, he returns to hear “Demand number twenty-­ one: a Harriet Tubman statue on the mall!” As Jones observes, he “insinuates a general apathy t­ oward, if not vexation with, nominal commemorations of African Americans and their cultural, po­liti­cal, and social achievements.”44 It is as if the speaker of this poem has himself exaggerated the interminableness of the speech (one comic ele­ment in this poem is due to its volume of talk: the lecturer is not the only one full of words). But the apathy Jones detects is transmitted in ways that are difficult to describe, in part ­because this poem is appreciative, inventive, almost buoyant, intimate in how it speaks to an i­magined reader (“I dare you / to find a lovelier black w ­ oman from Cincinnati, where the North touches the South”). And in part b­ ecause of stance: “The Avocado” invokes the notion of the poem as a ­mental drama with an epiphany, but it is markedly more calculated, and again more outward-­facing (“I dare you”). It is not exactly sardonic. Or if it is sardonic, it is mocking both the longwinded civil rights activist and the listener’s own dismissive streak. The faintly snarky critique of the overemotional public speaker “walking wet tissue to the trash can” is crossed with critique of the lyric speaker, in part through the poem’s ending. My attempts to lock in tone are thrown off partly by how this poem seems to pre­sent, in real time, a revelation. The mention of a Harriet Tubman statue sets off the poem’s ending, in a way: it is as if the poem’s speaker is listening to, or at least not successfully ignoring, the speech. Directly ­after he dismisses the activist (it is always “the one telling the story / that’s the hero”), he—­also a “hero” “telling” this story—is suddenly faced with a reprimand: or rather, both public lecturer and private speaker are told to be quiet: “Hush now,” Harriet Tubman prob­ably said near dawn, pointing a fin­ger black enough to be her pistol barrel ­toward the f­ uture or pointing a pistol barrel black enough to be her fin­ger at the mouth of some starved, stammering slave and then lifting her head to listen for something no one but her could hear. (28)

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The poem does briefly reassert verbal elaboration, through the con­spic­u­ous, three-­part chiasmus of “fin­ger / black / pistol barrel . . . ​pistol barrel / black / fin­ger.” But it swerves into seriousness: the unnamed fugitive is “starved,” an implicit rebuke to the poem’s page-­long cadenza on food, and “stammering,” a rebuke to its figurative capers. Invention yields to an attempt to listen: Tubman’s lifted head seems chasteningly ­free of irony, of anything but total attention. It is a way of being that recalls Quashie’s descriptions of quiet as “the inner dimensions of  . . . ​public bravery,” and as “an exquisite balance of what is public and what is intimate.”45 And yet the avocado, which has seemed to function as a distraction, is also central: abogado, the Spanish word closest to the Aztec ahuacatl, means advocate, and stems from ad and vocare, to call to or for a cause.46 While the poem’s ­earlier passages of fancy and irony are shown as painfully or shamefully frivolous next to this last image of the abolitionist, the images come from the same mind, and are in part generated by that mind’s irreverent streak. Although the comic can distract or dismiss, it can also make the overmythologized seem suddenly new and indelible. It can include (as Hayes’s image of Tubman includes) what is undecidable or indeterminate.

If You Like “Like” Like I Like “Like” ­ hese pages, which have centered on how undecidability can be comic in T Hayes’s work, bring up the question of the postwar lyric’s uncertain intersection with satire.47 Auden once noted that traditional satires presuppose “certain eternal laws of reason and morality,” which would seem true of the moral issues that Hayes confronts, ones that affect more p­ eople than oneself.48 But lyric, still associated with “feeling confessing itself to itself,” in John Stuart Mill’s formulation, does not usually come at satire from a clearly superior perspective. Its vantage is less certain: one often speaks from a state of confusion or ambivalence. Satire usually asks one to side with the poet’s control and authority, while the poems of this book and perhaps especially this chapter stage the tentative, the less controlled, the reconsidered. Yeats’s declaration that we “make out of the quarrel with ­others, rhe­toric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” has informed twentieth-­century notions of poetic ambivalence, and might linger especially in the minds of writers who address questions of justice: can a poem quarrel with ­others and with itself, at once?49 Hayes’s comic excess helps him h ­ ere: “Wigphrastic” demonstrates that he can jump from one mode to another, even within the same poem, b­ ecause he sees the mind as critical and pleasure-­loving and distracted at once.

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As in “How to Be Drawn to Trou­ble,” many of the topics of “Wigphrastic” seem, at first glance, to rise to the surface unwilled, suggesting the unpredictability of the inner life depicted in the poem. The speaker is caught between seeing himself as a “we” and an “I” (he uses both pronouns, from stanza to stanza). He has James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and the songs of Klymaxx (a mid-80s all-­female funk band) in his head. The poem begins with the explic­itly po­liti­cal and personal: wigs. A number of satirists have used wigs as a focal point for how black American w ­ omen are pressured to conform to white aesthetic standards. One sketch in George Wolfe’s 1986 play The Colored Museum is voiced by two feuding wigs; Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary Good Hair mines absurdity from the economic and emotional stresses exacerbated by the wig industry.50 As a subject where black ­women may be judged no m ­ atter what choice they make, wigs allow Hayes to branch through a network of related subjects: among them are cultural appropriation, white and black communities more broadly, racist vio­lence and white complacency, desire, and masculinity. Hayes’s sixty-­one-­line poem is inspired by Ellen Gallagher’s sixty-­print work DeLuxe (2004–2005), which takes its images of wigs, girdles, and bleaching creams from postwar magazines that catered to black Americans (Gallagher then changes the ­faces and figures even more, with paint, modelling clay, and X-­Acto knives). Hayes, in turn, makes one of ­those midcentury advertisements the poem’s first sentence:51 Sometimes I want a built-in scalp that looks and feels like skin. A form of camouflage, protection against sunburn and frostbite, horse­hair that covers the nightmares and makes me civilized. (How to Be Drawn 14) On the face of it, this opening—at least u ­ ntil it reaches “the nightmares”—­ achieves a tone, an attitude, that is quite close to the control and wit asserted in traditional satire. It is a good example of how a con­temporary poet can summon up accentual-­syllabic verse, to pointed effect. ­After the trochee of “Sometimes,” a long string of iambs sets off the slight nonsense of the advertisement (­humans already have a built-in scalp that looks and feels like skin). The next sentence, which elaborates on the uses of the wig, embodies the protective covering it describes: framed by the Latinate “camouflage” and “civilized,” four non-­Latinate compounds strike against each other. By being placed in such close proximity, “sunburn” and “frostbite” are both revitalized, and “horse­hair” pulls ­toward “nightmare.” It is a kind of lexical chiasmus, in which

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sunburn and frostbite and ­horse­hair and nightmares cross-­pollinate, ­until the relations between ­those unruly compounds are suppressed by the flat “makes me civilized”; the ostentatiously symmetrical structure is itself so polished as to enact what it requests. Syntax h ­ ere is an assertion of control, of virtuosity. So too in the next sentence, which culminates in a tercet with a sting: Somebody slap a powdered wig on me so I can hammer a c­ ouple sentences like Louis XIV small and bald as a boiled egg making himself taller by means of a towering hairpiece resembling a Corinthian column or maybe a skyscraping Kid with no Play wig worn by someone playing N.W.A at a pent­house party with no black ­people. (14) Much of the tension in the stanzas that ­will follow comes from irrepressibly lavish embellishments coming into contact with starker commentary. The freewheeling similes span centuries and scales: the speaker first compares himself to the seventeenth-­century Sun King, who is in turn immediately compared to a “boiled egg” (tiny, smooth, and white). Figurative language seems to run away with meaning ­here, as it did temporarily in “Carp Poem” and “The Avocado”: the “towering” hairpiece quickly resembles not only one of the most elaborate columns of classical architecture, but a massive hi-­top worn by one member of the 1980s hip-­hop duo Kid ’n Play. Then, suddenly, simile vanishes. Or rather, we are still in a simile but one that has gathered to a distinctly not-­ tangential point. The sentence narrows to focus on a scene of rich white Americans at a party, playing hip-­hop; it gets at the hy­poc­risy of a neoliberal society that depreciates black physical features, while also selectively commodifying ele­ments from black culture. ­After imagining the “pent­house party,” the speaker looks at the ­people actually around him, in a club. “Wigphrastic” takes place, like “New York Poem,” at a social gathering. It is one of quite a few across Hayes’s books: the first poem of How to Be Drawn pre­sents itself as “a footnote in my report / concerning the party” (3), and in American Sonnets, the speaker is “­going to the party as ­Will Smith / In the first half of the Hancock movie: aloof, gifted, / Fucked up” (31). For Hayes, such gatherings set off some ambivalence about his genre while also stretching it. He is interested in the ways one is connected to ­others (as emerges in many poems about f­ amily) and in how one can represent t­ hese partial, shifting connections in a genre that continues to be seen

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as solipsistic, asocial, sealed off. (My own reading of “New York Poem” emphasized a sense of estrangement, but social interaction literally informs the end of the poem: another guest provides the word contranyms, which the speaker uses to explain how he “think[s] of New York.”) In “Wigphrastic,” the speaker again sees this scene from a distance, while his language of “we” and “our” joins him to it; he seems more observer than participant. The poem moves, then, between a tenuous collective state and a tenuous, rapidly thinking first-­person singular. Soon midcentury advertisement and con­ temporary appropriation lead the speaker to think of Mailer’s 1957 generalizations about race and society, especially Mailer’s claim that that the existential threats of the twentieth c­ entury produce hipsters, whose awareness of death is like that experienced by black men.52 But the next stanzas dart away from that essay, to comprehend the sights at hand: We clubbing in our wigs of pleas and longing. The ladies wear wigs of nots, knots of nots: would nots, do nots, cannots, wigs dipped in dye swirl on their scalps, off their scalps, sides of scalps, their center parts, and irrigated plaits. Flirty bangs dangle below a bow clip of sparkle. A lady places her bow about-face to place her face in place. (How to Be Drawn 14–15) ­ ere Hayes may be inspired by Mullen’s Trimmings, her series of short unlinH eated poems that examine race and gender through clothes. The word straps, for example, leads Mullen to images of sexualized vio­lence (“Girls in white sat in with blues-­saddened slashers. Laced up, frilled to the bone. Semi-­automatic ruffle on a semi-­formal gown”).53 Similar rhyme-­studded puns give Hayes verbal approximations for makeup, hair weaves, and other decorations. Si­mul­ta­neously, they give him new topics: gender and sexuality. This summary of the hairstyles of “the ladies,” which deliberately aligns the speaker and the reader with a male perspective, makes literal a protective reaction to the men’s “longing”: the wigs announce would not, do not, cannot with ­every shake of a head. From ­there the language’s decorations move ­toward near nonsense, first through all the words clustered around -­l or -­r (as in “dangle” and “sparkle”), then through the multiplications of place and face, to end in an exclamation: “her face is a placebo!” Femininity and blackness intersect in that word, which has origins in the Latin first-­person verb placebo, “I ­shall be pleasing”: it is the promises of t­ hose advertisements for whiteners and corsets.

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­These lengthy quotations help make vis­i­ble the way “Wigphrastic” oscillates between meandering associations (impressions that look like the typical provenance of a lyric speaker), and the more forceful assertions of essays or nonliterary speech. “Dumb p­ eople are dangerous,” Hayes writes, echoing James Baldwin’s 1961 response to Mailer’s essay. A ­ fter asserting that “All roles are dangerous,” Baldwin continues, “The world tends to trap and immobilize you in the role you play; and it is not always easy—in fact, it is always extremely hard—to maintain a kind of watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.”54 But Baldwin also admits that “the roles that we construct are constructed ­because we feel that they ­will help us to survive and also, of course, ­because they fill something in our personalities,” an idea that is beginning to circulate in “Wigphrastic.”55 Unlike “How to Be Drawn to Trou­ble,” “Carp Poem,” or “The Avocado,” “Wigphrastic” does not conclude with the same sense of two disparate objects converging. Rather, it is more as if half a dozen ideas are scattered through the poem, interlocking around the edges (and reaching a cautious understanding at the end). ­After that reference to “dumb ­people,” Hayes quotes an inanely mixed metaphor—­“Calamity pimps come out of the woodwork / and start to paddle their own canoes”—­and reveals that it was “a white dude’s response to the death of [Trayvon] Martin” (How to Be Drawn 15): “Let’s beat that apathy wig off him.” Amid ­these references to the public and dangerous life imposed on black Americans, and to white apathy, a song has been playing. The 1984 single “The Men All Pause” has been pre­sent in fragments since the poem’s first few stanzas; ­here it is acknowledged, and it seems to change the direction of Hayes’s poem: the soft radar streaked ­music of Klymaxx singing “The men all pause when I walk into the room.” The men all paws. Animals. The men all fangles, the men all wolf-­woofs and a ­little bit lost, lust, lustrous, trustless, restless as the rest of us. (15) The song itself is sung by a coolly self-­assured Bernadette Cooper, who goes out in her “Versace blue leather suit,” and explains that “As soon as my feet hit the door / I had all attention from the dance floor.”56 Hayes draws out her pun on paws and pause: men, whose “whoa” of admiration turns to “woof ” in the song, do not even have hands, simply aggressive “paws.” The tonal, perspectival, and topical shifts of ­these lines are intriguing. The one-­word sentence of “Animals” reads like a dismissal, a reduction to uncivilized

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or even brutish carnality (recalling not just masculinity, but a legacy of racist language in which black and brown men are described with that term: it is  another fleeting invocation of ste­reo­types). While Hayes’s next phrase seems to go further, as if it is about to give men dog-­like fangs, it does not: instead it turns, unexpectedly, into “fangles.” That tacked-on syllable depicts men not as fanged, or not only as fanged, but as themselves susceptible to new fashions (to newfangledness), as the ­women are to “bangs” and “sparkle[s].” Having referred e­ arlier to “the ladies,” h ­ ere the speaker sees the men in the room at a remove, with the humanizing “lost,” then the more predictable “lust,” the unexpected “lustrous,” the uncertain “trustless.” Eventually “the men” are as “restless as the rest of us,” as if the speaker is now aligning himself with a group of h ­ umans that sees men as the other. Hayes is responding in part to Mailer, whose world is undisputedly male and heterosexual and white; at this moment, the poem swift calls attention to the roles of masculinity and desire in the United States, and their relation to the personal. “Wigphrastic” keeps trying on roles, to use Baldwin’s term. As Hayes approaches the end of this poem, he turns to several short declarations that seem half confessions, half ­theses: In my life the wigs eat me. The wish to live awhile on the mind of another h ­ uman is not inhuman. The wish to slide for a while inside another ­human, it is not inhuman. (How to Be Drawn 16) ­ hese lines make a contrastive allusion to Williams’s complaint about being T stifled (“In my life the furniture eats me”).57 For Hayes, one’s individuality and its disguises—­its furniture, its wigs—­are inseparable, and the desire to disguise one’s self like another is “not inhuman.” In the context of the Klymaxx song, and given that potentially erotic verb “to slide,” it also encompasses the act of wanting to possess another person; again, the desire is “not inhuman,” though described in this language it is ambiguous. “Wigphrastic” closes by turning outward, to a “you,” and by returning to what sounds like advertising language: If you like “like” like I like “like,” you should wear a hairpiece. It is peace of mind. It is artistic. It is a lightweight likeness, comfortable, wash and wear, virtually looking and feeling with virtually no side effects. . . . . . . . . . . ​New and improved,

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your wig can be set upon the older wig just as the older wig was set, when it was newer, upon the wig beneath it. Where’s your wig? Wear your wig. Your wig is terrific. (How to Be Drawn 16) In the hortatory language with which motivational speakers usually tell ­people to be themselves, to take their disguises off, Hayes affirms masks, personae, meta­phors, and other disguises. Like Baldwin, who knows “roles are dangerous” but necessary both for protection and self-­definition, Hayes recognizes that facades of some kind are “not inhuman”; they are extremely ­human. Chen Chen—­one of a slightly younger generation of writers influenced by Hayes’s mixture of irony and satire—­has a poem in which a friend says to him, “All you write about / is being gay or Chinese.”58 Chen ­later thinks of two retorts. The first: “wish I had thought to say to him, All you write about is being white // or an asshole.” ­Every writer, he knows, has a point from which they work, has topics to which they return (the poems of Frederick Seidel are about being white and an asshole). Or, as Chen’s second retort puts it: “No, I already write about every­thing.” To write about being gay or being Chinese, or to write about being straight and black, is to write about an entire world of experience. In “Wigphrastic,” Hayes uses markers of blackness as a way to get at what he sees as a universal condition: beginning from a distinctively black experience, he moves to an assertion that takes in all of ­human experience, from “Nonslip polyurethane patches, superfine lace, / Isis wigs” (How to Be Drawn 15) to the “movable halo” (16). Each of ­these fragments passes rapidly, with ­little appended commentary; the impression is of a drifting but nevertheless highly controlled set of reflections filtering through the speaker’s consciousness. The poem offers a vision of the modern-­day United States, and a repre­sen­ta­tion of how one inhabitant of that world mediates it; it is both public and intimate at once. In the year a­ fter his 2016 NBA speech, Hayes composed American Sonnets for My Past and ­Future Assassin, a title that explic­itly addresses the idea that “someone is trying to kill you.” As if in part registering that threat, t­ hese poems dispense with some of the vis­i­ble formal wealth of the ­earlier books: they always begin with the same title, always end at the same place. Even the index is ­shaped to fourteen lines on a page, and each of the book’s five sections has fourteen poems. Hayes’s use of this restrained form has continued in the months since, beginning 2019 with “American Sonnet for the New Year,” which consists of rearranging adverbs:

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t­ hings got terribly ugly incredibly quickly ­things got ugly embarrassingly quickly actually t­ hings got ugly unbelievably quickly59 This sonnet stacks our inadequate words for disaster, then shuffles them and goes to pieces; it is both hilarious and awful. In general, the humor in American Sonnets has become more muted: it is terser, ragged, generally less baroque. But it does keep welling up. A Baraka action figure comes with three “outfits,” among them a “black linen Leninist getup” (24) that makes audible Hayes’s enjoyment of sonic coincidence. Some of the sonnets foreground per­for­mance and comic relief, such as the one about a school bully beginning, “This one goes out to DeMascas Jackson, / Who named his beloved pit bull ‘DeMarcus’ ” and whom the speaker’s younger self once unluckily addressed as “DeMarcus” (53). And when Hayes writes, “I carry money bearing / The face of my assassins” (40)—­a single white face across multiple bills—it is a bleakly ironic recognition that even the currency of the United States, as Dave Chappelle notes, “looks like baseball cards with slave-­ owners on them.”60 Hayes’s sterner version of Chappelle is characteristic of the book’s tonal oddities: at one moment, t­ here is a flurry of sonic excess, and at another, a joke that is unconditionally serious. I have suggested throughout this chapter that Hayes derives comedy from poetic irrelevance and surplus that gesture ­toward quiet, what Quashie describes as an inner life not strictly defined by public re­sis­tance, not wholly separate from publicness, not wholly understood. Although humor from scope and volume seems less pos­si­ble in this rigid repeating form, and although the book’s title announces that it is addressing ongoing national injustice, American Sonnets continues to stave off the decisive readings that trou­ble Hayes. It is as if the small, set form itself brings out how extremely variegated and disparate t­ hese poems are; the w ­ hole book becomes like a Hayes poem in that it spreads out so much. ­Here excess takes the form of multiplicity (a princi­ple that also begins my final chapter, in Morgan Parker’s continued questionings of what a poem can represent in the con­temporary United States). For example, address multiplies, as if to encompass as many listeners as pos­si­ble: Maxine ­Waters, Amer­i­ca, George Wallace, a reader, a stinkbug, an unspecified you. And subgenres multiply: personal ads, lists, vignettes, memories, apostrophes, imprecations, hymns, sermons, speeches. Within this texture, the wit and play of American Sonnets set brief, slight false trails: not exactly to throw a reader off course, but to remind one again of what might not be labeled, or resolved into an interpretation. Again, Hayes calls to mind Quashie’s interest in thinking about expressiveness that “­isn’t al-

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ways publicly legible, and can be random and multiple in ways that makes it hard to codify singularly.”61 One of the book’s most caustic addresses to the United States, an explanation that “you just wanted change is all, a return / To the kind of awe we experienced ­after beholding a reign / Of gold” (32), is on the brink of referring to what is colloquially called a golden shower, allegations of which surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign. Thereafter, the sonnet tosses up an image of the “metallic narcissism” of the country’s president, a cata­logue of jewelry from Trinidad James’s 2012 single “All Gold Every­ thing,” and then (prefaced by the strangely gratuitous “if you know what I’m talking / About”) a quote from Gucci Mane’s 2009 “Lemonade,” a cata­logue of yellow objects.62 And a­ fter all this, it turns to the greed and vio­lence of the nation that it began by addressing. That bizarre pun about the reign of gold— is it a pun? Do I know what Hayes is “talking / About”?—­comes out of left field. If it is a pun, it does not fit with its sentence, topically or even grammatically. It remains as a sign of an unpredictable inner life that sees puns where it ­will, that makes puns when facing grim circumstances; it is also another sign of what cannot be pinned down.

Ch a p ter  5

Coming to Terms with Our Self Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, Monica Youn

In 2001, Fence asked fifteen poets to contribute statements for an issue “on Subjectivity and Style”; Monica Youn ended hers with a carefully jarring comparison: It is neither praise nor blame to say that a poem is grotesque the way road rage is grotesque (tailgating, cutting p­ eople off, vari­ous ways of trying to speak with your car): the attempt to make something inorganic—­a ­thing made out of words—­perform an expressive function that is both unsuitable and inevitable.1 For Youn, expressive poetry seems condemned to try to convey a messy internal state, with a set of unyielding words. A car jockeying for space, not wholly in control of what it is conveying, suggests the way language and form are rarely if ever perfectly synthesized with one’s inner life. It also suggests a slightly ironic version of the idealized poem as autonomous, closed-­off realm: to be in a car, encased in steel and plastic, is to be set off from all that one dismisses as traffic, from the rest of the supposedly outer world. Yet while Youn trou­bles a vision of an idealized poem that can encapsulate or express emotional states, she recognizes the per­sis­tent impulse to try, and the grotesque (distorted, ludicrous, embarrassing) effects of that attempt. Her vehicle is a good early twenty-­first-­century image for the unavoidable abjection of writing about one’s self and emotions: it pulls the writer into comedy. 14 6

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This final chapter continues to explore how recent ideals around the lyric genre encourage a comic stance from con­temporary American poets.2 It adds the predicament of writing about the self, especially about feeling, as a gendered subject. While feeling has run across the preceding chapters (most recently, in Terrance Hayes’s stagings of deflected emotion), the writers ­here—­Youn, Morgan Parker, and Natalie Shapero—­are keenly aware, as Youn put it in a 2017 interview with Bindu Bansinath, of how gender continues to help determine “the degree to which one’s subject m ­ atter is considered impor­ tant, or po­liti­cal, or ambitious, or relevant, or ‘masterful,’ as opposed to personal, or confessional, or beautiful in an easy way.”3 That imbalance is perhaps especially relevant when one’s subject m ­ atter does explic­itly take up private experience: one’s gender may prompt readers to assume one’s poems carry a heightened volume of unexamined feeling, and to overlook the qualities in the first half of Youn’s list.4 Parker’s work confounds preconceptions about interiority and its expression, especially t­ hose sometimes accompanying ste­reo­types of race and gender. In d­ oing so, her work chips away at the line between personal poetry and social critique.5 Shifting rapidly and constantly between the putatively internal and external, crossing generic and formal borders, this poetry depicts interiority as part of every­thing around one: “It is sixteen / years ago and the cracked coffee pot slips / out of your head, down seven flights of stairs.”6 The coffee pot, cracked before it even hits the steps, disintegrates into a t­ hing of the imagination or memory: at the moment one expects the physical crash, one gets that dazzling slippage between hand and head, made quietly funny by the numerical precision on e­ ither side.

You Think I’m Joking I’m Never Joking The first poem in Parker’s ­There Are More Beautiful ­Things Than Beyoncé (2017) begins by evoking and discarding jokes: its third line, “Okay so I’m Black in Amer­i­ca right and I walk into a bar,” even includes the quick phatic connections heard in live per­for­mances.7 The final section of Magical Negro (2019) is entitled “Popu­lar Negro Punchlines”; one of its titles, updating Amiri Baraka, offers a “Preface to a Twenty Volume Joke Book” (80), though the poem itself centers on feelings of bewilderment, grief, and detachment. As such lines and titles suggest, a number of Parker’s poems refer explic­itly to humor or the production of humor. Aware of how some readers might focus on the comic stratum in ­these poems to the diminishment of much ­else, Parker has felt compelled to clarify in interviews that she’s “not writing a sitcom or a

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stand-up routine.”8 Like Hayes, she’s intrigued by how humor might expand but also constrict, belittle, or reduce. As her poetry bears out, having a sense of humor is not the same as presenting something primarily for the sake of humor. While humor runs alongside seriousness in t­ hese poems, they tend to turn away from ending in laughter; they evoke something comic to make comedy recede, or to dissolve into irony. Parker’s work shows the continued relevance of Ralph Ellison’s observation that “­there is no one who sees the absurd any more than the person who has lived closest to it,” and acknowledges what Ellison termed “the basic artificiality, the irrationality, of the social arrangement.”9 Parker’s experience of the arrangement appears in “We Are the House That Holds the ­Table at Which Yes We ­Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat,” which opens by si­mul­ta­neously undercutting and literalizing a Biblical cliché: .

No one can serve two masters like we can, be f­ uture and what they threatened to forget, be Richard Pryor Live on Sunset and be the sunset.10 Knowing one cannot extricate oneself from one’s country’s history or institutions, Parker finds images for the inner contradictions that go along with one’s situation. To be like Richard Pryor, who found the “most fertile ground for his stand-up per­for­mances [in] his own life,” as Glenda Carpio notes, is to be outrageous, to talk about one’s addiction and third-­degree burns on stage; to be the sunset is to be a beautiful spectacle, disappearing and tacit.11 Parker’s interest in conveying personal experience involves “actively working out a poetics in the context of a racist society,” to borrow Evie Shockley’s summary of the poets discussed in her book on postwar and con­temporary black aesthetic innovation.12 For Parker, a v­ iable mode of writing needs to be flexible enough to include not only the full scope of one’s quirks and habits and flaws, but the threatening pressures of one’s social environment. Like Hayes, Parker addresses the challenge of documenting the ways one is affected by but not dominated by racist structures. A v­ iable mode of writing also needs to be able to represent the comic situations stemming from one’s idiosyncrasies, without acceding to ideas of what is amusing or universal or impor­tant as defined by ­those with power. Accordingly, allowing a sense of humor into one’s poems leads to the question of how one depicts one’s sometimes ironic or comic relations with one’s world, when parts of that world are composed of literally hostile forces.

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Rebecca Wanzo has addressed this question in a study of what she defines as “precarious-­g irl comedy,” an early twenty-­first–­century subgenre of the sitcom focusing on young ­women who are struggling with work, finances, romantic relationships, and the constrictions and embarrassments of adulthood.13 I think of her account of abjection and awkwardness when I encounter some of Parker’s swift declarative sentences that announce disarray. “I am all the plagues at once,” one speaker asserts: “anxiety, / wine teeth, bad credit, general malaise.”14 Such moments play up a matter-­of-­factly or outrageously self-­ deprecating side: “With champagne I try expired white ones / I mean pills I mean men” (­There Are More Beautiful ­Things 44). Elsewhere the speaker worries about student loans (3), or finds her dog has filled her shoes with dry food (55); she may be “microwaving multiple Lean Cuisines / and watching Wife Swap” (8) or “in the tub holding down / that on-­sale Bordeaux pretending / to be well-­adjusted” (72). This kind of self-­disparagement draws near to that of the sitcoms Wanzo examines. As Wanzo points out, however, the comedy of not-­quite-­together twenty-­ first-­century womanhood has dif­fer­ent stakes for white and black ­women.15 Black experience in the United States has involved dealing with dehumanizing mockery for generations: “We’ve spent our lives making you laugh” was how the inset speech in Hayes’s “Squawk” put it. Parker refers to the long-­ lasting consequences of minstrelsy when she imagines “the jokes Dave Chappelle’s been crafting off the grid” (­There Are More Beautiful ­Things 18); Chappelle left his show a­ fter coming to see it as misinterpreted by white spectators.16 For a person of color, deliberate comic per­for­mances may be tidily mischaracterized as tendencies of one’s ethnic group. If a writer’s skin color is linked to a history of degradation and white laughter, and if one of her subjects is a sometimes embarrassing self, how does self-­deprecation “escape the shadow of black humiliation s­ haped by white supremacy,” as Wanzo asks?17 Wanzo’s main example, Issa Rae’s web series Awkward Black Girl (2011–2013), “blends the historical weight of black abjection with other kinds of abjection,” spreading embarrassment and discomposure over a variety of situations, so that a racialized abjection is not the only form shown.18 Parker’s answer involves also blending—­blending genres, tones, forms, even grammatical units—­and especially multiplicity, a concept she has stressed in several interviews.19 In ­There Are More Beautiful ­Things Than Beyoncé, for example, it is vis­i­ble in how poems more easily read as lyric (­those whose speaker is in Brooklyn around 2015, and has a dog) alternate with ­those refracting lyric through dramatic monologue (like “Hottentot Venus,” “The President’s Wife,” and a number of poems identified with versions of Beyoncé, from “RoboBeyoncé” to “White Beyoncé”). A similar princi­ple of mixture works across

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poems, as when admissions of haplessness are interspersed with commanding, rhetorically sweeping, witty declarations.20 At times, the speaker simply wants to get out of this “one long slumber party” where no parent “­will ever arrive, car ­running, to take me home” (16); at ­others, she can change the weather and disrupt transit (Other ­People’s 13). On e­ very available level, Parker’s work keeps switching planes. The poem that imagines Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip and an ­actual sunset, for example, soon flashes to a racist comic trope (“For dinner, watermelon / and a dry white”), but from ­there to “Gin nightcap, / low moon”: the ste­reo­type and figurative language are contiguous with something that looks like a literal eve­ning in one’s apartment, weakening the expected bound­aries between public and private (Magical Negro 72). When Parker remarks in an interview that “I know how we are received as poets, as w ­ omen, as Black ­women, and like, all the t­ hings you could do to essentialize me—­what if I just preempt them,” she has in mind not only forces in American culture at large, but in American poetry establishments.21 Her work undercuts—­often comically undercuts—­the aesthetic and conceptual hierarchies within con­temporary poetry. As Dorothy Wang notes in her summary of con­temporary American poetics, critics aligned with traditional and with avant-­garde poetry still tend implicitly to devalue poems that bear traces of a personal identity (or rather, of an identity that is not a white masculine one). For relatively traditional critics, identity can be subsidiary to or even at odds with supposedly universal m ­ atters of form, or of the h ­ uman condition; for some critics who concentrate on avant-­garde lit­er­a­ture, poems dealing with identity are seen as less rigorous, and less experimental.22 Thus poetry establishments share a tendency to privilege the aesthetics of white writing: “Poetry by racialized persons, no m ­ atter the aesthetic style, is almost always read as secondary to the larger (and more ‘primary’) fields and forms of English-­ language poetry and poetics—­whether the lyric, prosody, rhetorical tropes, the notion of the ‘avant-­garde’—­categories all too often presumed to be universal, overarching, and implicitly ‘racially unmarked.’ ”23 Parker’s work, however, maintains that one’s identities are a source of aesthetic innovation: one needs to make forms to fit one’s experience and ideas. And the innovation of her forms comes itself partly from all that they join and cross: they unsettle both avant-­garde and relatively mainstream categories. While t­hese poems make quite direct statements about emotion and personal experience, the customary idealized terrain of lyric, in the next breath they take in what lyric is said to exclude: the social, the satirical, the almost nonrepre­sen­ta­tional. Parker shares Tommy Pico’s skepticism of the idea that poetic form selects and condenses a feeling from the chaos of everyday experience: to do so might

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be to quarantine experience from almost every­thing shaping both self and poem. She recognizes that emotions “come at weird moments. Every­thing could be ­going wonderfully, but then I’m thinking about Fred Hampton. All of ­those t­ hings exist at once.”24 She questions the coherence i­magined in the twentieth-­century lyric; to convey what one lives, multiplicity and lack of rationale are parts of the point. (This questioning also recalls Hayes’s work, which attends to the way that lyric reading can press a poem into an inaccurately single meaning.) Parker’s darting comic strain often arises from extending concepts of both the poem and the self across their ­imagined edges. Her breaching of compartments was vis­i­ble in the introduction to Lyric as Comedy, where contradictory, possibly limitless replies to the question of How are you began to break down the apparent border between a poem and a social, commercial, organized-­sports-­playing outside world. This poetry reworks still-­ present lyric ideals that are typically associated with making something intensely singular. Parker’s long, ungainly, lively titles, for example, pre­sent more than a title is conventionally expected to pre­sent. They tend to bear a sense that a poem is a slightly funny construction, as fixed and presented in a book: see “Poem Made of Empty Prescription B ­ ottles from the Garbage in Front of Bill Murray’s House” (22), or “How to Piss in Public and Maintain Femininity” (10), or “If My House­mate Fucks with Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)” (3), all from Parker’s first book, Other ­People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (2015). ­These titles demolish notions of the poem as lofty, universal, and interior. Instead, the poem is made from ephemera such as trash (or avant-­ garde art), instruction book, or homemade tape. Such titles announce writing that is constantly intertextual and almost intergeneric. For example, “We Are the House That Holds the T ­ able at Which Yes We ­Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat” (in which a relative pronoun throws the title open into an entire dramatic scene), is a response to Solange’s 2016 ­album A Seat at the ­Table. Or take “I’d Rather Sink . . . ​Than Call Brad For Help!”: for the DC Comics w ­ oman weeping in Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 pop-­ art painting, t­hese words appear in a private thought b­ ubble, a near equivalent to lyric idealized as private expression. The w ­ oman given a monologue by Parker bursts that b­ ubble, in the first two words of the poem: “Fucking Brad!” (Other ­People’s 43). Though she says she knows that Brad “­isn’t / wondering” about her, that knowledge provokes a long run-on account of her state, a state that explodes white feminine melodrama: “I’m cold and I’m / black like someone / e­ lse’s sky my ugly / face fresh-­baked cookies” (43). Parker’s deceptive grammatical parallels, disruptive enjambments, and minimal punctuation speak to an interest in how emotions are twisted up with what is

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outside them, how perceptions and associations come crowding in faster than one can track; her language explores how l­ittle in our minds or in poems is ever as resolved and clear as we might want. “99 Prob­lems” (from ­There Are More Beautiful ­Things Than Beyoncé) epitomizes this allusive, variegated, formally innovative style. It draws on both song and list, the latter being an inherently multiple form. Taking off from Jay-­Z’s 2004 single, it begins with a memory of being the odd one out in a group of ­children, and of knowing why even then: 1. Playing house I was ­adopted 2. or the dog 3. I understood (66) Parker is drawing together two genres in which the main common ground is lineation. Lists are not normally an aesthetically or­ga­nized genre, or an expressive genre. And whereas a list usually keeps to one kind of verbal unit (nouns, for example), Parker exaggerates both topical and grammatical heterogeneity: some units are full sentences, some are single words; item 2 is a continuation of item 1, item 3 responds to both. She exploits the list for its semblance of precision, for the way it is almost a parody of the ordered, proportioned poem, as if one could decide that exactly seven points should be reserved for the history of the United States: 36–42.  American History 43.  Where are you from? 44.  Prozac Weight 45. Thomas and I got pulled over in Bed-­Stuy last Saturday night 46.  We ­were in the back of a cab 47. Taxes 48.  The wilting planet 49.  Sometimes I forget to take my pills 50.  I do it on purpose (67) In blending the personal and the public, facts as they are presented in the news and as they impinge upon one’s life, Parker shows how thoroughly ­these categories collapse into and exacerbate each other, within one’s head: racial profiling, the expense of taxes, the bureaucratic stress of taxes, the bizarre condition of paying taxes to support the ­people who pull you over (in one sardonic line from Jay-­Z’s single, the police explain that “You was d­ oing

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fifty-­five in the fifty-­four”).25 The poem brims with irony; since one “of irony’s functions is to mediate sorrow and rage,” as Wang observes, “expressions of humor and sarcasm often vibrate and oscillate t­oward feelings of deep bitterness, revenge, resignation, and sadness.”26 Such oscillations often define Parker’s work: ­here the dryness of the numbers, and the pauses they force (the effect of saying “46” before saying “We ­were in the back of a cab” resembles that of a beat in the most mordant of stand-up), and the randomness they accentuate, keep cutting off any one vehement feeling from full expression. Apparent randomness and quiet design intersect in “99 Prob­lems,” as in the ironic reminder that one lives with the consequences of American history only to have it assumed, a second ­later, that one is not American (items 36–42; item 43). Design amid an illusion of randomness also emerges in the poem’s larger structure: what happens in the two ends of Parker’s arc makes the seeming ­jumble of prob­lems span almost an entire life, from one’s childhood to one’s pre­sent state of exhaustion. But just before ending, the poem returns to childhood, to note that the same person can be seen as out of place and as interchangeable: 94.  Teacher called me Sheila 95.  Sheila was the other Black girl 96.  Sheila hated me (69) This poem is another unruly answer to How are you? While it apparently sets out to itemize each prob­lem, the list turns out to be a swirl of interlocking and burgeoning answers. And the list could go on: it is far from complete, in that each of its entries points to other potential entries (“Teacher called me Sheila” is unlikely to have been the only encounter with that teacher, or other teachers). Given this throng of remembered and ongoing prob­lems, which join neurochemistry to global and local outrage, a poem that distills would miss the point. As “99 Prob­lems” suggests, sequentiality is impor­tant to the comic strain in Parker’s aesthetic: it is a foil to the overwhelming chaos of both the outer world as depicted in the poem, and of the self, where one’s 86th prob­ lem is “My dog eats a lipstick” but one’s 87th prob­lem is “Subjectivity,” an open-­ended word for the mess of consciousness. At moments in Parker’s poetry, that 87th prob­lem includes many of the prob­lems that Maggie Hennefeld recognizes in the “affective instabilities of recent awkward-­depressive comedians,” ­women whose per­for­mances address anxiety, depression, exhaustion, and the alienation that ­these ­mental states exacerbate (Hennefeld mentions Rae, Maria Bamford, Aparna Nancherla, and

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Tig Notaro as examples).27 Nancherla, for instance, opens one set by realizing that ­there “is no way to pick up pills that ­you’ve spilled on the ground without looking like a total h ­ uman red flag.”28 Crouched on the stage, gathering the invisible pills rolling away from her, she observes that such an accident “immediately turns into a sad one-­woman show that nobody agreed to attend.” For Parker, the resilient and imaginative mind that gives rise to t­ hese poems is also, at times, the miserably unstable mind. Take the statement that “I think I’m ­going crazy sometimes ­really / you think I’m joking I’m never joking” (­There Are More Beautiful T ­ hings 44). Its parallels between the speaking subject’s own thinking and that of the unidentified “you” who misreads depression as facetiousness (including the parallel between “sometimes” and “never”) point both to how one is misinterpreted and to how precarious one’s assertions might be.29 “99 Prob­lems” pre­sents an intellect that is face to face with multiple catastrophes, seen with clarity and inventiveness. H ­ ere sequentiality reflects the doubt—­confronted by each poet discussed in Lyric as Comedy—­that a poem can or should arrange personal experience into something controlled and reconciled. To that end, some items of “99 Prob­lems” are themselves lineated, thus muddling further the distinction between poem and list, between input and discrete psychological event: a­ fter picturing “52. A clean body like a lake,” Parker begins a new line and indents, pausing before the wildly self-­deprecating statement that “I’m some shit bodies sunk into.” Lists like this one are a way to work against the grain of lyric ideals of unity, privacy, and autonomy. What is ultimately comic in this painful, witty poem entails two conflictual realizations: ­there is the acknowl­edgment that the writer cannot list every­thing, that her repre­sen­ta­tion is incomplete; and that this nominally orderly form can nevertheless capture the barrage of objects in her periphery, any number of which might rush forward at once. Parker’s work exemplifies a substrain of con­temporary poets who link the poem to nonliterary genres, and to somewhat random, somewhat fixed forms. In d­ oing so, ­these writers fuse what is considered the typical provenance of lyric—­the subjective experiences of a self—­and the social contexts it is said to exclude or underexamine. Fatimah Asghar’s 2016 “Microaggression Bingo,” for example, consists of a grid of twenty-­five squares, each holding a grindingly predictable phrase: “Casting call to audition for Battered Hijabi W ­ oman #42,” the question of “what Muslim food tastes like,” the editor who worries about w ­ hether a story has enough white p­ eople to be “relatable,” and so on.30 As with Parker’s ranging, almost infinite list, the structure suggests a degree of arbitrariness: the remarks Asghar lists could pop up in any square, and could

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extend steadily beyond the grid. T ­ here is a ­bitter comic plea­sure in finding a form for how such hostilities collect in one’s mind; ­there is irony in finding that form in a literal game. Nonliterary genre and quasiserial form are also at work in Patricia Lockwood’s 2013 “Rape Joke” (“The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. / The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee”), underscoring both the inability to make coherent sense out of trauma, and the way sense making is tinged by how one has internalized jokes about or dismissals of sexual vio­lence.31 In ­these poems, which address subjects usually accompanied by strong emotion, less conventionally “literary” forms become a way to attend to American culture and to a subjectivity as affected by that culture. This multiplicity of perspective appears vividly in cata­logues, a subgenre Parker wields to represent, si­mul­ta­neously, white imaginings of black inner life, the vastly larger regions encompassed by that inner life, and the multiscale consequences of racism. “Afro,” for example, responds to a suspicious glance by declaring that “I’m hiding secrets & weapons in ­there” (­There Are More Beautiful T ­ hings 18). Its cata­logue per­sis­tently conflates physical and conceptual spheres. ­Actual bulky items ­jumble with non­ex­is­tent, dreamt-of abstractions: batik-­printed lengths of cotton cloth, “a Zulu / folktale warning against hunters drunk on Polo shirts & / Jägermeister,” ge­ne­tic “blueprints” for athletic superiority. The form is structurally ambiguous: it is almost a sonnet (fifteen and a half lines, with a sudden turn at the end of the twelfth), almost a prose poem (lines long enough that they seem to be breaking nearly at the right-­hand margin, as unjustified text), a hybrid apt for the vastness of the cata­logue. It twists from snark and ebullience to end with objective threat; all the items listed are ­things that a cartoonish “white glove might expect to / find” “fogging my dirty mind & glowing like / trea­sure in my autopsy.” A similarly ironic attention to the multiple forces impinging on self-­ construction—to how self hood is affected by and exceeds other ­people’s views—­appears in “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl,” which scatters adjectives, nouns, and famous names across the page, along with thirteen instances of the word “sex” (­There Are More Beautiful T ­ hings 29). ­Here Parker revisits the pro­cess that presses individuals into types, inviting the reader to start categorizing (the names: feminist theorist, singer, victim of police vio­lence? the adjectives: objectifying, pejorative, condescending?). While ­there is no single perspective presented as a lyric speaker, “13 Ways” traces not only the ­mental procedures of stereotyping, but the ways an object of such ste­reo­types registers them. Though to create a poem in the shape of a list or a bingo card is to make contact with a more obviously experimental form, ­these writers are also still working with lyric’s idealized reputation. Asghar, whose poems draw on her

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years in improv theater, plays off such a rarefied idea of poetry when she describes the poetry of the 2010s as “experimenting with what the lyric can be, and how frank the lyric can be too, and how vulgar.”32 Similarly, in an interview with Kaveh Akbar, Parker considers poetry’s relation to gender through the idea of “insisting, insistency”: that is, “the one ­thing that ­women ­aren’t supposed to do. You can assert, and you can imply, but you can never insist. You can never be pushy.”33 If the lyric speaker as construed in twentieth-­century criticism thinks only to herself, Parker uses that exclusion of insistency to insist all the more forcefully, spelling out the presence of injustice four times in a row in “99 Prob­lems”: “16. Oppression. / 17. Oppression. / 18. Oppression. /​ 19. Oppression.” “If you are over staying woke,” from Magical Negro, draws on the genre of self-­care listicle, disturbing bound­aries not only between literary and non-­ literary, but between real­ity and the absurd. It begins with familiar directives to do with taking care of one’s self and one’s setting; though the title promises a set of instructions to ­others, the instructions begin to turn into self-­ representation: ­Water the plants. Drink plenty of w ­ ater. ­Don’t hear the news. Get bored.34 This poem, like “99 Prob­lems,” triangulates seemingly random enumeration, the idea of a concentric lyric, and the nonlinear mind. Parker uses tiny, syncopated lines that seem to reassure, to put one foot in front of the other; her enjambments play with the rhythms of varyingly emphasized repetitions. Within a few sentences, she returns to “the news,” and the m ­ ental toll of functioning amid what is reported each day: Sleep in. ­Don’t see the news. Remember what the world is like for white p­ eople. (52) Some of the directives in “If you are over staying woke” could recall Wanzo’s description of “precarious-­g irl comedy”: ­there are sentences about how to con-

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duct oneself in the face of a hangover, about making sure one’s bag includes a corkscrew, about remembering to floss. But over the next half page, its imperatives shift to b­ itter avoidance (“burn the papers / skip the funerals” [53]) and to surreal commands like “Wilt the news” and “White the hydrangeas” (54). Punctuation, which Parker often removes so as to let multiple realms of discourse slide into one another, drops out, once again suggesting how ostensibly outer and inner worlds become bizarrely mixed: Turn into ­water ­Water the fire escape Burn the paper . . . ­Don’t smile ­Don’t wilt funeral funeral (54) The poem ends t­ here: all of the minuscule verb-­based instructions, ­those to help the h ­ uman planted in toxic soil, are set against two final, isolated nouns, which promise to keep iterating. It ends with a reference to the victims implicitly feared for and mourned throughout; but rather than listing an individual name or names, it stops on the blankness of “funeral / funeral,” refusing both singularity and the formal closure of a triad. “If you are over staying woke” threads through bitterness, stress, fatigue, and a ­mental state in which most words become meaningless; it calls up structure to stage disintegration. It also calls up a kind of bleak humor to push it away. This technique, where one moves from something streaked with comedy to something harrowing, has structural affinities with how Hayes ends “The Avocado” and “Carp Poem,” as well as with some present-­day stand-up, where a similar motion of summoning and dispelling happens in a range of tonalities. It happens, for example, in the ­middle of Trevor Noah’s Lost in Translation (2015), where Noah sets up a reflection on police brutality through a relatively unfraught imitation of himself as bewildered new driver on the Los Angeles freeway. He gets several minutes out of yelling commands in a white accent through a police bullhorn, and out of mimicking his own cheerfully overliteral following of ­those commands; at one point, seemingly overcome with amusement at the memory of his confusion, he joins the audience in laughter. When he slips to his fear of being shot by the police, reiterating “I just d­ on’t want to die” half a dozen

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times while looking directly into the crowd, it takes several of t­ hose statements for the audience to begin to stop laughing; only as Noah continues, “the worst ­thing is I d­ on’t know how not to die. That’s the t­ hing. I d­ on’t know how not to die,” does the room quiet down.35 The same change occurs in the minutes just ­after Hannah Gadsby tells the audience “That is your last joke,” near the end of Nanette (2018): the jokes are replaced by an icily direct speech about the homophobia she grew up with in Tasmania and continues to observe. The structural role of humor in ­these passages is both a reprimand of laughter itself and a way of defamiliarizing subjects intertwined with fear and pain. Parker’s poems evince a similarly ambivalent view of humor: key to one’s tonal effects, but also something to be wary of. By mining the comedy within lyric, one sometimes diminishes the claims one can make for the genre’s social force. Parker, however, shows humor existing alongside not only grief, but critique and protest: her resources of wit and her formal experiments can represent the impact of macro-­and microaggressions, on an individual mind. Her poems run c­ ounter to both avant-­garde and more canonical accounts of lyric. While they speak for her personal circumstance—as an African American ­woman in her late twenties, with degrees in anthropology and creative writing, with ­house­mates and a lipstick-­eating dog—­they are also about con­temporary black womanhood and millennial black culture in the United States, and make vis­ib­ le ­human responses to social structures. In evoking the idealized poem (recall titles like “Poem Made of Empty Prescription ­Bottles from the Garbage in Front of Bill Murray’s House”) and in pressing at the apparent edges of this genre, Parker demonstrates the ways feeling cannot be separated from other realms. Her comic impulse shows inner life and poem not as strictly private, unified objects, but as built by and building on the discourses around them.

Put Together to Come Apart In Natalie Shapero’s poems, feeling rarely appears explic­itly; when it does, it is mainly in inappropriate reactive affects, and is set against domestic, maternal, and other normative relational assumptions. Instead of having a suitably feminine affection for h ­ orses, what the person presented in Hard Child “adore[s]” is “a bug that lives only one day, especially if / it’s a terrible day.”36 This speaker is less than entranced by herself and her surroundings, “born as [she’s] been / into ­these rotting times, as into sin” (11). Her consideration of w ­ hether she would be willing “to dispense with [her] given form” (39) recalls John Limon’s assertion that “the deepest desire of stand-­ups is to be, with re­spect to their

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lives, unencumbered.”37 And yet the poems’ occasional patches of rhyme (not just literal sonic rhyme, but rhyme in its broader, figurative sense of correspondence) suggest conflictual feelings about living for approximately one terrible day: they evince a partly ironic attachment to what is around one, and to the idea that form can bestow order on what is around one. The book’s flickering narrative begins at an OB-­GYN office, and has to do with motherhood, that conventionally life-­affirming state. In some re­spects, having a child shapes each poem, but not in the ways one might expect: the baby is almost missing. The lines below follow a remark about how the baby is scheduled to arrive around Halloween. Since p­ eople have been joking to the speaker about costumes (“what ­will she go as?”), she makes “a list of iconic / infants” from Moses to Jessica McClure, the toddler who slipped down a well in the late 1980s and temporarily became a h ­ ouse­hold name in the United States. A ­ fter a short digression on how that incident led to the rise of cable TV (and to a national swell of concern and sympathy), the speaker focuses on her own favorite infant from history, the “Lindbergh Baby,” capitalized as if it ­were trademarked. Or not exactly on the infant, but on how the parents might wear matching leather jackets and flap hats with appended glasses, bomber brown. This costume works the best if the baby is nowhere to be found. (9) ­ here is a kind of structural rhyme in how the poem is bracketed by a lost T and found pun, across its first and last lines: it ends with the cliché of “nowhere to be found,” and it opens by remarking that the due date of Halloween “was not lost on anyone.” In a poem that rather nonchalantly refers to a kidnapping, that initial phrase about what nobody missed (as well as the initial dumb joke of “what ­will she go as?”) becomes a casually ominous reference to disappearing and loss. And though I w ­ ill turn to Shapero’s formal strategies shortly, I also want to note the unpromised, unexpected almost-­rhyme in that last sentence, which joins the “bomber brown” aviator sunglasses to the “nowhere to be found” baby: it gives you something at the moment something vanishes. In this book, the baby is for the most part peripheral. The physical facts of being pregnant are skipped, as is the event of giving birth, which happens in the page turn between the book’s halves. And birth seems to come about

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through the speaker’s morbid tendencies. Hard Child goes against received wisdom about “avoid[ing] the dismal” when expecting or caring for an infant (40): Part I ends with an unattributed warning not to “shock the baby into birth / by viewing wretchedness and rape // on-­screen” (34), but at the start of Part II, the baby has been born, one way or the other. The very last poem (which does not mention the baby) opens by asserting that “What­ever I care for, someone ­else loves it / more,” calling bromides about maternal love into question (62). An apparent lack of feeling is set next to a subject commonly associated with selflessness, empathy, and devotion. On one level, Shapero continues a strand of twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­ century poetry that renders half-­comic the unnerving situation of motherhood: the weirdness of infants, the weirdness of the emotions one feels or is expected to feel. One precursor is Sylvia Plath’s 1961 “Morning Song,” where the bemused new parent sees herself as “cow-­heavy and floral” in a “Victorian nightgown,” and the baby’s opened mouth as “clean as a cat’s.”38 Brenda Shaughnessy’s 2012 “Liquid Flesh” takes up disorientation, upending stress, and sensory overload: neither baby nor parent seem at ease. The former “howls and claws / like a wrongly minor red wolf / who ­doesn’t know his ­mother,” and the latter seems uncertain: “Do I like us? Can I love us?” Shaughnessy admits attitudes and questions ­mothers are not expected to have: “If anyone comes / first it’s him, but how can that be? / I was ­here way, way first.”39 Unlike Plath or Shaughnessy, Shapero’s speaker does not seem visibly thrown off by having a child; rather, what is conventionally assumed to change one’s life completely is sometimes glanced at, sometimes leads to unrelated meditations. Her h ­ andling also differs from how parenthood is addressed in con­temporary stand-up, where c­ hildren are a background for maternal irresponsibility or irreverence or complaint. Ali Wong, for example, speaks at length about being a ­mother. Breastfeeding is explained as a “savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now,” in which the baby behaves “like that bear fucking up Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant.”40 By contrast, references to the child in Shapero’s book are brief and uninformative. So in Hard Child (the title is explic­itly linked to the adult rather than to the ­daughter, though it encompasses the d­ aughter as well), the baby is partly a device by which modern American expectations about ­human priorities, especially female priorities, are turned on their heads. But the child is also a way to register, obliquely and ironically, kinds of tentative attachment. It is a way to indicate care for something when one has ­little affection for oneself or for much of the rest of the generally appalling world. Shapero’s speaker repeatedly imagines herself disappearing, but also registers the possibility that the child might dis­appear (a fear that comes out indirectly in the passage about

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the Lindbergh baby, and in a consideration of how scanty c­ hildren’s obituaries are: “She did // not like to try new foods” [41]). The book’s steady references to modern vio­lence are a vehicle for both preoccupations: for what one sometimes wants to lose, for what one fears losing. Although the almost invisible plot of Hard Child is the arrival of a baby, its recurrent allusions are grounded in assassinations, the Holocaust, and other disasters, with passing remarks about the Challenger explosion and oil spills. To understand how Shapero takes in “the dismal,” it is worth recalling the original sense of “dismal” in dies mali, evil days. The book sketches the situation of a young, white, American ­woman who was a child during the Gulf War, and in her twenties through the wars in Iraq and Af­ghan­i­stan. She sees the world as a “war museum” (Hard Child 8), and distant wars are so familiar to her that she drily folds them into her own self-­aversion. Admitting that “My mind has made / an e­ nemy of my body,” she admits no fondness for e­ ither: “it’s all I can do // not to quote Kissinger / on the Iran-­Iraq / War: a pity they // both c­ an’t lose” (58). The way international catastrophe is taken and made to refer to one’s own life (where both can indeed lose) recalls some of the more infamous meta­phors of Confessional poetry. But the self-­consciousness with which this speaker completely fails to keep from quoting Kissinger—­that she knows she should not make this comparison, and by saying so emphasizes it—­ underscores dif­fer­ent tones of self-­involvement. This solipsism is not histrionic; it is pointedly lower-­energy. It is almost a shrug. The same affect was evident in Shapero’s first book, where the speaker is ready to mistranslate Rilke’s “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” as “you must end your life.”41 At the same time, the grim, flippant twists of poem ­after poem also connect to the closer damage of one’s past. As in Parker’s work, what is funny may be a thin distance from trauma: a number of Shapero’s poems momentarily recollect domestic vio­lence and abuse. When one poem declares, “All I have coming in this / world is a joke that hits me ­later” (No Object 30), the verb hit is quite calculated: what w ­ ill be realized “­later” is a rug burn. Vio­lence, ­running across the news and through one’s memory, has s­ haped the speaker’s view of herself and her world: “I frustrate God, who built me for endings / and never says anything but you had one job” (7). The speaker thinks of herself as the one individual on God’s bad side, as certain to end eventually, as overstaying her welcome, as a mere internet meme, as one of thousands of dismal design failures.42 So the comic plight ­these poems ­handle has to do with a self one might sometimes want to be rid of, as situated in a world one might sometimes want to be rid of; it also has to do with the recognition that one persists in writing about such a plight. The act of writing about oneself ­under ­these circumstances

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tugs one ­toward abjection. While Shapero takes up international crises, she renders them through a lens of ego (a pity they both ­can’t lose) but also through an almost posthuman perspective; one recent poem puts h ­ umans in the context of hyperobjects, wondering if p­ eople, having “co-­evolved with waste,” are “­here // to be its forward vessel.”43 In “Teacup This,” the first poem a­ fter the child’s birth, even a customary bonding routine like singing to the new baby elicits thoughts of separation, both in the context of romantic relationships and from the h ­ uman species. Its first sentence promises a kind of hopeful familial tradition, but ­there is a catch; I quote at length to show how thought in a typical Shapero poem goes: To my young d­ aughter, I sing the songs my m ­ other sang to me. Which is to say: to my young ­daughter, I sing an eclectic se­lection of breakup tunes of the ’60s and ’70s. Now I know ­you’re not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name again, it’s all the same to me . . . ​That ­doesn’t seem quite right to sing to a baby, yet h ­ ere I am. And ­here she is: bed-­sprawled, unblessed, and so perhaps like the starfish, yes—­one creature of more than the world requires, as I am unceasingly reminded by pamphlet mandates, blanket labels, alerts to lay her always up. It’s awful, to be a person. That’s why, from my lovers, I’ve always demanded to know what kind of a dog I might be, ­were I ever a dog, and ­don’t say teacup this, toy that, ­don’t pick a dog that must travel all over stuffed in a bag like a filthy magazine. (Hard Child 37, ellipses in original) “It’s / awful, to be a person”: this poem implies a tentative relation to one’s species (being a dog would be preferable, as long as one w ­ ere not a pekinese or poodle, or another dog too molded by ­humans) and to one’s world. And it implies an equally tentative relation to a self that sees a baby as a lifeform about as alien as a starfish, that sings about the same themes of vanis­hing brought up by the Lindbergh Baby. ­These uncertain relations are thrown into relief by a style that is poised between disjointedness and coherence. The next

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few pages ­will unravel this fabric, since both strands—­what is disjointed, and the joints within it—­help compose Shapero’s bleak and often abject comedy. An off-­k ilter relation to the world begins to emerge in Shapero’s curious associative jumps. The carry­ing of a dog is likened to the carry­ing of a pornographic magazine, and the poem w ­ ill subsequently cut to the holding of a baby; also, a poem that seemed to be about connection and inheritance w ­ ill end with a pronouncement about having been involved with mostly trustworthy men. It is intensified by Shapero’s quietly odd diction and grammar, both of which contribute to a style that comes off as vaguely remote. Remoteness, for example, in the occasional word that does not look quite right: in the lines above, a magazine not dirty but “filthy,” or the “eclectic se­lection of breakup tunes” that mimics the perky announcements of a DJ, or the official-­sounding “pamphlet mandate.” Elsewhere a dancer is not permanently injured, but “injured enduringly” (16); instead of a dead cat, a “killed cat” on the road (Hard Child 30); someone not barefoot but “fully shoeless” (41). It is as if the speaker has missed some of the idioms of En­glish, though at other moments her language is convincingly slangy (she says, for instance, that if t­ here ­were a white-­ noise recording of “nails / of a killer [scratching on the car roof of urban legend], I ­would’ve // shelled out” [56]). Such diction underlines a varyingly estranged view of the world. Its sentences can also seem remote: generally crisp, sharp, precise, and slightly formal on the page, they display elegant conjunctions, and now-­slightly-­ obsolete subjunctives (“­were I ever a dog”). This language helps produce poems that tend to speak unemotionally, collectedly to the reader, even when confessing to petty schadenfreude: take the too-­lofty, too-­precise last verb in “Watching a stranger parallel park, I pray / she abrades her neighbor” (Hard Child 49). Like Maria Bamford’s peculiar, almost Victorian exclamations—­“Oh, what a stinging broth intimacy can be”—it implies an eccentric understanding of social conventions.44 Even typography contributes to the sensation that ­these poems are at odds with and aloof from what they describe. While Parker intermingles direct and indirect speech, as if to make the two indistinguishable, Shapero sets most quoted speech in small caps. It is slightly reminiscent of the transcriptions in James Merrill’s Ouija-­board epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), where the voices from the other world sound like tiny shouts: Shapero’s upper-­case makes words from beyond the poem (ads, titles, other texts, what other ­people say, one’s own ­actual or ­imagined speech) reverberate within their new setting (you had one job). To a degree, this obliqueness has a correlative in f­ree verse that dimly, intermittently, remembers a fixed form: impish line breaks, snippets of meter,

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rhymes that come out of nowhere. As in Lowell’s Life Studies, near-­punchlines—­ “stuffed / in a bag like a filthy magazine”—­often happen in the ­middles of lines. Not even the lines of the melodious, chipper breakup song end where they ­ought to; they are literally misaligned. ­Things rarely seem to stop or start or connect quite as they should, or as one might expect: instead, phrases like “and ­don’t / say teacup this, toy that, ­don’t pick” run pentameter across line breaks, or promise iambic pentameter and then forget about the last foot.45 Line breaks are treacherous: though one poem seems to end with an unpunctuated “I am sorry” (Hard Child 46), which appears to be a stark, ragged ending, the facing page begins “to bring up Hitler, but” (47), form making apology still more perfunctory. An apparently devout “I have feared God” ends another stanza, but the next continues, “would turn out to be like Houdini,” that is, supposedly invulnerable ­until proven not: “it takes only a few well-­delivered // blows and a week and He’s gone” (10). As with the references to Hitler or the Iran-­Iraq war, t­here is something impertinent in how that sentence unfolds. But not only impertinent: the respectful capitalization of He, embedded in a sardonic image for losing one’s faith, is characteristic of Shapero’s deliberate tonal inconsistencies, of the ways what is flippant coexists with what is rueful. And a similar contradiction—­ something near mockery, but not just—is lurking in how ­these poems fleetingly call up fragments of traditional form, in how one catches echoes of pentameter at unexpected places. That is, my account so far does not fully capture how other ele­ments of Shapero’s form work within the generally off-­k ilter perspective described. Rhyme, in par­tic­u­lar, helps me get at the disjointedness that is not just disjointedness. While the poems of Hard Child generally are not in an accentual-­ syllabic meter and generally do not rhyme, their ends often heighten into unexpected sonic correspondence, in a kind of stylistic ambush. It is not usually between two line-­endings: instead, the last word of the poem might be linked to a word half a line or two and a half lines back, so the correspondence is visually buried. A poem that has heretofore been rhymeless is thereby sealed up, with a tidiness that borders on irony—as if to underscore that a poem can impose coherence on what does not cohere, or find matches for t­hings that are missing. As in Berryman’s Dream Songs, t­ here often seems to be little-­to-no semantic basis for the rhyme. Consider the abrupt ending of “­After attempting the anthem, upward of fifty / p­ ercent remark, I should have started lower or I should / have chosen something ­else instead. Uneasy lies the head” (Hard Child 49). That comment on American imperialism links a possibly made-up statistic and a fragment of Shakespeare, through a rhyme that is not quite end-­rhyme but not simply internal.

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As you might expect, such rhymes add something audibly funny when something audibly funny is needed, for example in the painfully short obituaries of ­children: “He never sketched the Earth without / its hatch of latitudes. She did // not like to try new foods” (Hard Child 41). This tragicomic relief comes partly from its inappropriate echoes not only of light verse but of neoformalism. Rhyme was increasingly likely to signal something comic by the midcentury—­when Plath writes, “Last summer, my God, last summer / It ate seven maids and a plumber,” she is tapping comic rhymes for fairy-­tale horror—­ and has become still more of a statement since then.46 When coinciding with traditional meter, rhyme continues to tend to affiliate one’s work with senses of authority, control, and understanding (if sometimes ironic understanding), senses that the poets of this book do not always feel.47 And when what was once reliable becomes quite unreliable, rhyme’s relations to ideals of closure grow thorny. Hard Child takes a deadpan look at formalist princi­ples, especially ideals of closure. From poem to poem, ­there is a glimmer of extraneousness, randomness, and prankishness in the superficial coherences of rhyme. This attention to formal coherence has run throughout Lyric as Comedy. It was vivid in Hayes’s longer meditative poems, where two seemingly unrelated subjects alternate and then lock together. Like Hayes, Shapero is thinking about the contrivances attendant on assembling a self in a poem, and about the extent to which one’s assemblage coheres. In a recent essay, she describes writing poetry—­how one needs to get words a certain way, to get a feeling in an adequate way—as a pro­ cess of humiliation: “The poem greets any attempt at earnestness or unfettered self-­expression with some canned sarcastic rejoinder like thanks for sharing or tell me how you ­really feel.”48 That image is a bit like Youn’s image of road rage in its comic frustration: the attempt to express jams up against something unyielding (a “­thing made out of words”) or uninterested (thanks for sharing). Even though the poems themselves rarely show feeling where it might be expected, part of the way one tells how one feels is through one’s willful, desultory, lopsided forms. What I hear is not precisely nostalgia, but a kind of irreverent wistfulness, like that of having “feared God // would turn out like Houdini.” It is as if traces of formal unity are reminders of what the world does not have. It is evident in the tiny stitches of rhyme and alliteration within “Teacup This,” t­ hose of “bed-­sprawled, unblessed, / and so perhaps like the starfish, yes” or “pamphlet mandates, blanket labels.” When a speaker learns of a pyrosome, a “seabound creature” made up of “a thousand small // fish, stuck together and sucking,” she admits that she herself is “composed in haste and subject to uncoupling. // I, too, am put together to come apart” (Hard Child 7).

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Such an image for the physical body is also a good image for poetic form as figured in Hard Child, gathered together by dozens of minute verbal ties, liable to give at any moment. ­These poems keep glancing back to the forms and ideals that do not fit them; they know that poetic shapes are a source of something satisfying, indeed fun, while being contingent or emptied of semantic relation or arbitrary. That same glint of humor—­from recognizing the appeal of pattern amid chaos—­also appears when verbal disjunction (a tangent, a non sequitur) unexpectedly snaps back into place. For an example, remember how “Teacup This” was sidetracked by the undesirability of being a teacup dog, then sidetracked by the memory of a few less-­than-­completely-­dependable individuals in the speaker’s past. In the first lines of “Hot Streak,” the next poem, the speaker suddenly returns to dogs: Actually it’s ridicu­lous to opine on what kind of a dog I would be, ­were I ever a dog, as I ­don’t contain within me half enough life to power a dog. i would be a dead dog, that’s what kind, or maybe a mere industrial object boasting a low-­g rade animation, some odd beep or flicker, like a dryer or a bulb. (38) The comic satisfaction in this abrupt opening lies not simply in its abruptness, but in the way it picks up a stitch from the ­middle of the poem that preceded it, a stitch (what kind of dog I might be) that seemed to be a throwaway. In t­ hese poems, where difference and discontinuity are often writ large, such returns offer the plea­sure of finding correspondence amid disintegration. Disintegration reasserts itself, to be sure: the rest of the poem is a poem-­sized digression about the moths that fly into lights. ­These poems resemble jokes on a large scale: attraction amid estrangement, disconnect amid surplus, pattern in randomness.49 Though thoughts seem to give way to t­ hings completely unrelated, some circle back and fit into one another, again and again: the train that derailed comes trundling back through. In presenting something both wrong in several senses (­those of being degraded, discontinuous, and so on) and right (this quality being what I’ve argued is underemphasized in writing about the comic), they bring to mind the slightly impossible feeling of a comic moment. My last example of this texture comes from the poem that opens Hard Child. It is again about loss—of joints, selves, babies. It begins with a general reflection on how many times operations have been conducted on “erroneous” parts of

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the body, which is why an acquaintance “wrote across his good knee not this knee” before g­ oing into surgery (5). It then cuts to the speaker’s own situation: The death of me: I’m never half so bold. You ­will feel, the doctor said, my hand and cold— and I thought of the pub quiz question: Which three countries are entirely inside of other countries? (5) Much ­here is characteristic: the throwaway phrase about “the death of me,” which hovers around the ­whole book; the mismatched pentameter, and crooked rhyme between “bold” and “cold”; the pressure put on the odd wording of the doctor’s advance warning; the question’s leap of thought, where the gap is pregnancy. Pregnancy is indirectly touched on in the next sentence, when the speaker explains that she has purchased “the bound one thousand names / for baby,” a peculiar kenning for book. And from that book, the speaker makes two lists: one if she’s born breathing, one if not. The second list was longer. So much that I might call her, if she w ­ ere never to bear the name, never turn to it, suffer shaming, mull its range and implications, blame it, change it, move away to San Marino, Vatican City, Lesotho. (5) This poem sets a tonic note for Hard Child, where death—­vanis­hing, uncoupling, coming apart—­appears in almost ­every poem, along with the idea of getting away. The last five lines ­here drift away with the idea that death’s cancellation of possibilities somehow opens up other possibilities (what ­will she go as?). ­There is an escape, for example, in how the speaker thinks of something literally trivial at the approach of the doctor’s hand. But avoidance keeps turning back to what it avoids: the trivia question, of course, is formally related to pregnancy, one small country inside another. And although Shapero seems to abandon the question itself, her ending gives an answer to it, even while wandering altogether elsewhere. Such moments suggest how these poems make estrangement con­spic­u­ous and then sometimes turn it back on itself.

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And the Chorus Kicks In: Feeling and Singularity While Monica Youn examines intense, humiliating feeling, her depictions of feeling are strained against both avant-­garde and traditional expressive expectations. In her work, emotions sometimes seem to exist without a speaker, pervasive (“A mist becomes a murmur, becomes // a moan”)50 yet not necessarily connected to a single perspective. The lyric subject is manifestly impersonal in Youn’s second book, Ignatz (2010). T ­ here are almost no I’s ­here; the language is generally spare and compressed, with white space pressing in on words. Nevertheless, it is about one’s relation to one’s self, and to o ­ thers, and to desire, which confuses such relations. In an often darkly funny response to assumptions about both what one feels and where the personal belongs, Ignatz sets desire into the third person and pushes it against styles often associated with experimental poetry. Though the book is grounded in remote, distanced, third-­person portrayal, it zooms in on emotions so closely as to make them palpable, moving frequently into what is seen as quintessentially lyric territory; its comic gleams arise partly from its relation to an idealized (and anti-­idealized) genre. And in its attention to feeling, Youn’s work helps me return to a popu­lar and critical assumption mentioned in the first few pages of this book: that what we now think of as “lyric,” and what we think of as funny, are usually taken as exclusive. So to explore comedy at its most subterranean, I turn to a sequence that focuses on a cluster of quintessentially poetic subjects, ­behind which lies an ­actual comic strip. Ignatz takes inspiration from the love triangle of George Herriman’s modernist cartoon Krazy Kat. Krazy, a black cat, loves Ignatz, a white mouse; the goal of the (generally hostile and conniving) mouse’s life is to throw bricks at the (generally good-­natured and slightly daft) cat. The cat is adored, meanwhile, by Offissa Pupp, a bulldog who is a police officer. Over and over, from 1913 through the early 1940s, Herriman unfurled gorgeous, fourth-­wall-­ breaking drawings around one basic plot: ­whether the mouse ­will successfully hit the cat with a brick. The through line of the strip is desire, as Youn’s own title affirms: Ignatz revolves around the unreachable person on whom the abject, desperate, needy self concentrates. The plot of desire—­often desire ignored or rejected—­repeats in each of the book’s four sections. “Once more an urge; once more a succumb,” as an epigram to one poem puts it, quoting Herriman’s bulldog (44). The book does not mention cats or mice, and the bricks hurled are figurative. But sometimes, fleetingly, it reflects Krazy’s “werra roughish, and werra uncootish lengwidge.”51 On rare occasions, Youn buries playfulness that would be vis­i­ble only if one had seen a par­tic­u­lar Herriman strip. For instance, the

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solitary two lines of “For to­night I am a win­dow / in a cottage by the sea” (Ignatz 8), isolated by stark white space and set off on ­either side by asterisks, resemble a bare, minimalist poem by Rae Armantrout, but w ­ ere sung by Krazy in 1929 (the cat was mangling a then-­popular song about a lonely ­widow in a cottage by the sea).52 Youn does not mimic Herriman’s misspelled malapropian idiolect at any length; but her phrases sometimes recall the way his cat warps language, as when the speaker of “I-40 Ignatz” exclaims, “o night // of joy / and blitz” (27). Though responding to the lights of “trucks so // gaily caparisoned” along the highway, that phrase also evokes sex, a plea­sure very close to threat throughout Ignatz. While the book’s most vis­ib­ le comic iridescence comes from interactions between the objective and the personal (which I discuss over the next few pages), ­there is also the iridescence between comic strip and ambitious poetic sequence. Like Herriman, whose inanimate world has more of a mind of its own than the fixated main characters do (trees walk out of the boxes of their panels, clouds shape themselves into elephants), Youn summons a fluid, sometimes anthropomorphic backdrop: The clockwork saguaros sprout extra ­faces like planaria stroked by a razor. Chug say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-­powered ground squirrels (Ignatz 29). Although that simile—in which the multiarmed cactus is one of the tiny flatworms that when sliced can regenerate into multiheaded creatures—is not from Herriman, it suggests how Youn plays not simply with the Krazy Kat aesthetic but with its under­lying tones of playfulness and heartache; her mixture of dissection and invention gestures at the cruelty lurking in the whimsy of Herriman’s panels. In this poem, “Ersatz Ignatz,” the landscape is a stage, and the love object is i­magined as the lead in an opera, about to emerge: “­He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite / pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.” Although ­there is no first-­person pronoun, the poem’s terrain is molded by the lyric speaker’s anticipation. So from one ­angle, ­there is the love object, glimpsed mostly through memory or the imagination, addressed in fragments. Tilting the poem slightly, ­there is the bundle of ferocious energy that is Herriman’s mouse, and which is reproduced in the front ­matter of Ignatz: circles for a potbelly and large ears, sticks for tail and arms and legs, severe eyebrows, a snout. H ­ ere is a relatively explicit instance of how Youn layers, from “Ignatz Pacificus”:

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Travelling backwards on the Amtrak Surfliner, Ignatz is firelord of the Pacific, CEO of the thermal inversion, true husband of the Santa Ana wind. Observe his hands, sowers of wildfire, hovering over the waveembroidered armrests, see the tray ­table fruitlessly offering up tidbits to his gaze. (Ignatz 25) This opening echoes Geoffrey Hill’s comically anachronistic list of titles for the eighth c­ entury Offa, at the start of Mercian Hymns (“King of the perennial holly-­g roves, the riven sand-­/ stone: overlord of the M5”),53 but it is mainly a fantasia on the beloved’s name, the root of which is ignis. Youn’s hymn links “firelord” with “Pacific,” brick-­heaving energy with peace, and flame with ocean—­while also satirizing con­temporary Southern California. The same contrast ends the poem: Ignatz is a still-­burning “ember” floating “on the blue surface of a kidney-­shaped pool,” an image that sees the myriad private swimming pools of desiccated Los Angeles from above. This poem is not simply mock-­heroic: it depicts how the self hiding around the edges of this poem sees and thinks of the beloved everywhere, how one feels as if the beloved alters the landscape. Krazy’s boundless devotion charges ­these disparate meta­phors, which invent a corporate administrator for a meteorological phenomenon, and make Ignatz so power­ful as to bring up the Santa Ana wind that is mythically responsible for tension in LA. So too in the “The L ­ abors of Ignatz,” which sees the beloved as Hercules, thus splicing the cartoon world with myth. Cerberus turns into Offissa Pupp, and the girdle of Hippolyta is “the ­belt / of your bathrobe // forlorn on the floor” (Ignatz 22). Youn drops tiny reminders of her source (­there is a “cop car” “drows[ing]” in “I-40 Ignatz,” a reference to the way the bulldog is often two steps b­ ehind the mouse) not just as homage to Herriman, but as a way of underscoring the extreme repetition of love: the lyric poems from 2010 have the same eternal plot as the drawings from 1922. Although ­there is a parodic quality in such moments, something comic also arises h ­ ere through intensity itself—­for example, through how emotion seeps into the lonesome bathrobe b­ elt, into a putatively ultralyrical moment, alliterating and metrical and imagistic. Each of Youn’s books, or at least the three so far, circle around desire: a poem from Barter (2003) admits that “I’d like a trophy of you / for ­every room in the h ­ ouse,” which gets at the insistence and possessiveness of love, the irony by which love is sparked by another but is inherently self-­interested.54 Ignatz presses at the contradiction Auden senses in romantic desire, where we “per-

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suade ourselves that we value the person of another, when, in fact, we only value her (or him) as a sexual object, and it allows us to endow her with an imaginary personality which has l­ittle or no relation to the real one.”55 That self-­deluding is analyzed in “On Ignatz’s Eyebrow”; the following lines begin from what seems to be Ignatz’s own perspective, and articulate the comic friction pre­sent around intense emotion. Ignatz “feels his anger / dissipating”: dissipating in that self-­same gap between the trigger and the smack between his anger and its object the way one eyebrow can never meet the other in a true unbroken v no m ­ atter how doomy how dour how darksome his invariable frown. (Ignatz 42–43) The sentence swings around to the perspective of the effusive, devoted, linguistically unorthodox Krazy; though it originated in an examination of Ignatz’s own feeling, it moves to a rapturous description of how that feeling is externally expressed: “how doomy how dour / how darksome.” (And again, Youn invites one to recollect Herriman’s Ignatz, whose cartoon eyebrows make their fiercest unbroken v as he winds up to hurl his brick.) In Auden’s view, “sexual desire, ­because of its impersonal and unchanging character, is a comic contradiction. The relation between e­ very pair of lovers is unique, but in bed they can only do what all mammals do.”56 Youn exposes that contradiction—­the feeling of something one of a kind, the knowledge of something common to all mammals—­not only by superimposing erotic attraction onto a comic strip, but through moments of explicit irony. Desire ­here is consuming but also repetitive, generic, and embarrassing. The m ­ iddle of one poem, for example, inserts a parenthetical, wry “(and the chorus kicks in),” at which a previously unannounced chorus suddenly sings about Ignatz yet again (Ignatz 32). Like Berryman’s references to stages and microphones, Youn’s theatrical scenery and chorus set the personal into a context of per­for­ mance: the refrain, which sounds like something out of musical theater, turns the preceding twenty lines into part of an act. In such poems, I hear an acute awareness of how one’s desires can be shameful and repetitive, but also of how the articulation of t­ hose desires can itself be shameful and repetitive. Recall Youn’s declaration that trying to convey one’s feelings in a poem is like trying to convey them in a car (honk, swerve, tailgate, jam on the brakes). In Ignatz, forms underscore the poems’ constructedness—­the way each is unmistakably verse, something unyielding and “made out of words,” as Youn put it in her statement for Fence. Humor is

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most audible when a form makes itself felt, as in “So Sweetly Slumbers Ignatz in His Sylvan Bowers,” which offers an Ashberyean pastoral: breeze breeze a dappling breeze sunlight pitterpatter the silver birch trees (Ignatz 57) Once again, this poem avoids an explicit first-­person subject, but it seems almost a cartoon of lyric, in its rhymes and its tweeness and its imagining of an Edenic world for the beloved. And then it quickly arrives at an exclamation that is also a parody of Ezra Pound, the supposedly austere opposite to pitterpatter and literary clichés like “sylvan bowers”: “but ­there      a black blot      against a green / a green bough” (Ignatz 58). The blot is from the world of the comic strip; it is the glove of Offissa Pupp, which keeps the sun from shining on the slumbering Ignatz. This poem is in part a meditation both on genre and on poetic quality, on experimental layouts and a long-­dead rhyme. Though each of the four sections of Ignatz is markedly experimental (prose, grids of solitary words f­ ree of syntactic structures, a poem whose lines mimic the swing of a tetherball), this book has something in common with a conventional sonnet sequence: it has a one-­track mind. Each of its cyclical sections opens with two slim rhymed quatrains addressing the beloved, like an Elizabethan song (each thus begins with a quin­tes­sen­tial lyric: ­these quatrains are some of the few places where an I appears openly). Each section ends with a poem entitled “The Death of Ignatz,” the end of yet another infatuation. And though the nine or ten titles in between ­these constants vary, each has the word Ignatz in it. “Ignatz in Furs,” “X as a Function of Distance from Ignatz,” “Springes to Catch Ignatz”: such titles, like their intensely wide-­ranging forms, are variations on a theme, where every­thing in the world relates back to the object of obsession. As in Lowell’s sonnets, the sequence h ­ ere itself registers the shame of ­going on, of heading into the cycle again and again. In her 2017 interview with Bansinath, Youn discussed the status of identity in con­temporary poetry establishments, and the institutional values (which she traces back through the New Criticism to Eliot) that have kept it somewhat peripheral. A view in which the writer’s “biography does not ­matter,” she explained, “is exclusive of writing about personal identity, and particularly about race and gender issues.”57 For someone whose influences include Hayes (in a version of his “golden shovel,” discussed in chapter 4, Youn uses the

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rhymes of Milton’s Sonnet 19 as a point of departure for fourteen compressed essays), Armantrout, Claudia Rankine, and Anne Carson, and who does address issues of race and gender, the idea that poems stemming from one’s private life are less innovative than so-­called impersonal poems would be baffling.58 Her work splices the patently experimental—­disjointed forms, enigmatic fragments, an absence of I—­with intensely personal subjects. Youn’s most recent book, Blackacre (2016), makes still more clear how such critical assumptions can provoke sly responses: “Redacre” (which takes an anapestic ballad stanza and runs it three lines wide across the page, so as to make a grid of staggered rhymes) stems from her experience with infertility, and centers on the way w ­ omen become conditioned to feel shame at not having ­children. “Goldacre” is prefaced by an epigram from Snopes, debunking the legend that Twinkies are formed by chemical reaction. It figures whiteness as “what was piped into you, what seeped into each vacant cell, each airhole, each pore,” undermining the idea that “you had started out skinless, shameless, blameless, creamy.”59 Youn ­handles the snack food in varyingly lush, abstract, dry, deadpan ways: “as if      though sponge-­like, you could remain shelf-­stable for de­cades, part embalming fluid, part rocket fuel, part glue.” It mocks the fiction that one’s inner life is somehow inherent and unchanging, that one could write poetry devoid of personal identity; of course one’s self and writing are bound up with one’s surroundings. Embalming fluid, rocket fuel, and glue produce something literally timeless, transcendent, and coherent, like a poem as construed in accounts of lyric descending from the New Criticism. When Youn writes, in a 2015 essay, that “We never start with a blank slate—­each acre has been previously tenanted, enriched and depleted, built up and demolished,” she c­ ounters the image of a poem as the realm of an individual interiority, as completely set off from the social or historical.60 Rather than affirming a subjectivity as pristine, Blackacre makes even the shortest and most visibly lyric poems chart ­those changing acres (as the repetitive build-up and razing of desire in Ignatz does). Introducing “Redacre” at one reading, Youn explained that the poem arose from her interest in “what twines itself so deeply into your sense of self that you ­don’t even know it’s ­there,” in how material like ­children’s books affects one’s ­later and seemingly most innate beliefs.61 Calling lyric singularity into question, her work thwarts readings for consistent voice, and demonstrates that the precarious and embarrassing ­thing one calls a self—­having a race and a gender, modified by cultures—­permeates what one writes. Achieving a range of subjects and styles that exceeds most avant-­garde and establishment classifications, the deeply submerged comedy of Ignatz comes from strong emotion felt as such but also as trivial or reprehensible, filtered through

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restraint and indirection. This tension—­between what is extremely personal and the impersonal way it is said—­activates the disturbing intimacy of the last poem I want to consider, “Semper Ignatz.” Although tonal worlds away from Ammons’s “Their Sex Life,” it shares Ammons’s indirect sense of referring to the poet’s own world and life, and works within and around lyric territory. It reads in its entirety: How could it have been other than abrupt when as ever in medias Ignatz remarked, Sometimes

I ­don’t

like

fucking.

Whoosh!

A billow

of white cambric sheets the scene, through which her nipples glow dully, taillights

in snow. (30)

We have seen the comedy of lyric as involving nuances of feeling and self-­ regard; this damagingly self-­conscious moment evokes a memory (of a sexual encounter and rejection) and emotion that would be more commonly relayed in the first person. Although it has been removed to the third, it suggests a speaker who feels deeply, and another person who does not care; shame is somehow both experienced immediately and recollected from an indeterminate distance. While about abjection, it is handled with controlled and precise syntax, and even a phrase of italicized Latin for euphemism. But the “Whoosh!” that cuts into this scene is a sound effect that should be in a speech b­ ubble. It represents, in cartoon, the way that the mind as adumbrated in this poem tries to blank the moment out. Youn renders a single remark seared into one’s memory, and the way that—­even as the subject backs away from the encounter and the memory—­the mind turns its camera humiliatingly onto the still-­aroused body. Though feeling ­here is not explicit, it seems to bend the form, pushing words away from each other on the page (as if to suggest how what was said lingers in one’s mind, or perhaps how the words ­were said in the first place). What happens in bed, to use Auden’s phrase, is recalled in all its shame and with a ­bitter kind of wit, a wit that can note merely that Ignatz’s statement was “abrupt,” can hear it as a “remar[k].” And the poem is also a commentary on the devices of poetry, on the way that this speaker turns in retreat to poetic meta­ phor, fusing the shame of the body with the quasi-­imagistic snow.

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As the con­temporary lyric continues to assem­ble a self, its comic dimensions stem from—­and take stock of—­the legacy of poetic idealization; the poets of this book find themselves trying to write about the personal in a genre with expectations that make a comic posture an almost inescapable result. When Parker makes a poem out of a list, when rhymes materialize without obvious reason in Shapero, and when Youn’s chorus kicks in, you can hear some of the multiple layers of embarrassment that cling to the urge to write about the self in a poem. First, ­there is the embarrassment of one’s life, especially the feeling that one’s self has come to be defined by a role that does not quite fit, that one is reducing oneself to a character. That feeling appears at the end of “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World,” a desolate and funny poem from Lucie Brock-­Broido’s last book. “For whom left am I first?” the speaker asks; then, her question unanswered, she closes: We have come to terms with our Self Like a marmoset getting out of her ­Great Ape suit.62 The squirrel-­sized monkey, far too small for her chosen costume, could climb out of a gorilla suit instantly; for a moment, the simile implies that all pretense has been cleared away. But two minor discrepancies in grammar complicate the reconciliation or self-­understanding achieved. Though the “We” and single “Self ” might be t­ hose of a comically royal We and comically impor­tant Self, they also underscore how tenuous and contingent one’s sense of self hood can be; recollect the 10,000 selves that Marcus Wicker imagines, in the first few pages of this book. And t­ here is a slight lack of parallel between verb tenses: though one has come to terms, in a fully accomplished pre­sent perfect, it is as if one is “getting out” in an ongoing pre­sent participle. The marmoset is still in the pro­cess of extricating herself from the ­Great Ape suit, and one is still stuck with one’s ill-­fitting, not-­quite-­detachable sense of self, harnessed ridiculously—­and abjectly—to its inevitable poses and aspirations. Second, that embarrassment or shame about one’s self is compounded by the embarrassment or shame of one’s elevated genre. The concept of lyric poetry as the genre in which the self talks naturally and directly to itself (thus having no notion of an audience or per­for­mance) has had a per­sis­tent residual influence; its legacy, which continues to heighten the feeling that one is performing even when one is trying to be truthful, leads the expressive autobiographical poem to scrutinize not only self-­absorption but self-­exposure. In its half-­intimacy and unavoidable postures, it is like stand-­up; accordingly, I take my last image for poetic abjection from the opening lines of Maria Bamford’s

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Old Baby (2017). Old Baby consists of sixty minutes of self-­deprecation; it draws together self-­involvement, affluent white femininity (“Just know what one individual managed to accomplish with a modicum of effort, and e­ very pos­ si­ble advantage”), and a precarious emotional state (“I went into a psychiatric fa­cil­i­ty, which, if you ­haven’t been, uh, ­don’t feel bad if you go, and, uh, ­they’re uniformly awful. ­You’re not at the wrong one. ­They’re all bad, ­they’re all bad”). Bamford begins with a quiet enactment of how, in stand-up as in a lyric poem, one always has an audience, cannot ignore the audience, w ­ ill never be ­free of the necessary deceit of per­for­mance. She starts her per­for­mance not in a hall, but in her room. Nobody ­else is in the room. She is talking into a mirror, intently (almost gravely), and she warns her audience that what they are about to hear might not be for them. If they want to take a break for a bit, they should: I always like to tell audiences pre-­program, just in case ­you’re brought ­here by a friend: sometimes friends lead us astray. I had two very close friends, my parents, invite me to go see a film. I said, “Of course I’ll go see that movie with you, b­ ecause you love me. Why on earth would you want to see me suffer?” And then I sat through Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, which if you ­haven’t seen, as far as I’m concerned, is a fourteen-­ hour, real-­time documentary about a gentle ­horse struggling in vain to escape from barbed wire. This may be your War Horse. If that’s the case, do as I did. Take a lap outside. Get yourself a treat. The joke dispersed through this opening centers on the embarrassments of performing one’s self. The audience addressed—­her reflection, with whom she maintains steady, earnest eye contact and about whom she seems genuinely concerned—­cannot leave, cannot take a lap outside. This is to say: Bamford can get away neither from the crowd for whom she is recording a Netflix special, nor from herself. It is a War Horse she both makes and has to watch: an hour-­long strug­gle, in vain, to escape from a troubled, cringe-­making, extremely eccentric self, and from the act entangled with it. Though she intimates that she’s speaking “pre-­program,” she is not; each attempt to get ­free of per­for­mance is pushed back into per­for­mance. What makes Bamford’s pervasive abjection funny is, again, the intersection of accuracy and distortion, of luck building up amid embarrassment and shame. Her explicit likening of her act to a major motion picture, for example, is both contrastive (it puts a bombastic epic next to one person talking in level, ordinary tones) and connective (each genre can be difficult to sit through; each manipulates and can be sentimental). And though her implicit comparison of herself to the trapped ­horse is snarled up by a detail she omits (he gets

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out of the wire), the omission is pointed: it is, si­mul­ta­neously, an effective swipe at the spirit of the movie and a view into how Bamford sees her unappetizing per­for­mance. “As far as I’m concerned” is a more literal phrase than it might have seemed; one is left with the impression that she r­ eally means her warning about her act. Her eccentricity seems not contrived or exaggerated but unsuccessfully suppressed. Her strange line of thinking (­she’ll go to the movies with her parents, she decides, “­because [they] love me” and therefore would not “want to see me suffer”; it seems that she thought this decision through aloud, in front of them) comes off as how she actually reasons in the ­actual world. So what is transcribed above manages to be both an artificial gimmick with a mirror, and a true-­to-­life enactment of one’s nerves and peculiarities and shame. It is self-­conscious, but one is inevitably self-­conscious; it is a shtick, but one has a shtick even when one is most sincere or natu­ral. As recent comedians and poets bear out, a self is never finished and simply pre­sent; some assembly is continually required.

N ote s

Introduction

1. Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, filmed at the Hollywood Palladium, October 22–23, 1981, Columbia Pictures, 1982. 2. Marcus Wicker, Maybe the Saddest ­Thing (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), 7. 3. Pryor, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip. 4. The idea that twentieth-­century American lyric is essentially not funny can be found in studies of comedy and of poetry: John Vernon claims that “When con­ temporary poetry is funny, it is usually anti-­lyrical, which means anti-­poetic,” and Jonathan Holden suggests that unlike jokes, poems “summon desirable feelings not in order to devalue them or to dispel them but in order to dwell on them, to work them up, to glorify them.” Vernon, “Fresh Air: Humor in Con­temporary Poetry,” in Comic Relief: Humor in Con­temporary American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Champaign: Illinois University Press, 1978), 304, and Holden, Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 165. On the relations between the avant-­garde and comedy, see Mark Silverberg, “The Politics of Taste: Comedy Camp and the Neo-­Avant-­Garde,” in The New York School Poets and the Neo-­Avant-­Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (New York: Routledge, 2016), 135–198. See also David Lehman, who asserts that “in academic Amer­ i­ca the bias against humor in poetry is matched only by the bias in ­favor of the short, sincere, autobiographical anecdote,” a bias he finds misguided in The Last Avant-­garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor, 1999), 204. 5. Hilton Als, “A Pryor Love,” New Yorker, September 13, 1999. 6. Adrian Matejka, interview by Anna Claire Hodge, Southeast Review, July 3, 2017: https://­www​.­southeastreview​.­org​/­single​-­post​/­2017​/­07​/­03​/­Author​-­QA​-­Adrian​ -­Matejka; for a recording of “Stand Up,” from the Propositions series at the New Museum (March 30, 2013), see Mores McWreath, “A Proposition by Cathy Park Hong: Stand Up @ The New Museum,” YouTube video, posted May 15, 2013: https://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=K ­ Vf0CGEi2nU. Ross Gay has also singled out Pryor as “an amazing teacher . . . ​to poets” in an interview with Dave Roderick, “The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Ross Gay,” The Rumpus, March 13, 2015: https://­therumpus​.­net​ /­2015​/­03​/­the​-­rumpus​-­late​-­nite​-­poetry​-­show​-­9​-­ross​-­gay​/­. 7. Rei Terada, “­After the Critique of Lyric,” PMLA 123, no. 1 ( January 2008): 197. My emphasis. 8. ­Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?” PMLA 123, no. 1 ( January 2008): 183. For a full account of lyricization, and of “lyric reading,” see Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005). 179

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TO PAGES 3 –7

9. ­Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2. 10. See Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Con­temporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1–41. 11. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 4th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston: 1981), 99. The definition remains the same as in the 1957 first edition. 12. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 226. 13. See Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 129–132; and White, Lyric Shame, 115–117. 14. John Stuart Mill, Essays on Poetry (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 6. Emphasis in original. 15. Mill, Essays, 8 and 12; Sarah Mackenzie Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 1. 16. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1961), 509. 17. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957), 50; Tilottama Rajan, “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 196; Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 11. See also T. S. Eliot’s image for the “first voice” of poetry, that “of the poet talking to himself— or to nobody”: “The Three Voices of Poetry,” reprinted in Jackson and Prins, Lyric Theory Reader, 192. Theodor Adorno claims that lyric is “subjective expression of a social antagonism,” in Notes to Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:37. 18. Jackson, “Lyric,” in The Prince­ton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), 833. 19. Herbert Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Jackson and Prins, Lyric Theory Reader, 152. 20. Frederick Buell, “Ammons’s Peripheral Vision: Tape for the Turn of the Year and Garbage,” in Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A. R. Ammons’s Long Poems, ed. Steven P. Schneider (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 215–216. 21. The dramatic side grows more audible if one hears the rhythms of Lady Macbeth’s agitated, sleepwalking “No more o’ that, my lord” in “No more of that, my friend.” Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1984), 5.1.43. 22. Shira Wolosky, “The Claims of Rhe­toric: T ­ oward a Historical Poetics (1820– 1900),” American Literary History 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 27. 23. R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), 337. 24. Cleanth Brooks, “The Formalist Critics,” Kenyon Review 13, no. 1 (Winter 1951): 72. 25. Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 71. 26. John C. Gerber, The College Teaching of En­glish (New York: Appleton-­Century-­ Crofts, 1965), 40. My emphasis. 27. Morgan Parker, ­There Are More Beautiful T ­ hings Than Beyoncé (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2017), 57.

NOTES TO PA GES 8 – 1 0

181

28. White, Lyric Shame, 266–267. 29. Ian Brodie, A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 81. 30. See Christopher Grobe, The Art of Confession: The Per­for­mance of Self from Robert Lowell to Real­ity TV (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 1–26. For recent histories of stand-up, and of how by the 1950s, preset jokes and routines had begun to give way to something more unscripted and personal, see Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—­the Under­ground Tradition of African-­American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Knopf, 2009); Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-­Up in the 1970s Changed Amer­ic­ a (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 31. Shelley Berman, “The Morning a­ fter the Night Before,” from Inside Shelley Berman (Verve, 1959). 32. Lainie Kazan, quoted in Nachman, Seriously Funny, 314. 33. John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in Amer­i­ca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 4. W. H. Auden describes a similar feeling—­“R ­ eally, must you, / Over-­familiar / Dense companion, / Be t­here always?”—in “You,” Collected ­Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), 543. For Kristeva’s account of abjection, especially of how “the one haunted by it [is] literally beside himself,” see Julie Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1–31. Throughout ­these pages, I am focusing on Limon’s par­tic­u­lar use of the term, that of the self-­dramatizing shame to do with the self and with presenting it. I am not dealing extensively with the power­ful forces of exclusion documented in Judith Butler’s Bodies That ­Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). However, the short, provisional cultural history Limon sketches indicates how the context in which he theorizes abjection is close to Butler’s: noting that straight male Jewish performers dominated stand-up in 1960, he draws on Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) to suggest that “the Jewish approach to white Amer­i­ca . . . ​was made through blackface” (7), and more specifically by invoking blackness, queerness, and femaleness. This use of conventionally abjected bodies (­those bodies that Butler describes as not “­matter[ing]” in Western culture) is of a piece with how Berryman turns to minstrelsy, and Lowell to black, queer, and female personae. 34. René Girard, “Perilous Balance: A Comic Hypothesis,” MLN 87, no. 7 (December 1972): 821–822. 35. Girard, “Perilous Balance,” 826. He continues: “We are constantly told, therefore, on the one hand that we are absolute nonentities, on the other that a world is being created which w ­ ill be entirely dominated by h ­ uman ­will” (836); this “we” feels helplessly flimsy, even nonhuman, and yet is susceptible to delusions about being significant. 36. Limon, Stand-­up, 79. 37. Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2012), 7. 38. Rochelle Rives, Modernist Impersonalities: Affect, Authority, and the Subject (New York: Springer, 2012), 7; Limon, Stand-­up, 71.

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39. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 63. 40. For how postwar American poets absorb developments in psy­chol­ogy, see Nikki Skillman, The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 41. Marta Figlerowicz, Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Lit­er­a­ture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 21. Bonnie Costello, finding in recent American poetry “an audacious, risk-­taking humor, as dark as it is ‘light,’ ” argues that the “prevalence and development [of a tragicomic mode] since the mid-­twentieth ­century suggests that the optimism and moral bearing we associate with e­ arlier American comic imagination may be struggling with an increasing sense of uncertainty and vulnerability in other arenas.” Costello, “Tragicomic Mode in American Poetry: ‘Awful but Cheerful,’ ” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 459–460. 42. Mill, Essays, 12. 43. Kenneth Koch, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (New York: Knopf, 2007), 643. 44. Koch’s passing reference to the German expressionist Trakl points to a ­silent reworking of a poem of vehement, explicit feeling. Trakl’s 1913 “Zu Abend mein Herz” begins, “Am Abend hört man den Schrei der Fledermäuse”—­in the eve­ning one hears the cry of bats, an overdetermined image of distress. Koch’s end-­of-­the-­century mistranslation, which places Trakl’s agitated poem b­ ehind a much lower-­key address, is self-­conscious about its place in what Koch sees as a tradition of manifestly expressive poetry: on the one hand, it is participating in a tradition of writing about one’s private emotions, and on the other, the emotions h ­ ere are so etiolated as to seem untransmittable. Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Alexander Stillmark (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 10. 45. Limon discusses this aspect of stand-­up’s abject structure at length: the comedian cannot just dress in a wholly new part as an actor could, but neither can they avoid the pretense inherent in being on a stage. Limon, Stand-­up, 105. 46. Rebecca Wanzo, “Precarious-­Girl Comedy: Issa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abjection Aesthetics,” Camera Obscura 31, no. 2 (2016): 36. 47. Limon, Stand-­up, 6. 48. Lucille Clifton, Good ­Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980 (Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 1987), 51; V.  R. Lang, Poems & Plays (New York: Random House, 1975), 135. 49. Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 1–24. 50. Hughes’s “Formula”—­which opens, “Poetry should treat / Of lofty ­things”— is one early, ironic response to the idealizing of poetry; see The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Poems, 1921–1940 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 179. For recent work on how some of ­these writers dealt with institutional desiderata, see Rebecca Walkowitz on Hughes’s interest “in taking the institutional contexts of writing as the content of his work and in asking what lit­er­a­ture might make of literary ‘excellence,’ ” in “Shakespeare in Harlem: The Norton Anthology, ‘Propaganda,’ Langston Hughes,” Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 4 (December 1999): 500; Andy Hines, “Vehicles of Periodization: Melvin B. Tolson, Allen Tate, and the New Critical Police,”

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Criticism 59, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 417–439; Lena Hill’s exploration of Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery, where humor is a “cultural conduit between the black critic and the African American modernist artist”: “Laughing in the Gallery: Melvin Tolson’s Refusal to Hush,” in Humor in Modern American Poetry, ed. Rachel Trousdale (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 80; and Julia Bloch, “ ‘Shut your rhe­torics in a box’: Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyric Dilemma,” Tulsa Studies in ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture 35, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 439–462. 51. For example, see Chad Bennett’s study of how less institutional poets make “a knowing effort to reimagine emerging critical ideals of the lyric,” in Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 16. 52. Kamran Javadizadeh’s Institutionalized Lyric: American Poetry at Midcentury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming) argues that both poetry institutions and psychiatric institutions ­were crucial models to midcentury poets taking up autobiography. Langdon Hammer has linked autobiographical poetry to “questions about the professional culture out of which confessional poetry (among other midcentury poetic modes) emerges” in “Plath’s Lives: Poetry, Professionalism, and the Culture of the School,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 75, no. 1 (Summer 2001), 61. 53. Shane McCrae, interviewed by Derek Gromadzki for The Rumpus, November 27, 2016: https://­therumpus​.­net​/­2016​/­11​/­the​-­sunday​-­rumpus​-­interview​-­shane​-­mccrae​/­. 54. Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 5. Emphasis in original. 55. Grobe, Art of Confession, 39 and 40. See also Kamran Javadizadeh’s description of the confessional mode as driven by “its construction of whiteness, an identity that assumes its universality even as it anxiously apprehends its sovereignty to be ­under threat”: it “reifies the white subject whose identity it began by assuming.” Javadizadeh, “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject,” PMLA 134, no. 3 (May 2019): 477. On masculinity in midcentury criticism and poetry, see Brunner, “Policing the Mainstream/Curtailing Feminine Excess” in Cold War Poetry, 69–94; Ian Gregson’s The Male Image: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Masculinity in Postwar Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 39–66, discusses masculinity and abjection (in Kristeva’s sense of the word) in Berryman. Stephen  E. Kercher’s Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) studies midcentury comedians and “notions of heroic male rebellion,” in a time where “liberal satirists by and large represented the prerogatives and individualist ethos of the mid-­century middle-­class American male” (3). 56. A. R. Ammons, “Interview: A. R. Ammons,” by D. I. Grossvogel, Diacritics 3 (Winter 1973), 50. 57. Berryman, for example, shifts from “When Shakespeare wrote, ‘Two loves I have,’ reader, he was not kidding” (emphasis in original) to reinstate a fictive speaker, where “an abyss” opens “between [a writer’s] person and his persona” in The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 316 and 321. 58. In My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Daniel Tiffany has pointed to a sense of abjection threatening between modernist poetic ideals and the shame of kitsch, suggesting that kitsch represents stylistic impulses poetry might be embarrassed about: “by condemning

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kitsch to the realm of the abject—­and by concealing poetry’s hidden ties to this forbidden realm—­modernism inadvertently lays a snare for itself, a rationale for the equation of poetry and kitsch” (21–22). 59. Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 54. 60. Allen Grossman, The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the ­Bitter Logic of the Poetic Princi­ ple (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 13. In Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), Grossman’s concept of the impossible ideal poem is linked to the bad verse of William Topaz McGonagall. 61. Wanzo, “Precarious-­Girl Comedy,” 36. 62. T. S. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in Jackson and Prins, Lyric Theory Reader, 200; Monica Youn, “A Symposium on Subjectivity and Style,” Fence 3, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2000–2001): http://­www​.­fenceportal​.­org​/­symposium​-­on​-­subjectivity​ -­and​-­style​/­. 63. Tommy Pico, Junk (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2018), 52. 64. G. Gabrielle Starr describes poetry as a comic target in a chapter of Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), observing that lyric “often represents a kind of ideal—of beauty, decorum, communication between hearts—­but it is an ideal that calls as loudly for violation as for worship” (125). While Starr focuses on the aspirational profundity perceived around eighteenth-­century poetry, this ideal intensifies in twentieth-­century American poetry, and promotes the send-up of poems in novels, Saturday Night Live sketches, webcomics, ­etc. 65. Rachel Trousdale makes an eloquent case for extending our ways of thinking about laughter in her introduction to Humor in American Poetry, a collection of essays stressing the interpersonal promise of comedy. Trousdale’s The Joking Voice: Humor and Empathy in Twentieth-­Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming) ­will address poetry’s intersection with more capacious comic theories as well. 66. For a detailed overview of irony’s definitions, connotations, and functions, see Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1994), 48–56. 67. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 248. 68. Limon, Stand-­up, 12–13. 69. Jonathan Winters, The Jack Paar Program, NBC, January 31, 1964. 70. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 338. 71. For recent studies of comic theory, see especially Salvatore Attardo, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor (New York: Routledge, 2017); Todd ­McGowan, Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017); John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009); Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: ­Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage, 2005); Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002). For a vivid overview of “the repertoires of comedy,” and a conception of comedy “as an instinct that can exceed specified bound­aries, as a container for expectations and surprises,” see Matthew Bevis, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3.

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72. A third theory, now somewhat neglected due to its physiological under­pinnings, centers on the relief found in unexpected psychic efficiency, identified most famously by Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905); it remains helpful to any discussion of wordplay and to many of the literally abject topics touched on in this book. For an illuminating discussion of Freud in relation to poetry, see Trousdale, “Introduction: Theories of Humor and Modern Poetry,” in Humor in Modern American Poetry, 8–10. Freud’s concept of economy also plays a role in Howard Nemerov’s “Bottom’s Dream: The Likeness of Poems and Jokes,” reprinted in A Howard Nemerov Reader (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 205–222. 73. Henri Bergson, Laughter, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 49. For Aristotle’s view of comedy as “a mimesis of baser but not wholly vicious characters,” see Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 2005), 45; and see Plato on schadenfreude, Philebus 48b8–9. 74. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 1–55. 75. In Immanuel Kant’s influential formulation, “Something absurd (something in which, therefore, the understanding can of itself find no delight) must be pre­sent in what­ever is to raise a hearty convulsive laugh.” Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, rev. and ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 161. See also Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Theory of the Ludicrous,” in The World as ­Will and Repre­sen­ta­tion, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), 2:91–101. The concept of incongruity has been generative in the past c­ entury of literary studies; Fred Miller Robinson, for example, stresses the “the paradoxical relationship between form and formlessness” in The Comedy of Language: Studies in Modern Comic Lit­er­a­ture (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1980), 16. 76. Limon, Stand-­up, 4. 77. Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 122. 78. Kant suggests a more complicated version of incongruity when he describes how “when [the joke’s] semblance has vanished into nothing, the mind looks back in order to try it over again, and thus by a rapidly succeeding tension and relaxation it is thrown to and fro and put in oscillation” in Critique of Judgement, 162. Similarly compounded opposites have intrigued several other con­temporary critics: Giovannantonio Forabosco proposes “congruent incongruity” in “Cognitive Aspects of the Humor Pro­cess: The Concept of Incongruity,” Humor 5, nos. 1–2 (1992): 45–68. Benjamin La Farge has argued that “all comedy is governed by a generic dynamic that we can call illogical logic,” in “Comedy’s Intention,” Philosophy and Lit­er­a­ture 28, no. 1 (April 2004): 134. Todd McGowan focuses on deficiency and abundance, in a study in explicit debt to Zupančič’s reevaluation of Lacan: for McGowan, comedy “reveals that our most opposed possibilities—­the moment of absolute lack and of absolute excess—­not only depend on each other but share the same structure” in Only a Joke Can Save Us, 18. 79. Zupančič, Odd One In, 52–53; 27. 80. Zupančič, Odd One In, 119. Emphasis in original. 81. Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (New York: Mari­ner, 1998), 57. 82. Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1947), 41. 83. Though “right” can sound overly warm and optimistic, I do not mean to suggest an ethical direction. ­Whether the source of comedy is in an aesthetic or a moral

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perception, one prob­ably cannot help but see one’s own circle’s jokes as more legitimate, and funnier; the laughter of one group, however, can contain the same notes of delight, triumph, or desperation as that of an opposing group, as Michael Billig has suggested. For an extended account of comedy’s moral valences, see Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 10–33. 84. Mary Douglas places a similar emphasis on comedy as both a social and aesthetic mode when she sees in an ­actual joke “a fourfold perception of the congruence of a formal pattern”—of content, structure, physical experience, and “the energy of the unconscious against the control of the conscious,” in Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 146–154. 85. Descartes traces laughter to joie (plea­sure or delight), but requires that joy be fused with hatred (haine) or won­der (l’admiration). René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), 85. 86. Philip Fisher, Won­der, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4. Although the proximity of won­der to laughter has not been explored thoroughly, Shane Ewegen has suggested that they are related as far back as Plato, and argues that Plato’s Euthydemus “shows that the comic or the ridicu­lous is such as to induce won­der,” in Plato’s “Cratylus”: The Comedy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 14. 87. On a formal level, most definitions of irony, like Quintilian’s “something which is the opposite of what is actually said” or Hutcheon’s “a kind of simultaneous perception of more than one meaning,” suggest princi­ples of embrangled doubleness similar to what Zupančič and Limon point to in comedy. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 3:401; Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 60. Irony, like paradox, gestures more distantly t­oward what’s amiss and what fits. It heightens into a comic experience at moments—­think of Wicker finding the image of a “fire engine red suit”—­where a sufficiently strong emotion of won­der or delight is an ingredient. 88. This book uses the words comedy and comic more often than the words humor and humorous ­because the latter hold connotations of warmth and geniality that the former, to my ears, do not; George Meredith describes the comic as “differ[ing] from satire, in not sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, and from humour, in not comforting them and tucking them up,” in An Essay on Comedy: And the Uses of the Comic Spirit, ed. Lane Cooper (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 134. 89. See Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 28, Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Re­nais­sance, ed. Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 3–13; and Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 90. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1982), 59. 91. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 536. 92. Charles Henry Rowell, “ ‘The Poet in the Enchanted Shoe Factory’: An Interview with Terrance Hayes,” Callaloo 27, no. 4 (2004): 1076. My italics. 93. Wanda Coleman, Imagoes (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1983), 160. 94. Bernadette Mayer, A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New York: New Directions, 1992), 9. 95. Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2006), 45.

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1. Comedy in an Age of Close Reading

1. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), 9. 2. John Berryman, Dream Song 75, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). ­Future references to The Dream Songs ­will be cited in the text, by song number. 3. John Cohen, ed., The Essential Lenny Bruce (New York: Ballantine, 1967), 222. For an extended reading of the Bruce threat, especially of the way it capitalizes on the confused relation between audience and performer, see John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in Amer­i­ca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 11–27. 4. ­Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 12. 5. John Berryman, letter to Ann Berryman, [August 1964], John Berryman Papers (Mss 43), Upper Midwest Literary Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota (hereafter Berryman Papers). 6. On Berryman’s place in confessional poetry, see Philip Coleman, John Berryman’s Public Vision: Relocating the Scene of Disorder (Dublin: University College Press, 2014), 3–21. 7. For the primary study of humor in The Dream Songs, see Ronald Wallace’s God Be with the Clown (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1984), 171–201. Wallace describes how Berryman’s comic mode draws on the princi­ples of the alazon and eiron, the figures of self-­deceiving braggart and ironic self-­deprecator from Greek comedy. Anthony Caleshu’s “Affective Postures in The Dream Songs,” in Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds., ­After Thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 101–120, also bears on this chapter’s interest in comedy and per­for­mance. 8. “Silence and Breath: Kaveh Akbar and Kazim Ali,” Asian American Writers’ Workshop, June 2, 2017: https://­aaww​.­org​/­silence​-­and​-­breath​-­kaveh​-­akbar​-­and​-­kazim​-­ali​/­. 9. I am grateful to an anonymous reader who encouraged me to bring Mill into this book, especially in the chapters on Berryman and Ammons. 10. Gregory Corso, The Happy Birthday of Death (New York: New Directions, 1960), 29. 11. Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (Urbana: ­Illinois University Press, 2001), 6. 12. Garrick Davis, ed., Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism (Athens: Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 2008), 237. 13. Davis, Praising It New, 376. 14. Cleanth Brooks and T. V. F. Brogan, “The New Criticism,” in The New Prince­ton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), 834. 15. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.  S. Eliot (New York: New ­Directions, 1968), 11. 16. Pound, Literary Essays, 7. 17. Stevie Smith, Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), 332. 18. William K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 165. 19. Anne Ferry, “Love rhymes with of,” Modernism/Modernity 7, no. 3 (September 2000), 435.

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20. Hugh Kenner, “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (Fall 2004), 394. 21. Peter Denman surveys Berryman’s many patterns of rhyme in Coleman and McGowan, ­After Thirty Falls, 93. 22. In general, Henry is a pessimistic or even fatalistic rhymer. Song 94’s image of “God, / tuning in from abroad” recognizes that God’s absence is inevitable. When Henry starts the morning in Song 140—­“In the first of dawn, / he fails a l­ittle, which he figured on”—­the very sound of lackadaisical correspondence confirms the certainty of failing. So too with Song 209’s “Henry lay cold & golden in the snow / t­ oward whom the universe once more howled ‘No’ ”: you can hear the “No” coming, just as Henry’s glum “once more” anticipates it. 23. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1979), 158. 24. Fussell, Poetic Meter, 159. 25. For how Berryman worked against “the New Critical emphasis on the poem as an autonomous, closed form,” see Gareth Reeves’s “Songs of the Self: Berryman’s Whitman,” Romanticism 14, no. 1 (April 2008), 47. Brendan Cooper explores Berryman’s “inclination for a more ‘personal’ reading of Eliot that challenges New Critical assumptions” in Dark Airs: John Berryman and the Spiritual Politics of Cold War Poetry (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 29. 26. John Berryman, letter to R.  P. Blackmur, October  8, 1936; R.  P. Blackmur ­Papers (C0227), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Prince­ton University Library. 27. Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University Press of ­Virginia, 1999), 128. 28. John Berryman, letter to Allen Tate, October 11, 1936; Allen Tate Papers (C0106), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Prince­ton University Library. 29. Berryman, We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His ­Mother, ed. Richard Kelly (New York: Norton, 1988), 55. 30. Yvor Winters, “Three Poets,” Hudson Review 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1948), 404–405. 31. One undated scrap of paper in Berryman’s archives is entitled “How + ­whether to write criticism”; it begins with a list of possibilities, each of which is rejected by a pencil that bears down more firmly with ­every passing ugh: “crit theory ugh / Eliot’s sugg’s ugh / [. . .] heavy-­handed acad. New Crit. ugh,” Berryman Papers. 32. Berryman, “The Old Criticism,” Berryman Papers. 33. See M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 123. John Fuller regretted “the carelessness, romanticisms, and sentimentalities that turn up almost as frequently as the fragments of taut perceptions and the occasional ­really striking and moving passages.” Fuller, “Mr Berryman Shays His Sing,” The Guardian (December 4, 1964): 7. 34. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 111. 35. Tate, quoted in Travisano, Midcentury Quartet, 81. David Perkins writes that “no generalization can be made except that Berryman uses any language that seems effective. . . . ​Sometimes the highjinks have a par­tic­u­lar function in their context; sometimes they merely signal a break-­loose, slapdash state of mind.” Perkins, A History of

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Modern Poetry, vol. 2, Modernism and ­After (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 401. Kevin Young finds that “Henry, while likeable, often vexes us, just as the poems . . . ​provide an odd mix of monotony and ‘scrambling, sitting, spattering’ rhythm.” Young, “Responsible Delight. Revaluation: John Berryman,” Kenyon Review 21, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 161. 36. Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 270. 37. Umberto Eco, V.  V. Ivanov, and Monica Rector, Carnival!, ed. Thomas  A. ­Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 1984), 2. 38. Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 36. 39. Kevin Young, The Grey A ­ lbum: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2012), 218. 40. For example, see Andy Hines’s examination of Tate’s introduction to Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, where to “avoid criticism that considers a poet’s racial background, Tate molds Tolson’s identity into the assumed identity of the poet: a white man writing on behalf of humanity.” Hines, “Vehicles of Periodization: Melvin B. Tolson, Allen Tate, and the New Critical Police,” Criticism 59, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 422. 41. Matthew R. Meier and Chad M. Nelson, “ ‘Would You Want Your ­Sister to Marry One of Them?’ Whiteness, Stand-­Up, and Lenny Bruce,” in Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-­Up Comedy and the Rhe­toric of Social Change, ed. Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt (New York: Routledge, 2016), 93. Berryman did call Ralph Ellison, repeatedly, to read drafts of songs to him and to hear his “reaction to [Berryman’s] uses of dialect”; Ellison had the “amus[ed]” impression that he was being put in the position of “a long-­distant [sic] Mister Interlocutor—or was it Mister Tambo.” Ralph Ellison, quoted in Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1990), 387. 42. Peter Maber, “ ‘So-­called black’: Reassessing John Berryman’s Blackface Minstrelsy,” Arizona Quarterly 64, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 134, 146. 43. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Re­nais­sance, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11. 44. While in college, for example, Berryman turned to blackface and nonce words to downplay and thereby exaggerate his situation: “I be in a berry bad state—­sleepless & gruffgruff.” John Berryman, letter to E. M. Halliday [ca. October 6, 1935], Berryman Papers. 45. Compare con­temporary white Americans’ partial imitations of black American vernacular, as when the habitual “be” is used on social media almost as a kind of shorthand for “I’m being funny.” On digital blackface (the white use of largely black reaction gifs and black vernacular), see Laur M. Jackson, “Memes and Misogynoir,” The Awl, August 28, 2014: https://­www​.­theawl​.­com​/­2014​/­08​/­memes​-­and​-­misogynoir​ /­. For a history of white attitudes to black speech in the United States, see Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black Amer­i­ca (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 167–200. 46. Harry Belafonte, “A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in Amer­i­ca,” ABC Stage 67, broadcast April 6, 1967; described in Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015), 167–169.

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47. Michael S. Harper, “Tongue-­Tied in Black and White,” in Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 10. 48. Tyehimba Jess, Olio (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2016). 49. For further discussion of the minstrel dialect in The Dream Songs, see Kathe ­Davis, “ ‘Honey Dusk Do Sprawl’: Does Black Minstrel Dialect Obscure The Dream Songs?,” Language and Style 18, no. 1 (1985): 30–45; Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Kevin Young’s introduction to John Berryman, Selected Poems (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 2004), xxiv–­xxv; Cooper, Dark Airs, 177–190; Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “The Blues: A Craft Manifesto,” Kenyon Review Online, Summer 2012: https://­kenyonreview​.­org​/­kr​ -­online​-­issue​/­2012​-­summer​/­selections​/­honoree​-­fanonne​-­jeffers​-­656342​/­. 50. James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 298. 51. Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters and Other Writings, ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 27. Emphasis in original. 52. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1991), 23. 53. Helen Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 123; T. S. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in Jackson and Prins, Lyric Theory Reader, 192. 54. Vendler, The Given and the Made, 52. 55. As Cristanne Miller observes of Dickinson, parataxis suggests both the artless and the vatic or obscure: it “leads to comparisons with a child’s voice and with that of the author of the Bible.” Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 32. 56. In recordings (like the October 31, 1963 reading at the Guggenheim Museum), which lack the visual indications of line breaks, a pentameter line is audible, beginning ­after the pronounced caesura of “died,” as Henry returns to the source of ­unease. 57. Richard J. Kelly, John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Cata­logue (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 125. 58. Dickens, David Copperfield (Hertfordshire: Words­worth Editions L ­ imited, 1992), 37; for examples of Uriah’s “umbleness,” see 203, 220, and 325, among ­others. 59. Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (New York: Penguin, 2003), 62. 60. “I chuckled first”: see the end-­papers of Bellow, Herzog (the 1964 Viking edition), John Berryman’s Personal Library, Upper Midwest Literary Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 61. Quoted by John Haffenden in the preface to Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967– 1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), xviii. 62. Stephen E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 135. 63. Shelley Berman, New Sides (Verve, 1963); Elaine May and Mike Nichols, An Eve­ ning with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (Mercury Rec­ords, 1960); Rodney Dangerfield, “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me,” The Rodney Dangerfield Show (ABC, 1982). 64. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage / Random, 1990), 373. 65. Berryman, Dream Songs, xx.

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66. Samuel Maio offers a survey of previous explanations for Berryman’s use of an imaginary character, and describes Henry as “an outlet . . . ​that allowed [Berryman] to say anything,” in Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005), 116. 67. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, John Berryman’s Personal Library, University of Minnesota. 68. In a personal communication, Marissa Grunes remembered a related moment in Shakespeare: to Orlando’s “Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind,” Jaques replies, “Nay, then, God be wi’ you, an you talk in blank verse” and then leaves. As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 4.1.28–29. 69. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 7.711 and 7.930. 70. Robert Tracy, “The Trial of Lenny Bruce,” New York Times, October 30, 2018: https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2018​/­10​/­30​/­opinion​/­letters​/­lenny​-­bruce​.­html. 71. John Berryman, “Morris Gray Poetry Reading,” audio recording, The Listening Booth, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University: https://­library​.­harvard​.­edu​ /­poetry​/­listeningbooth​/­index​.­html#. 72. Louise Glück asserts that “the drama of the poems, is the absence of a firm self ”; W. S. Merwin writes that the “dif­fer­ent personae . . . ​shift their shapes, their presences, their identities insofar as they have any such t­ hing, sometimes in midsentence, with the mere changing of the indicative pronoun.” Glück, Proofs and Theories (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1995), 76; Merwin, introduction to The Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), xxv. 73. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London: Chapman and Hall, 1914), 74. 74. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: Penguin, 1994), 5; James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” in The Thurber Carnival (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1945), 37–42. 75. The name “Henry” receives about a parade of epithets, from “Huffy Henry . . . ​ unappeasable Henry” (Song 1) to “impenetrable Henry, goatish, reserved” (Song 297). The name is pushed around and sometimes used as metrical stuffing, contributing to the speaker’s image of himself as a movable, kickable object; as he declares querulously in Song 70, “Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry / did ­will not bear thought.” 76. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1950), 81. 77. Thom Gunn, “Carnal Knowledge,” in Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 15. 78. Vendler, The Given and the Made, 31. Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Con­temporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 98–153. 79. John Stuart Mill, Essays on Poetry (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 12. 80. Mill, Essays, 12. 81. David Haven Blake, “Public Dreams: Berryman, Celebrity, and the Culture of Confession,” American Literary History 13, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 717. 82. William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), 675.

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83. Deborah Forbes argues that Berryman seeks “to re-­naturalize the dramatic monologue,” to make something like a transcription: “by appearing to unselectively represent the more or less random movements of h ­ uman consciousness, and most of all by restaging the gap between poet and speaker as a natu­r al function of self-­ consciousness, Berryman presses the dramatic monologue back in the direction of personally direct, sincere speech.” Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-­Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-­Twentieth-­Century American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 102. 84. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Jackson and Prins, Lyric Theory Reader, 145. 85. Limon, Stand-­up, 72. 86. Cohen, Essential Lenny Bruce, 194. 87. Fussell writes that an initial trochee “most often supports the force of active verbs whose effect is to surprise, to enlighten suddenly, or even to horrify,” in Poetic Meter, 49–50. 88. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 45. 89. Young, “Responsible Delight,” 162. 90. Marilyn Chin, “How I Got That Name,” Iowa Review 20, no. 2 (Spring–­Summer 1990): 87. 91. Anne Carson, “Twelve-­Minute Prometheus (­after Aiskhylos),” London Review of Books 30, no. 20 (October 23, 2008): https://­www​.­lrb​.­co​.­uk​/­v30​/­n20​/­anne​-­carson​ /­twelve​-­minute​-­prometheus​-­after​-­aiskhylos. 92. Northrop Frye, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 21, Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1962, ed. Germaine Warkentin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 125. 93. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue,” in Jackson and Prins, Lyric Theory Reader, 153. 2. Robert Lowell

1. Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 387. 2. For summaries of Lowell’s reception, see Steven Axelrod’s introduction to The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 1–26; and Stephen James, Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 9–10. Work that has pointed to Lowell’s humor includes George McFadden, “Life Studies: Robert Lowell’s Comic Breakthrough,” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975), 96–106; Frank Kear­ ful, “Poetics and Politics in Robert Lowell’s ‘The March  1’ and ‘The March  2,’ ” Connotations 22, no. 1 (2012–2013): 89–117; and Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1978), 235–238, on the moments of humor amid deprivation in Day by Day. Irvin Ehrenpreis argues that comedy ­frees Lowell from the threat of “his own unmanageable emotions,” “impulses that now seem predetermined and external, beyond control,” in “Lowell’s Comedy,” New York Review of Books 23, no. 17 (October 28, 1976), 3: https://­www​.­nybooks​.­com​/­articles​/­1976​ /­10​/­28​/­lowells​-­comedy​/­. Kevin Young hears Lowell’s humor as “high comedy, self-­

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deprecating, intellectual”: Young, “Responsible Delight. Revaluation: John Berryman,” Kenyon Review 21, no. 2 (Spring 1999), 167. In the main, however, ­these claims have been overshadowed by the image of Lowell as an archetypally somber postwar writer. John Vernon finds Lowell “humorless”; Bonnie Costello contrasts Lowell with Bishop with regard to humor; Charles Altieri writes that Lowell “has never been a very playful man, at least in his poetry.” John Vernon, “Fresh Air: Humor in Con­temporary Poetry,” in Comic Relief: Humor in Con­temporary American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Champaign: Illinois University Press, 1978), 307; Bonnie Costello, “Tragicomic Mode in American Poetry: ‘Awful but Cheerful,’ ” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 461; Charles Altieri, Enlarging the T ­ emple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960s (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 60. 3. John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in Amer­i­ca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 4. 4. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: Penguin, 1994), 33; Sadie Stein, “For the 1 Train Dead,” Paris Review, August 28, 2014: https://­www​.­theparisreview​ .­org​/­blog​/­2014​/­08​/­28​/­for​-­the​-­1​-­train​-­dead​/­; Patricia Lockwood, “A Diagnosis of the Maladies of Poets of the Modern Age,” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), April 9, 2014: https://­www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­harriet​/­2014​/­04​/­a​-­diagnosis​-­of​-­the​-­maladies​-­of​ -­poets​-­of​-­the​-­modern​-­age. 5. Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 352. Lowell’s pedigree, which “critics rarely failed to mention in reviews of his work, had made him something of a celebrity before he earned his fame as a poet,” as Deborah Nelson notes in Pursuing Privacy in Cold War Amer­ic­ a (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 45. 6. On Lowell’s manic depression, see Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (New York: Knopf, 2017). 7. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 838. Henceforth cited in text as CP, with page number. 8. Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Per­for­mance from the 1920s to the Pre­sent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 29. 9. Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 10. 10. See Rei Terada’s discussion of Lowell’s conflicted desire for autobiography and something more than autobiography (he “feels poetically restricted to making confessions, or to writing ‘Robert Lowell,’ ” and both possibilities always fail to get at one’s entire self ), in “Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship,” in Reading the M ­ iddle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-­Century American Poetry, ed. Eric Haralson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 35. 11. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 226. 12. John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 287. 13. Randall Jarrell, “From the Kingdom of Necessity,” The Nation (January 18, 1947): 76. 14. Jarrell, “Kingdom of Necessity,” 77. Jarrell took this paragraph out of the essay when he collected it for the 1953 collection Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf ); the

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omission may owe something to the publication of The Mills of the Kavanaughs in 1951, where the “wit of t­ hings” is so relentless as to become monotonous. 15. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 232. 16. D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, eds., The Stuffed Owl (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), xiii. 17. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1950), 92. 18. Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 111. 19. Louise Bogan, “Verse,” New Yorker ( June 9, 1951), 110; Stephen Spender, “Robert Lowell’s ­Family ­Album,” New Republic ( June 8, 1959), 17. For another view of Lord Weary’s ­Castle, see Vereen Bell, who contends that “the rational faculty begins by seeking to discover order and succeeds only in imposing it.” Bell, Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 10. 20. Lowell, Prose, 286; Lowell’s ellipses, my italics. 21. See Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London and New York: The Arden Shakespeare, 1966), 2.3.153, and The Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio (New York: Oxford World’s Classics 1994), 4.1.113. 22. Lowell, Prose, 351. 23. Henri Bergson, Laughter, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 8. 24. Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Con­temporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 31–32. 25. As Deborah Nelson writes, “At the time of their emergence, the confessional poets ­were taken to be an extreme instance of romantic lyric self-­absorption”: Nelson, Pursuing Privacy, xvii. See also Anne Janowitz, Lyric and L­ abour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8, and Gillian White’s summary of twentieth-­century constructions of romanticism in Lyric Shame, 5. 26. William Words­worth (“While Anna’s peers and early playmates tread”), in Lewis and Lee, Stuffed Owl, 151. 27. Songbirds, as ­Virginia Jackson has noted, evolve from an emblem for poetically unattainable, profoundly expressive m ­ usic to an emblem for the successful m ­ usic of poetry itself; see Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 26–27. 28. William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge, ed. Ron Loewinsohn (New York: New Directions, 1974), 163; Isidor Schneider, “Stuffed Bird,” New Masses 15, no. 1 (April 2, 1935): 31; Nissim Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 1952–1988 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 70; Snodgrass, “A Cardinal,” Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 364. 29. “Propped” calls back to Words­worth, where nobody is around to “prop” Anna’s “languid head.” 30. Terada, “Writing as a Child,” 35. 31. Quoted in Lowell, Letters, 734. 32. George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner’s, 1911), 252. 33. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 125.

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34. White, Lyric Shame, 91–93. 35. See also Alice Notley’s almost nightmarish encounter with expressive poetics, when she finds “ ‘my own form / stuffed and staring’ ” in a display case (Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses [New York: Penguin, 1998], 110), and Anne Carson’s skeptical ekphrasis of how Audubon posed dead birds to draw them “from life” (Carson, Men in the Off Hours [Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001], 17). 36. “A Poet Reads His Work: Robert Lowell,” 1977 video recording, Stony Brook Visiting Poets Series 8, Stony Brook University Libraries, Stony Brook University: http://­digital​.­library​.­stonybrook​.­edu​/­cdm​/­ref​/­collection​/­poetrycenter​/­id​/­15. 37. Berryman, Freedom of the Poet, 317. 38. Christopher Grobe, The Art of Confession: The Per­for­mance of Self from Robert Lowell to Real­ity TV (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 8. 39. “Robert Lowell: March  27, 1957,” audio recording, Poetry Center Digital ­Archive, San Francisco State University: https://­diva​.­sfsu​.­edu​/­collections​/­poetrycenter​ /­bundles​/­191213. 40. “Robert Lowell: May 10, 1966,” audio recording, Poetry Center Digital Archives, San Francisco State University: https://­diva​.­sfsu​.­edu​/­collections​/­poetrycenter​/­bundles​ /­226781. 41. “Poetry Reading ( July 1958),” audio recording, The Listening Booth, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University: https://­library​.­harvard​.­edu​/­poetry​/­listeningbooth​ /­poets​/­lowell​.­html. 42. “A Poet Reads His Work: Robert Lowell,” Stony Brook Visiting Poets Series. 43. “Robert Lowell: May 10, 1966,” Poetry Center Digital Archive. 44. “Poetry Reading ( July 1958).” 45. Lowell’s as-­yet unpublished prose is also revealing; see Steven Gould Axelrod, “Sensual Drift and Ethnic Longing in Robert Lowell,” in Robert Lowell in a New ­Century: Eu­ro­pean and American Perspectives, ed. Thomas Austenfeld (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019), 25–39. 46. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 7. 47. Kevin Young, The Grey A ­ lbum: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2012), 217–218. 48. Robert Lowell Papers (MS Am 1905), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 49. Grobe, Art of Confession, 42, 40. 50. For examples of Lowell’s familial snobbery, see CP 124, 125, 138. 51. Jamison, Robert Lowell, 112. 52. Bergson, Laughter, 21. 53. ­Until it disintegrated in 2003, the Old Man of the Mountain was a literal granite profile, one that Lowell might have seen in ­family visits to New Hampshire. 54. See Limon, Stand-­up, 4 and especially 53–54, where he adapts Kant’s description of the sublime—­a “vibration,” “a quickly alternating attraction ­toward, and repulsion from, the same Object”—­for comedy, and Zupančič, Odd One In, 3. 55. Limon, Stand-­up, 69. 56. Lowell, Prose, 346. 57. Julie Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 58. Nikki Skillman, The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 58–59. Stephen Yenser, who describes “the per­sis­tent mixing within

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and among” Lowell’s images, also sees them as made by someone “who is or has recently been un­balanced”: Yenser, Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 157. 59. Marta Figlerowicz, Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Lit­er­a­ture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 117. 60. Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 54. 61. John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 273. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1979), 160. 62. See Calvin Bedient on how “the sonnet razed, destructured” “is a perfunctory repository for contingent facts and feelings”; according to Robert B. Shaw, the form is “­little more than a box to fill”: Bedient, quoted in Axelrod, Critical Response, 183; Robert B. Shaw, Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 171. 63. Natalie Shapero, Hard Child (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2017), 22. 64. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction (New York: Random House, 1997), 19. 65. Nick Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 92. 66. Lowell, Letters, 642. 67. Lowell, Letters, 522. 68. See Jill St. Germain, Broken Treaties: United States and Canadian Relations with the Lakotas and the Plains Cree, 1868–1885 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 295. 69. In “The Restoration,” which takes place ­after the 1968 sit-­ins at Columbia, what initially seems to be a second quatrain actually works more like a decidedly premature turn. In the ten lines that pan across the mess of the university president’s wrecked study, it becomes evident that the sonnet is turned on its head as the room is (CP 547). 70. Bergson, Laughter, 52. 71. Donald Hall finds that its language “is trite, and its connections unfixed, its overall tone proclaims the lassitude and despondency of self-­imitation” (10); Harold Bloom emphasizes its “flatness” in his review of Day by Day, New Republic 177, no. 22 (November 26, 1977), 24. 72. Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010), 72. 73. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 98. 74. Alice Rayner, “Creating the Audience: It’s All in the Timing,” in The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences, ed. Judy Batalion (Anderson, SC: Parlor, 2009), 36. 3. A. R. Ammons

1. Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2017), 15. 2. For a vivid account of Ammons’s style, including his “willingness to be ineloquent for the sake of exactness” (107), see Nick Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic: The

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Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 99–137. Several writers have considered the foundations of Ammons’s humor. James S. Hans suggests that Ammons’s poetry “reflects the basic play of the universe”: Hans, “ ‘Essay on Poetics’: The Serious Playfulness of A. R. Ammons,” in Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A.R. Ammons’s Long Poems, ed. Steven P. Schneider (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 290. Daniel Mark Fogel argues that all “forms of Ammons’s humor are perhaps subsumed ­under his notion that the poem is a ‘play-­form’ for the release of hidden and unacceptable passions,” in Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A. R. Ammons, ed. David Burak and Roger Gilbert (New York: Norton, 2005), 153. Linda Orr has described how “irony crouches even in Ammons’ highest ambition,” in “The Cosmic Backyard of A. R. Ammons,” Diacritics 3, no. 4 (Winter 1973): 11. Lorraine DiCicco suggests that the long poem Glare is “similar to Seinfeldian sitcom specifically and to American-­style stand up comedy generally in that it focuses on nothingness and even treats it similarly,” in “A. R. Ammons’s Comic Strip Glare: Lit(t)erary Musings about Nothing,” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 59, no. 2 (2006): 189. 3. A. R. Ammons, Complete Poems, 2 vols., ed. Robert M. West (New York: Norton, 2017) (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, as CP1 and CP2), 2:251. 4. John Ashbery, Chinese Whispers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 19. 5. Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Con­temporary Poetry and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 110. On Ammons’s avant-­ garde interests, see also Patrick Deane, “Justified Radicalism: A.R. Ammons with a Glance at John Cage,” Papers on Language and Lit­er­a­ture 28, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 206– 222; and Kevin McGuirk, “A. R. Ammons and ‘The Only Terrible Health’ of Poetics,” Postmodern Culture 9, no. 1 (September 1998): http://­pmc​.­iath​.­virginia​.­edu​/­text​-­only​ /­issue​.­998​/­9​.­1mcguirk​.­txt. 6. For example, a number of readers have been put off by what can appear to be a massive volume of talk in Ammons, especially in the long poems, where a strain of folksy garrulousness can seem to dominate. Willard Spiegelman writes of “the tedium of indiscriminateness”; Hayden Carruth, of what’s “dull” and “talky”; Marjorie Perloff compares The Snow Poems to “doodles drawn by eighth-­g rade boys during a boring math class. . . . ​Ammons may be entertaining himself, but he can hardly be said to entertain his readers.” Robert Kirschten, ed., Critical Essays on A. R. Ammons (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997), 6, 8, and 15. 7. A.  R. Ammons, An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Kevin ­McGuirk (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2013), 3, 7, 13, 53. 8. On the books Ammons had as a child, see Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, ed. Zofia Burr (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 93. 9. A. R. Ammons, miscellaneous poetry notebook, 1945–1949 (1096–001.2.a), J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC. 10. See, first, Ammons’s journal entry for April 1, 1945, which hovers between wistfulness, piety, and possibly irony: “is it not good that no ­matter where you be, it is always pos­si­ble to commune with God. And so ­today did we hold an Easter ser­vice on the fantail.” A. R. Ammons, “A Log of the USS Gunason (DE-795),” Epoch 52, no. 3 (2004): 408–409. Then see, in “Easter Morning,” the b­ itter idea that t­ here is no resurrection; it pictures “crashing into empty ends not / completions” (CP2 15).

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11. Ammons, Image, 115. 12. A. R. Ammons, miscellaneous poetry notebook, 1945–1949. 13. Ammons, Image, 50. 14. Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic, 103. 15. On midcentury understandings of Williams, see Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Con­temporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 55–57. 16. Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” quoted in The New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove, 1960), 395. 17. Amy Clampitt, The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (New York: Knopf, 1997), 399. 18. Stephen Ross, Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 138 and 31. 19. Ross, Invisible Terrain, 138. 20. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1986), 95. 21. Henri Bergson, Laughter, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 130. 22. See Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 110–127. 23. In this chapter, I am omitting most of Ammons’s abstract work, like Sphere, not ­because it lacks humor, but b­ ecause it generally cannot be broken up into quoted passages. 24. Matthew Daube, “The Stand-up as Stand-­in: Performer-­Audience Intimacy and the Emergence of the Stand-­Up Comic in the United States since the 1950s,” in The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences, ed. Judy Batalion (Anderson, SC: Parlor, 2012), 61. 25. Daube, “The Stand-up as Stand-in,” 61. 26. See Christopher Grobe, The Art of Confession: The Per­for­mance of Self from Robert Lowell to Real­ity TV (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 30–31. 27. John Berryman Papers, Box 6, Miscellaneous Prose, Literary Manuscripts Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 361, and The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 610. 28. See CP1 636, CP2 463, CP2 633. 29. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its ­Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). 30. Ian Brodie, A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 45. 31. John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in Amer­i­ca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 13. 32. Interview with William Walsh in Burr, Set in Motion, 65. 33. A. R. Ammons, “A Place You Can Live,” interview with Philip Fried, Manhattan Review 1, no. 2 (Fall 1980), republished in Terrain​.­org 24 (October 22, 2009): https://­ www​.­terrain​.­org​/­2009​/­interviews​/­a​-­r​-­ammons​/­. 34. I take this term from Patrick Colm Hogan, Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition (New York: Routledge, 2014), 11. 35. Olson, “Projective Verse,” 387.

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36. See Ian Sansom, “Cheesespreadology,” London Review of Books 18, no. 5 (1996): 26–27. Ammons responded in a poem: “in my last (and nearly first) review from / ­England, it is observed that I am on automatic, // good lord” (CP2 608). In that politely anonymous sentence, he remembers that Sansom used his poems as a case of American language “on automatic,” and as “a kind of ­g iant bulk bin fed by his extraordinary brush-­equipped pick-up ­belt of a brain.” 37. For work on Ammons’s prosody and form, see Michael McFee, “A. R. Ammons and The Snow Poems Reconsidered,” Chicago Review 33, no. 1 (1981): 32–38; Stephen Cushman, Fictions of Form in American Poetry (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993); and Susan Stewart, “Salience and Correspondences: Tape for the Turn of the Year,” Chicago Review 57, nos. 1/2 (Summer 2012): 24. 38. Ammons, Image, 219. 39. Yvor Winters, Primitivism and De­cadence: A Study of American Experimental P­ oetry (New York: Haskell House, 1969), 136–137. 40. Olson, “Projective Verse,” 386. 41. Denise Levertov, New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992), ­78–79. 42. William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1992), 222. 43. Olson, “Projective Verse,” 387. 44. Helen Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 119. 45. Ammons, CP1 179, 324, 208; 196, 243, 268. 46. On Ammons’s interest in print and its intersection with midcentury debates about form, see especially George Hart, “Walking the Walk: Ammons, Eigner, and Ecopoetic Form in the 1960s,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Lit­er­at­ ure and Environment 24, no. 4 (Autumn 2017): 680–706. 47. Helen Vendler, “Ammons,” in A. R. Ammons, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 78. 48. Nikki Skillman, The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard ­University Press, 2016), 5. 49. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern En­glish Usage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1926), 545. 50. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 224, 370. 51. Robert Herrick and Lindsay Damon, New Composition and Rhe­toric for Schools (New York: Scott, Foresman, 1911), 340. 52. Ellen DeGeneres, The Beginning (HBO, 2000). 53. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: Knopf, 1989), 141; Ammons, CP2 616. Ammons steals famous lines from A. E. Housman, declaring that “miltown can do more than / Milton can” (CP1 801); Walt Whitman, to whom he alludes in “when I heard the learned astonisher, I said // to myself, well, I bedanged” (CP2 662); and E. E. Cummings, whose exuberantly scatological doggerel he makes faux-­genteel: “the coarse, ah, the coarse, unhappily // they are not refined” (CP1 626). 54. Tommy Pico, Junk (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2018), 69. 55. Catherine Chauvin, “Callbacks in Stand-up Comedy: Constructing Cohesion at the Macro Level within a Specific Genre,” in Contrastive Analy­sis of Discourse-­pragmatic

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Aspects of Linguistic Genres, ed. Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis (New York: Springer, 2017), 182. 56. Archie Ammons papers, #14-12-2665, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY. 57. Rochester, The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 32. 58. Pico’s jagged style shares a sense of humor, for example, with the much shorter lines of “On the Loss of Energy (and Other T ­ hings),” where “gas is gone / and alka seltzer ­running gas / a close race / outasight,” and where t­ here is a shortage both of “toilet paper” and of “halfway honest politicians.” June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2007), 219. 59. The addresses to the reader carry over into Pico’s live per­for­mances, where from time to time he acknowledges the audience’s responses; for instance, when he is interrupted by laughter a­ fter a reference to “Ross Pierogies,” he digresses to explain that some groups he has read for w ­ ere too young to get the joke: “Brontez Purnell and Tommy Pico: September 13, 2018,” The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, audio file, Poetry Center Digital Archive: https://­diva​.­sfsu​.­edu​/­collections​ /­poetrycenter​/­bundles​/­236155. 60. Tommy Pico, IRL (Austin, TX: Birds, 2016), 76. 4. Terrance Hayes

1. “2016 National Book Awards: Terrance Hayes Pre­sents Cave Canem with Literarian Award,” National Book Foundation, November 16, 2016, YouTube video, posted November 17, 2016: https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­7V58BYM4DtE. 2. Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box (New York: Penguin, 2006), 19. 3. In the words of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “the presence of a system of racial meanings and ste­reo­types, of racial ideology, seems to be a permanent feature of U.S. culture.” Omi and Winant, “Racial Formations,” in Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, 6th ed., ed. Paula S. Rothenberg (New York: Worth Publishers, 2004), 16. In Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Glenda R. Carpio documents how t­ hese ste­reo­ types only intensified in the years ­after the civil rights acts, when “the focus was no longer on white racism . . . ​but on the moral deficiencies of minorities. For African Americans, such backlash included the reemergence of longstanding ste­reo­types regarding their character” (3). 4. Christopher Spaide, “Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s Response-­Poems and the African American Lyric ‘We,’ ” Cambridge Quarterly 48, no. 3 (September 2019), 238. Spaide offers an eloquent account of “how Hayes’s elastic, proudly inauthentic sense of voice resolves or simply dissolves current debates on influence, the lyric, and the reception of poets of color” (238). 5. Glenda Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill, 7. 6. Terrance Hayes, “Journal, Day Four,” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), June 8, 2006: https://­www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­harriet​/­2006​/­06​/­​-­journal​-­day​-­four​-­56d34c6440614. 7. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 4.

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8. Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (New York: Penguin, 2015), 10. 9. “Terrance Hayes: 2011 National Book Festival,” Library of Congress Lit­er­at­ ure Webcasts, September 25, 2011: https://­www​.­loc​.­gov​/­today​/­cyberlc​/­feature​_­wdesc​ .­php​?­rec​=5­ 313. 10. Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and F­ uture Assassin (New York: Penguin, 2018), 25. 11. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues: An Introduction,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 235. 12. John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 252. Francisco Yus surveys recent modifications of the resolution theory in Humour and Relevance (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016), 65–113. 13. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 6. 14. Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (New York: Penguin, 2010), 29. 15. Note the slippage of this sentence: although it emphasizes an inner perception, the remembered “purr of liquor” comes from the social singing and drinking. 16. Gillian White identifies a similar re­sis­tance to expressive ways of reading lyric in Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Countee Cullen in Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Con­temporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 92–96. 17. For an example of a critical approach centered on how the poem’s language unfolds an inner life, see Helen Vendler’s description of lyric as “direct[ing] its mimesis ­toward the per­for­mance of the mind in solitary speech” in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1–2. For commentary on this mimetic view, see V ­ irginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 132. Jonathan Culler describes a version of this interpretive mode when he summarizes how Hegel’s vision of lyric has been supplanted by a New Critical speaker, “whose situation and motivation one needs to reconstruct.” For Culler, the prob­lem is what this leaves out, pedagogically: “to work out who is speaking, in what circumstances, to what end, and to chart the drama of attitudes that the poem captures” is to gloss over aspects of lyric that are not obviously related to a persona’s subjective predicament, such as sonic features. Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 2. See also Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s argument in Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Plea­sure of Words (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007) that lyric poetry is “not mimesis,” but rather “a formal practice that keeps in view the linguistic code and the otherness of the material medium of language to all that ­humans do with it” (3). 18. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 104. 19. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 104–105. 20. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957), 276; for the oddly similar phrase applied to the lyric poet, see Frye, Anatomy, 50. 21. The splitting pigtails are, again, bizarre along one line and perfectly apposite in another. Pivoting on the contextually primary meaning of split (to run away at top speed), Hayes returns it to its original meaning, of breaking into parts. The literal and figurative commingle—­the pigtails that fly everywhere when one is on a trampoline become not one but several girls dashing away from the speaker’s younger self—­and

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kindle other points of comparison: for example, that the young boy seems to be himself a kind of trampoline, sending each unlucky person he meets into flight. 22. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 6. 23. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 8. 24. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 129. 25. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), 642. 26. Shara McCallum, “A Conversation between Shara McCallum and Terrance Hayes,” Shining Rock Poetry 2, no. 3 (Spring 2016): http://­www​.­shiningrockpoetry​.­com​ /­poetry​-­anthology​/­issue​-­three​-­spring​-­2016​-­volume​-­one​/­​-­a​-­conversation​-­between​ -­shara​-­mccallum​-­and​-­terrance​-­hayes​/­. 27. Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith, eds., The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2017). 28. See Langston Hughes, Shakespeare in Harlem (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942); Gloria Wade Gayles, Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 44; and for part of the “American Sonnets” sequence, see Wanda Coleman, Mercurochrome: New Poems (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 2001), 91–105. 29. See Dorothy J. Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Con­ temporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), xx. 30. Harryette Mullen, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 48. 31. Terrance Hayes, “The Tenor of a Hum: Flash Interview,” interviewed by Meg E. Griffitts, Front Porch Journal 31, no. 2 (undated): http://­frontporchjournal​.­com​/­issue​ -­31​-­2​/­the​-­tenor​-­of​-­a​-­hum​-­flash​-­interview​/­. ­There, discussing “polarities in terms of emotional intensity,” Hayes mentions Richard Pryor, as well as O.D.B. (“a tragic figure who happens to be a hoot”). 32. See Patrick Colm Hogan, Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition (New York: Routledge, 2014), 11. 33. It is not the first time Hayes has called attention to a comparison by disturbing it, as if he is skeptical of perfect comparisons: see the opening of “New York Poem,” where the city’s “alternative takes” outnumber musical “alternative takes” (see above). 34. I am grateful to an anonymous reader, who noticed that the speaker half-­ imagines Brown’s action as deliberate care. 35. Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 94 and 78–81. 36. Philip Fisher, Won­der, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4. 37. Gwendolyn Brooks, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 73. 38. Terrance Hayes, Hip Logic (New York: Penguin, 2002), 13. 39. The phrase “which I’m thinking” activates yet another line of thought, moving to a scene two thousand years old. Explicit “thinking” in a Hayes poem usually means that all bets are off: from the first wandering “I’m thinking” of Muscular ­Music (15), variations on that phrase have stippled his collections. They announce a capricious move away from what­ever the topic at hand, often away from what is logically significant: see “I keep thinking” (Muscular ­Music 18), “& I start thinking” (Muscular ­Music 32), and “I’m thinking” (Lighthead 8). 40. Douglas A. Jones Jr., “The Fruit of Abolition: Discontinuity and Difference in Terrance Hayes’ ‘The Avocado,’ ” in The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Ex-

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pressive Culture, ed. Soyica  D. Colbert, Robert  J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-­Hussen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 45. 41. Fran Ross, Oreo (New York: New Directions, 2015), 127. Hayes mentions Oreo in a commonplace-­book-­esque essay for the Poetry Foundation; see Hayes, “Journal, Day Five,” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), June 9, 2006: https://­www​.­poetryfoundation​ .­org​/­harriet​/­2006​/­06​/­journal​-­day​-­five​-­56d34c6460dc4. 42. Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 236. 43. Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popu­lar Culture and the Post-­Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), 120. 44. Jones, “Fruit of Abolition,” 47. 45. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 3. 46. Oxford En­glish Dictionary online, s.v. “avocado, n.,” June 2019: https://­www​ -­oed​.­com​/­view​/­Entry​/­13783​?­redirectedFrom​=a­ volcado#eid. 47. For a detailed account of satire’s evolution in English-­language verse, see Christopher Yu, Nothing to Admire: The Politics of Poetic Satire from Dryden to Merrill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 48. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage/Random, 1990), 295. 49. W. B. Yeats, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 411. 50. See George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum (New York: Grove, 1988), 19–23; Chris Rock, Good Hair, dir. Jeff Stilson (Chris Rock Productions and HBO Films, 2009). 51. See, for example, a design “with Built-in Scalp that looks and feels like Skin” in Sepia 23, nos. 1–6 (1974): 33. 52. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” Dissent (Fall 1957): 276–293. 53. Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2006), 34. 54. James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 291. 55. Baldwin, “Black Boy,” 291. 56. Klymaxx, “The Men All Pause,” UMG Recordings, 1984. 57. William Carlos Williams, “Young Love [First Version],” in Collected Poems, vol 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 200. 58. Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2017), 83. 59. Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for the New Year,” New Yorker, January 14, 2019: https://­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­2019​/­01​/­14​/­american​-­sonnet​-­for​-­the​ -­new​-­year. 60. Dave Chappelle, For What It’s Worth (Sony Pictures, 2004). 61. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 103. 62. Maurizio Cattelan’s Amer­i­ca, a sculpture of a golden toilet installed at the Guggenheim from 2016–2017, is also prob­ably ­behind this sonnet. See Trinidad James, “All Gold Every­thing,” on ­Don’t Be S.A.F.E., Def Jam Recordings, 2013, and Gucci Mane, “Lemonade,” on The State vs. Radric Davis, Warner Bros. Rec­ords, 2009.

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5. Coming to Terms with Our Self

1. Monica Youn, “A Symposium on Subjectivity and Style,” Fence 3, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2000–2001): http://­www​.­fenceportal​.­org​/­symposium​-­on​-­subjectivity​-­and​-­style​/­. The call for responses, printed along with the responses themselves, indicates the oppositions still largely assumed in poetry ­today: the editors noted that “the Confessional, Narrative, and/or Lyric traditions imply a poetic subjectivity that is identifiable and coherent, while Objectivist, Beat, and/or Language traditions tend to treat poetic subjectivity as an experimental ground, deprivileged or decentered.” 2. On the continued presence of ­these notions about poetry in pedagogy, literary criticism, and con­temporary poetics, see V ­ irginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 451–459, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s summary of definitions of the lyric in “Lyric and Experimental Long Poems: Intersections,” in Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhe­toric of North American Avant-­Gardism, 1963–2008, ed. J. Mark Smith (Montreal, QC: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2013), 22–50. While Rei Terada has suggested that the “lyric zone of electrification is dissipating along with belief in the autonomy of the lyric object and in the specialness of the lyric mode,” the poets of this chapter continue to mine comedy from expectations stemming from the perception of that electrified zone. They have in mind how lyric is figured both by firmly traditional critics and by antilyric groups. Terada, “­After the Critique of Lyric,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 197. For a discussion of how multiple poetic groups have turned to the nebulous postwar ideal of the lyric genre to define their own practices, and of how poets continue to respond to ­those polarized terms, see Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Con­temporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 16–26. Jed Rasula, for example, describes lyric as “a mode of subjectivity as distinctly American as self-­help primers, tele­vi­sion game shows, and video arcades,” in The American Poetry Wax Museum: Real­ity Effects, 1940–1990 (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of En­glish, 1995), 3. Lynn Hejinian sees “the romantic, unitary, expressive self, the ‘I’ of the lyric poem” as a “simpleminded model of subjectivity and authority” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 329. Marjorie Perloff implies a similar view of lyric when she surveys how “Language poetry provided a serious challenge to the delicate lyric of self-­expression and direct speech: it demanded an end to transparency and straightforward reference in ­favor of ellipsis, indirection, and intellectual-­political engagement,” in “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric,” Boston Review (May 18, 2012): http://­bostonreview​.­net​/­forum​/­poetry​-­brink. 3. “Monica Youn: Poet and L ­ awyer,” interview with Bindu Bansinath ( January 9, 2017), Mythos: https://­mythosmag​.­com​/­interviewhome​/­17​-­monica​-­youn. 4. As White observes in Lyric Shame, the late twentieth ­century responds not only to “ ‘lyric’ abstracted, since the eigh­teenth c­ entury, as the genre of overabundant affect (read feminine)” but also to “its redrawing, in the mid-­to-­late twentieth ­century, as the au­then­tic site of homosocial, hypermasculine self-­actualization” (253). Emotion, gender, and the idealized lyric have been repeatedly knotted together, ­whether in the generally masculinist aesthetic criticism of the midcentury (where emotion is acceptable when refined by appropriate form), or its subsequent avant-­garde reproaches (where emotion is generally not immediately vis­i­ble); the relationship is still evoked

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by critics, if now more in reaction than in confirmation. Linda Kinnahan has summed up the “gendered overmarking of lyric . . . ​as emotive, personal, descriptive, nonintellectual,” in Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Con­temporary Discourse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 2. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell write that “the nature of the lyric—­can it be reclaimed from its masculinist origins, does it reflect a solipsistic retreat to interiority or a complex resistant engagement with the world—­remains an ongoing concern” for the poets discussed in their edited volume Eleven More American W ­ omen Poets in the 21st ­Century: Poetics across North Amer­i­ca (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 2. 5. Kevin Quashie summarizes how black ­women are often “excluded from the discourses of white femininity that inform many notions of the interior,” in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 130. 6. Morgan Parker, Other P­ eople’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (Chicago: Switchback, 2015), 57. 7. Morgan Parker, ­There Are More Beautiful T ­ hings Than Beyoncé (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2017), 1. 8. Kathleen Rooney, “Quality Life,” interview with Morgan Parker, Poetry Foundation, September  15, 2015: https://­www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­articles​/­70266​ /­quality​-­life. 9. Ralph Ellison, “American Humor,” quoted in Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 31. 10. Morgan Parker, Magical Negro (Portland, OR: Tin House, 2019), 72. 11. Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 78. 12. Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 9. 13. Rebecca Wanzo, “Precarious-­Girl Comedy: Issa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abjection Aesthetics,” Camera Obscura 31, no. 2 (2016): 28. 14. Morgan Parker, “The Book of Exodus,” The Offending Adam 173, no.  1 ( June 2014): http://­www​.­theoffendingadam​.­com​/­2014​/­06​/­02​/­other​-­peoples​-­comfort​ -­k eeps​ -­m e​ -­u p​ -­a t​ -­n ight​ -­h ow​ -­t o​ -­p iss​ -­i n​ -­p ublic​ -­a nd​ -­m aintain​ -­femininity​ -­b ook​ -­o f​ -­exodus​/­. 15. Wanzo, “Precarious-­Girl Comedy,” 30. 16. This incident is discussed in Bambi Haggins, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-­Soul Amer­i­ca (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 229– 230. A more pointed example of Parker’s cautiousness about humor appears in how a skipping-­record repetition of “Laugh Track Laugh Track Laugh Track Laugh Track” turns to a racist term in Magical Negro, 89. 17. Wanzo, “Precarious-­Girl Comedy,” 45. 18. Wanzo, “Precarious-­Girl Comedy,” 30. 19. See, for example, Parker’s interview with Kaveh Akbar, “What We Think about as Beautiful Is so Painfully ­Limited,” Divedapper 73 (August 21, 2017): https://­www​ .­divedapper​.­com​/­interview​/­morgan​-­parker​/­; “ ‘It’s About Multiplicity’: A Conversation with Morgan Parker,” interview with Hanna Andrews, MELUS 43, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 148–162.

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20. Occasionally, t­ hese statements are from a­ ctual celebrities. For example, the poem that ends “Motherfuckers / better duck” (Other ­People’s 13) draws on the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1995 “Warning” (from Ready to Die, Bad Boy / Arista, 1994); the title of “Let Me ­Handle My Business, Damn” (Other ­People’s 72) is the second half of a couplet spoken by Jay-­Z (who declares “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” in Kanye West, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” Roc-­A-­Fella Rec­ords, 2005). Poems nominally about female celebrities return in Parker’s work: for example, Other ­People’s Comfort is subdivided by five poems entitled “Miss Black Amer­i­ca,” each addressing a dif­fer­ent dimension of Miss Black Amer­i­ca’s ­imagined life. 21. Parker, “What We Think about,” 2017. 22. Dorothy J. Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Con­temporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 1–47. 23. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, xx. See also Cathy Park Hong’s account of how “mainstream poetry” “prefer[s] their poets to praise rather than excoriate, to write sanitized, easily understood personal lyr­ics on f­amily and ancestry rather than make sweeping institutional critiques. But the avant-­gardists prefer their poets of color to be quiet­est as well, paying attention to poems where race—­through subject and form— is incidental, preferably invisible, or at the very least, buried.” Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-­Garde,” originally published in Lana Turner 7, no. 2 (November 2014), currently hosted at Stanford Arcade: https://­arcade​.­stanford​.­edu​/­content​ /­delusions​-­whiteness​-­avant​-­garde. Parker writes ­under circumstances where at one turn, one’s work w ­ ill be seen “merely” as po­liti­cal and reactive (­because of one’s skin color), and at another, as expressive “merely” of the private and personal (­because of one’s skin color). 24. Parker, “What We Think about.” 25. Jay-­Z, The Black ­Album, Roc-­A-­Fella Rec­ords, 2003. 26. Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 149. 27. Maggie Hennefeld, “­Toward a Feminist Politics of Comedy and History,” Feminist Media Histories 3, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 6. 28. Aparna Nancherla, The Half Hour, season 5, episode 5, September 9, 2016, Comedy Central. 29. As ­these lines suggest, Parker’s grammar sometimes creates a logical frame off of which she plays the less logical. For example, the attempt to distract oneself (from what seems to be a damaged relationship) by reading June Jordan leads to seeing “you hiding in the margins”: “­later that night I’m so anxious I knit / two rows of a scarf it’s so ugly I fall asleep” (Other ­People’s 50). That relatively normal so sets off a completely unexpected so, a deceptive parallel construction attesting to the unpredictable ways one feels and behaves. 30. Fatimah Asghar, If They Come For Us (New York: One World, 2018), 68. 31. Patricia Lockwood, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (New York: Penguin, 2014), 40. 32. Fatimah Asghar, “VIDA Voices & Views Interview (Part I),” interview with Melissa Studdard, VIDA (March 2, 2018): http://­www​.­vidaweb​.­org​/­fatimah​-­asghar​-­vida​ -­voices​-­views​-­interview​/­. 33. Parker, “What We Think about.” 34. Parker, Magical Negro, 52.

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35. Trevor Noah, Lost in Translation, Comedy Central, 2015. 36. Natalie Shapero, Hard Child (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2017), 11. 37. John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in Amer­i­ca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 6. 38. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 157. 39. Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2012), 22–23. At this point, Shaughnessy’s book has not revealed an injury that ­will move the book to registers of explicit pain; h ­ ere the focus is on the tragicomic distress of “I have the breasts, godawful, and he / the lungs and we share the despair” (23). 40. Ali Wong, Hard Knock Wife, Netflix, 2018: https://­www​.­netflix​.­com​/­title​/­801​ 86940. 41. Natalie Shapero, No Object (Admore, PA: Saturnalia, 2013), 64. 42. “You had one job” became a popu­lar caption for images around 2011, appended to photos of collapsing buildings, messages misspelled on cakes, and so on. 43. Natalie Shapero, “The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports,” Granta 139: Online Edition, May 23, 2017: https://­g ranta​.­com​/­two​-­poems​-­shapero​/­. The concept of the hyperobject is from Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecol­ogy ­after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 44. Maria Bamford, Old Baby, Netflix, 2017: https://­www​.­netflix​.­com​/­title​/­801​ 33663. 45. For another example, see the poem where Shapero rattles off “the list // of lifetimes. A worker bee w ­ ill die before / a camel. A fox w ­ ill die before a pi­lot ­whale” (Hard Child 61), her sentences pushing groups of five stresses each across the line breaks. 46. Plath, Collected Poems, 238. 47. In an interview with Stephanie Burt, for example, Youn mentions that pentameter “always feels so authoritative that it makes me a ­little claustrophobic.” “A Backward Song,” Boston Review, October 13, 2016: http://­bostonreview​.­net​/­poetry​/­stephen​ -­burt​-­monica​-­youn​-­interview​-­blackacre. 48. Natalie Shapero, “Tell Me How You ­Really Feel,” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), November 12, 2018: https://­www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­harriet​/­2018​/­11​/­tell​ -­me​-­how​-­you​-­really​-­feel. 49. ­These poems, like Parker’s, also include quite a few standalone jokes. What is announced as an old Jewish joke (“the food is lousy h ­ ere, and such / small portions”) is reworked into “God is abusive ­toward all His ­children, // and also He hardly ever comes around!” (Hard Child 43). 50. Monica Youn, Ignatz (New York: Four Way, 2010), 4. 51. George Herriman, Krazy & Ignatz, 1922–1924: “At Last My Drim of Love Has Come True” (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2012), 57. 52. George Herriman, Krazy & Ignatz, 1929–1930: A Brick, A Mice, A Lovely Night (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2003), 30. 53. Geoffrey Hill, New and Collected Poems, 1952–1992 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 93. 54. Monica Youn, Barter (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2003), 25. 55. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage/Random, 1990), 375. 56. Auden, Dyer’s Hand, 375.

20 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 1 7 2 –1 7 5

57. Youn, “Poet and L ­ awyer.” 58. Youn also mentions Hayes’s influence, specifically of his anagram poems, in her interview with Stephanie Burt, “Backward Song.” 59. Monica Youn, Blackacre (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2016), 47. 60. Youn, “On ‘Blackacre,’ ” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), June 3, 2015: https://­ www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­harriet​/­2015​/­06​/­on​-­blackacre. 61. “Monica Youn Reading ‘Redacre,’ ” Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, June 9, 2018, YouTube video, posted November 1, 2018: https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​ ?­v​=d­ SyXY3S1et8. 62. Lucie Brock-­Broido, Stay, Illusion (New York: Knopf, 2013), 7.

Index

abjection: in Ammons, 110; and audience, 10, 16–17, 48, 176, 187n3; in Bamford, 175–176; in Berryman, 21, 27, 48, 50; and blackness, 13, 149; and bodies, 181n33; and kitsch, 183–184n58; in Lowell, 22, 53, 55, 60–61, 63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 79; and masculinity, 183n55; in Pico, 110; and poetry in the twentieth ­century, 10–12, 14–15, 19, 53; in Shapero, 162, 163; and stand-up, 9–10, 16, 18, 27, 182n45; and whiteness, 13–14, 149; in Youn, 146, 168, 174, 175 Abrams, M. H., 4 Adorno, Theodor, 180n17 African Americans. See blackness; black womanhood aging, 78–79, 96, 103, 108 Akbar, Kaveh, 26, 156 Allen, Donald, 24 allusions, 59–62, 103–104, 116, 128, 142, 152, 180n21, 182n44, 199n53 Als, Hilton, 3 Altieri, Charles, 192–193n2 Ammons, A. R., 13, 86, 111, 113, 196–197n2, 197n10, 198n23, 199n36, 199n53; on aging, 108; allusions in, 103–104, 199n53; audience of, 93, 94, 131; and the connection between writing and waste, 23, 96–100, 104; enactment of ineptness by, 22–23, 82–83, 87–91, 95, 101–103, 106–107; as experimental, 83, 97, 101, 110; and formalism, 88, 90, 97; and grammar, 95, 97, 103; and imitative form, 96–97; and irony, 90, 196–197n2, 197n10; language of, 83, 87, 88, 91, 98, 102, 104, 106; and meta­phor, 88, 89, 96, 108; origins of, 13, 84; and per­for­mance, 82, 93–94, 103, 108; Pico builds on, 110, 114; on sex, 105–108, 174; and similarities of work to stand-up comedy, 81, 91–94, 105, 109; speaker in poems of, 85, 88, 92, 101,

112; talkiness in, 197n6; and typography, 98–102 Ammons, A. R., works of: “Ballad,” 87–88; Bosh and Flapdoodle, 91, 95, 96, 107, 108–110; Garbage, 83, 102, 104–105, 106, 108; Glare, 94–95, 102, 103, 105–106, 196–197n2; “Good God,” 108–109; “I Broke a Sheaf of Light,” 86; Ommateum, 22, 85–86, 88, 104; “Orthodoxy with Achievement,” 85–86; “Renovating,” 90–91; The Snow Poems, 88–89, 101, 102; Sphere, 90, 102, 106, 108, 198n23; Tape for the Turn of the Year, 22, 95–104; “Their Sex Life,” 107, 174; Uplands, 90–91 Aristotle, 17, 185n73 Armantrout, Rae, 169, 173 Asghar, Fatimah, 154–156; “Microaggression Bingo,” 154–155 Ashbery, John, 71, 88–89, 90, 172; “Postilion of Autumn,” 83 Auden, W. H.: on abjection, 181n33; Ammons’s allusion to, 103; Berryman influenced by, 31; and form, 128; on humor, 42, 43; on romantic desire, 170–171, 174; on satire, 137 audience: Ammons’s ­imagined, 93, 94, 131; Berryman’s awareness of, 21, 25, 27, 33, 35, 45–49, 51, 63; and comedy, 10, 16–17, 41, 92, 93, 106, 157–158, 176; Hayes’s ­imagined, 131; Lowell manages expectations of, 63; and J. S. Mill, 4–6, 21, 27, 47–49, 93, 131; and Pico, 200n59; and poetry, 5, 15, 18, 175, 176. See also per­for­mance avant-­garde, 14, 83, 87–88, 95, 97, 150, 158, 204–205n4; poetry that runs ­counter to, 24, 90, 158, 168, 173; and humor, 2, 189n4; and race, 150, 206n23. See also experimental poetry Awkward Black Girl (Rae), 149

209

21 0 I nde x

badness, comic, in poetry, 21; in Ammons, 83, 85, 87, 88–89, 94–95, 99, 105, 109–110; in Berryman, 29–30; in Chaucer, 43 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18 Baldwin, James, 34–35, 138, 141, 142, 143 Bamford, Maria, 153, 163; Old Baby, 175–177 Bansinath, Bindu, 147, 172 Baraka, Amiri, 116, 147 Bataille, Georges, 79 bathos, 15; in Lowell, 56, 57, 73, 77; in Ashbery and Ammons, 88–89; in The Stuffed Owl, 55, 60 Beatty, Paul, 115 Bedient, Calvin, 196n62 Belafonte, Harry, A Time for Laughter, 34 Bell, Vereen, 194n19 Bell, W. Kamau, 115 Bellow, Saul, 41, 52 Bennett, Chad, 183n51 Bergson, Henri, 17–18, 58, 67, 76, 89 Berlant, Lauren, 16, 121 Berman, Shelley, 9, 41 Berryman, John, 55, 64, 65, 73, 77, 83, 87, 95, 99, 104, 110; Ammons’s allusion to, 103–104; departures of, from canonical expectations, 4–6, 8, 26–33, 35, 36, 82; and the dramatic monologue, 48, 49, 50, 192n83; education of, 84; and Eliot, 188n25; and fictive speakers, 27; and Ralph Ellison, 189n41; and formalist desiderata, form in, 21, 26–33, 35, 36, 43, 44, 47, 100; grammar of, 26, 27, 29, 30, 36, 38–42, 46, 49; and ideals of lyric privacy, 26; and irony, 21, 28, 34, 46; and literary criticism, 14, 21, 25–27, 30–33, 35, 188n31; and Lowell, 32, 63, 80–81; and masculinity, 183n55; meter in, 26, 27, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 190n56; and minstrelsy, 54, 66, 181n33, 189n44; and quin­tes­sen­tial lyric, 4–6; rhyme in, 27, 29–30, 33, 37, 43, 44, 45, 188n22; and self-­involvement, 26–27, 50; and similarities of work to comedic monologue, 9–12; theatricality of, 27, 43–49, 51, 63, 93–94, 171; unruliness in, 25, 33, 46, 100; and Yeats, 27, 31, 35, 36, 37, 39 Berryman, John, works of: The Dispossessed, 31; “Dream Song 4,” 49; “Dream Song 46,” 44; “Dream Song 55,” 37–38; “Dream Song 57,” 42; “Dream Song 67,” 44–46; “Dream Song 69,” 28; “Dream Song 75,”

25; “Dream Song 114,” 39–41; “Dream Song 164,” 27–28, 29, 36; “Dream Song 207,” 4–6, 8, 9, 10–12; “Dream Song 215,” 35–36, 39, “Dream Song 290,” 36–37; Henry’s Fate, 80 Billig, Michael, 185–186n83 Bishop, Elizabeth, 52–53, 54, 64, 115, 192–193n2, 201n16; “First Death in Nova Scotia,” 62 blackface. See minstrelsy Blackmur, R. P., 6, 28–29, 31 blackness: and abjection, 13, 149; in Hayes, 116, 123–124, 133–143; and Jewish comedians, 181n33; Quashie on, 118; in Parker, 147, 149. See also black womanhood Blackwood, Caroline, 79 black womanhood, 24, 136–137, 138, 149, 150, 155, 158, 205n5 Blake, David Haven, 47 blank verse, 48, 73, 74, 191n68 Blazing ­Saddles, 43 Bloom, Harold, 5, 196n71 Bogan, Louise, 57 Brock-­Broido, Lucie, “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World,” 175 Brodie, Ian, 9, 93 Brooks, Cleanth, 6, 8, 31, 48; The Well-­ Wrought Urn, 31, 84 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 12, 128, 133, 201n16 Brown, Sterling, 12 Browning, Robert, 48 Bruce, Lenny, 25, 33, 44, 49 Brunner, Edward, 6, 27 Buell, Frederick, 5 Burt, Stephanie, 207n47 Butler, Judith, 181n33 Caleshu, Anthony, 187n7 Carpio, Glenda, 116, 148, 200n3 Carruth, Hayden, 197n6 Carson, Anne, 173, 195n35; “Twelve-­Minute Prometheus,” 50 Cattelan, Maurizio, Amer­i­ca, 203n62 Chappelle, Dave, 115, 144, 149 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 22, 43 Chauvin, Catherine, 106 Chen Chen, 143 chiasmus, 78, 137, 138–139 Chin, Marilyn, 50 civil rights, 115, 135, 136, 200n3 Clampitt, Amy, 88

I n d e x Clifton, Lucille, 12, 115 Coleman, Wanda, 12, 128; “The Saturday After­noon Blues,” 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59 comedy, definitions of, 10, 17–19, 33, 69, 89, 121, 184n71, 185n72, 185n75, 185n78. See also incongruity, and comedy; subversion, and comedy; superiority, and comedy confessional poetry, 12–15, 59, 88, 92, 183n52, 194n25; Ammons’s, 88, 107; Berryman’s, 34, 47, 50; and gender, 147; Lowell’s, 53, 59; meta­phors of, 161; and whiteness, 183n55 Cooper, Brendan, 188n25 Cope, Wendy, 22 Corso, Gregory, 27 Costello, Bonnie, 182n41, 192–193n2 couplets, 22, 72, 206n20; in Ammons, 102, 107, 109; in Berryman, 27, 29; in Hayes, 134; in Lowell, 48, 54, 63, 66, 74, 78 Cowley, Abraham, 60 criticism, literary, 3, 13, 14–15, 201n17; and Berryman, 21, 25–33, 35, 188n31; and the devaluing of poems dealing with identity, 150; and the idea that “lyric” and humor are incompatible, 2, 168; mainstream, 7, 24; and race, 13, 182–183n50; 189n40; and self-­seriousness, 83; and the tendency to force poems into singular explanations, 117. See also New Criticism Cullen, Countee, 201n16 Culler, Jonathan, 201n17 cultural appropriation, 138, 140 Cummings, E. E., 34, 199n53 Dangerfield, Rodney, 41 Daube, Matthew, 92 Deadpool, 43 decorum, 13, 19, 22, 55–57, 62, 106, 110, 184n64 DeGeneres, Ellen, 103, 105 depression, 153–154 Descartes, René, 186n85 DiCicco, Lorraine, 196–197n2 Dickens, Charles, 38, 40, 46, 70 Dickinson, Emily, 190n55 Donne, John, 48, 73 Douglas, Mary, 186n84 dramatic monologue, 24, 48–51, 149, 192n83 Eco, Umberto, 33 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 192–193n2

211

Eliot, T. S., 15, 46, 55–56, 103, 180n17; and minstrel dialect, 34; and the New Criticism, 172, 188n25 Eliot, T. S., works of: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 32, 47, 48; “Mr. Apollinax,” 36; The Waste Land, 75–76 Ellison, Ralph, 148, 189n41 Empson, William, 25 epanalepsis, 39 Epstein, Andrew, 83 essentialism, 116, 125, 126, 150 establishment, poetic, 14, 23, 82, 150, 172 Everett, Percival, 115 Ewegen, Shane, 186n86 excess, in poetry, 19; in Berryman, 34; in Hayes, 23, 117, 121, 122, 124–127, 129, 131, 133, 137, 144; in Lowell, 55, 65, 81; in Parker, 7 experimental poetry, 22, 155–156, 168, 172, 173; Ammons’s, 83, 97, 101, 110; Pico’s, 110. See also avant-­garde Ezekiel, Nissim, “The Stuffed Owl,” 60 fallacy of imitative form, 20, 96–97 femininity, 140, 176, 204–205n4, 205n5 Ferry, Anne, 29 Figlerowicz, Marta, 11, 71 figurative language, 57, 67, 69, 131, 139, 150, 201–202n21. See also meta­phor first-­person. See speaker: first-­person Fisher, Philip, 20, 133 Fogel, Daniel Mark, 196–197n2 Forabosco, Giovannantonio, 185n78 Forbes, Deborah, 192n83 form, in poetry. See avant-­garde; blank verse; couplets; experimental poetry; formalism/formalist poetry; ­free verse; meter; pentameter; sestets; sonnets; trochees; voltas formalism/formalist poetry, 2, 5, 30–31; Ammons’s response to, 88, 90, 97, Berryman’s divergence from, 21, 26, 29, 35, 36; and Hayes, 165; Lowell as an emblem of, and ambivalence about, 53, 72; neoformalism, 165; and Shapero, 24, 163–166 Fowler, H. W., 38–39, 102 ­free verse, 128, 163; in Ammons, 97, 99; in Hayes, 128; in Lowell, 14, 54, 66, 72 Freud, Sigmund, 185n72; in Berryman, 37, 47 Friedrich, Caspar David, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 104

21 2 I nde x

Frost, Robert, 48 Frye, Northrop, 5, 50, 124 Fuller, John, 188n33 Fussell, Paul, 30, 35, 44, 73, 192n87 Gadsby, Hannah, Nanette, 158 Gallagher, Ellen, DeLuxe, 138 Gay, Ross, 179n6 gender, 149, 156, 204–205n4; and expectations, 24, 147; in Hayes, 138, 140, 141, 142; in Lowell, 64–66; in Mullen, 128, 140; in Parker, 147, 156; in Shapero, 158, 160; in Youn, 172–173. See also black womanhood; femininity; masculinity Gethard, Chris, ­Career Suicide, 109 ghazals, 22, 128 Ginsberg, Allen, Howl, 27 Girard, René, 10, 181n35 Glück, Louise, 191n72 God. See religion grammar, in poetry: in Ammons, 95, 97, 103; in Berryman, 26, 38–41, 49; in Hayes, 120, 122–123; in Lowell, 75; in Parker, 149, 151–152, 206n29; in Shapero, 163; in Youn, 175 Greek comedy, 187n7 Gregson, Ian, 183n55 Grobe, Christopher, 9, 13, 63, 65, 92 Grossman, Allen, 14–15, 19, 184n60 Grunes, Marissa, 191n68 Gucci Mane, “Lemonade,” 145 Gunn, Thom, “Carnal Knowledge,” 46 Hall, Donald, 196n71 Halpern, Nick, 74, 86, 196–197n2 Hammer, Langdon, 183n52 Hans, James S., 196–197n2 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 65 Harper, Michael S., “Tongue-­Tied in Black and White,” 34–35 Hayes, Terrance, 13, 21, 114, 147, 165, 202n33; and excess, 23, 117, 121, 122, 124–127, 129, 131, 133, 137, 144; the “golden shovel,” 128, 172; influence of, on Youn, 172, 208n58; and inner life, 23, 116, 117, 121–128; inspirations for, 22, 128, 203n41; irony in, 115, 121, 129, 133, 134, 137, 143, 144; language of, 122–123, 131; meta­phor in, 122, 134, 136, 141, 143; multiplicity of meanings in, 23, 114, 125, 126, 144, 151, 202n39; and per­for­mance, 130, 131, 132, 144; and puns, 121, 124, 128, 140, 145; and race/racism, 115–121, 126–127,

133–134, 138, 141–142; rhyme in, 119, 126, 127, 132, 140; and satire, 23, 137–138, 143; similes in, 119, 124–125, 127, 131, 139; and skepticism about one’s sense of humor, 133–134; speaker in poems of, 123, 125, 131, 135, 136, 141; syntax in, 122, 123, 132, 139; subjects of, 116; tonal shifts in, 117–118, 157; and voice, 200n4 Hayes, Terrance, works of: “All the Way Live,” 127; American Sonnets for My Past and ­Future Assassin, 23, 118, 120, 128, 139, 143–145; “American Sonnet for the New Year,” 143–144; “The Avocado,” 135–137, 141, 157; “The Blue Baraka,” 115–116; “The Blue Terrance,” 124–125; “Carp Poem,” 134, 141, 157; Hip Logic, 128; “A House Is Not a Home,” 122–123; How to Be Drawn, 118, 128, 139; “How to Be Drawn to Trou­ble,” 129–133, 138, 141; Lighthead, 126, 128; Muscular ­Music, 115–116, 128; “New York Poem,” 118–121, 122, 124, 132, 139, 140, 202n33; “A Plate of Bones,” 126–127; “Squawk,” 133, 149; “Wigphrastic,” 137–143; Wind in a Box, 134–135 Heaney, Seamus, 74 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 201n17 Hejinian, Lynn, 204n2 Hennefeld, Maggie, 153–154 Herriman, George, Krazy Kat, 168–171 Hill, Geoffrey, 19; Mercian Hymns, 170 Hill, Lena, 182–183n50 Hines, Andy, 189n40 hip-­hop, 22, 139 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 94 Holden, Jonathan, 179n4 Hong, Cathy Park, 3, 24, 206n23 Housman, A. E., 29, 199n53 Huggins, Nathan, 34 Hughes, Langston, 12, 128; “Formula,” 182–183n50 Hutcheon, Linda, 186n87 idealization, of lyric/poetry, 60, 62, 168; and abjection, 14–15; in con­temporary poems, 155, 158, 175, 204–205n4; history of, 3, 182–183n50; and the private, 11, 23, 146, 150. See also lyricization of poetry; Mill, John Stuart incongruity, and comedy, 17, 18, 56, 69, 185n75, 185n78; and resolution, 23, 121 indigenous poets, 12, 110 interiority, 27, 118, 122, 147, 173, 204–205n4. See also solipsism

I n d e x irony, 16, 186n87; in Ammons, 90, 196–197n2, 197n10; in Berryman, 21, 28, 34, 46; in Hayes, 115, 121, 129, 133, 134, 137, 143, 144; in Lowell, 54, 62, 67, 74–75, 77; in Parker, 146, 148, 153, 155; in Shapero, 159, 160; in Youn, 171 Jackson, V ­ irginia, 3–4, 6, 26, 60, 194n27 Jarrell, Randall, 31, 54–55, 79, 193–194n14 Javadizadeh, Kamran, 183n52, 183n55 Jay-­Z, 152–153, 206n20 Jess, Tyehimba, Olio, 34 Jewish comedians, 181n33, 207n49 Jones, Everett Leroi. See Baraka, Amiri Jordan, June, 110, 206n29; “On the Loss of Energy (and Other ­Things),” 200n58 Joyce, James, 43 Kant, Immanuel, 185n75, 185n78, 195n54 Kazan, Lainie, 9 Kenner, Hugh, 30, 96–97, 99 Kercher, Stephen E., 41, 183n55 Key, Keegan-­Michael, 16, 115 Kinnahan, Linda, 204–205n4 kitsch, 89, 183–184n58 Klymaxx, 138, 141, 142 Koch, Kenneth, “To My Heart at the Close of Day,” 11–12, 182n44 Krazy Kat (Herriman), 168–172 Kristeva, Julie, 9, 12, 70, 181n33, 183n55 Lacan, Jacques, 185n78 La Farge, Benjamin, 185n78 Lang, V. R., 12 Language poetry, 24, 204n1, 204n2. See also avant-­garde; experimental poetry Laurel and Hardy, 19, 20, 67, 92 Lee, Charles, 55, 60 Lehman, David, 179n4 Levertov, Denise, 96–97 Levine, Ann, 26 Lewis, D. B. Wyndham, 55, 60 Limon, John: on the oscillation between opposites in comedy, 69, 186n87, 195n54; on stand-up comedy and abjection, 9–11, 14, 16, 18, 48, 53, 93, 158–159, 182n45 line breaks: in Ammons, 88, 91, 97, 100, 107; in Berryman, 44, 190n56; in Hayes, 135; in Parker, 154; in Pico, 111–112; in Shapero, 163, 164, 207n45 Lloyd, Harold, 92

213

Lockwood, Patricia, 53; “Rape Joke,” 155 Lowell, Robert, abjection in, 22, 53, 55, 60–61, 63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 79; on aging, 79; and autobiography, 193n10; and Berryman, 32, 63, 80–81; and black, queer, and female personae, 181n33; as confessional poetry’s icon, 59; and excess, 55, 56, 65, 81; form in, 14, 22, 48, 54, 63, 66, 74, 75, 78; and ­free verse, 14, 54, 66, 72; hospitalization of, 66–67, 71; irony in, 54, 62, 67, 74–75, 77; and literary criticism, 57, 59, 66; ­mental state of, 69–70, 195–196n58; meta­phor in, 56, 57, 58, 62, 66, 68, 72; meter in, 22, 54, 62, 72, 73, 78; and per­for­mance, 52–53, 54; and privilege, 10; rhyme in, 22, 65, 72, 73, 75, 76–77; self-­consciousness and self-­ involvement of, 13, 72, 82; sonnets of, 57, 58, 70, 73–78; unease about laughter, 93; voice of, in poems, 21–22, 54, 63, 66, 73, 74; voice of, in recordings, 63–64 Lowell, Robert, works of: “91 Revere Street,” 65; “­After the Play,” 77–78; “Between the Porch and Altar,” 57, 63; “Bright Day in Boston,” 79, 90; Day by Day, 22, 57, 78–79, 81; The Dolphin, 74; “Flounder,” 75–77; For Lizzie & Harriet, 74; For the Union Dead, 72; History, 74; “In Memory of Arthur Winslow,” 55–56; Life Studies, 57, 59–61, 65–74, 93, 106, 164; Lord Weary’s ­Castle, 22, 54–59, 70, 194n19; “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich,” 65, 66; “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” 64; “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” 48; The Mills of the Kavanaughs, 193–194n14; Near the Ocean, 74; Notebook, 74; Notebook, 1967–68, 74; “The Restoration,” 196n69; “Returning Turtle,” 74–75; “Skunk Hour,” 64, 65; “To Ann Adden,” 65; “To Delmore Schwartz,” 59–61, 63, 64; “To John Berryman,” 80–81; “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” 65, 66; “Waking in the Blue,” 65–72; “Words for Hart Crane,” 66 lyric, definitions of, 3–7, 53, 180n17, 201n17, 204n2 lyricization of poetry, 3, 179n8. See also idealization, of lyric/poetry; New Lyric Studies lyric reading, 5, 13, 21, 23, 49, 117, 124, 151, 179n8

21 4 I nde x

Maber, Peter, 33–34 Mailer, Norman, 46, 53, 138, 140, 141, 142 Maio, Samuel, 191n66 Majmudar, Amit, 22 masculinity, 116, 138, 142, 150, 183n55, 204–205n4 Matejka, Adrian, 3 May, Elaine, 41 Mayer, Bernadette, 24 McCrae, Shane, 13 McGonagall, William Topaz, 184n60 McGowan, Todd, 185n78 Meier, Matthew, 33 Melville, Herman, 73 Meredith, George, 186n88 Merrill, James, The Changing Light at Sandover, 163 Merwin, W. S., 191n72 meta­phor: 20, 175; in Ammons, 88, 89, 96, 105, 108; in Berryman, 44; in confessional poetry, 161; in Hayes, 119, 122, 124–125, 127, 131, 134, 136, 139, 141, 143; in Lowell, 56, 57, 58, 62, 66, 68, 72, 74; in O’Hara, 20; in Youn, 169, 170, 174. See also figurative language meter, 22; in Ammons, 91, 99, 199n37; in Berryman, 6, 26–33, 36–38, 40, 42–46, 49, 192n87; in Hayes, 130, 135, 138, 165; in Lowell, 22, 54, 62, 72, 73, 78; in Shapero, 163, 164; in Youn, 173; Youn on, 207n47 Mill, John Stuart, on poetry, 4–5, 6, 27, 47, 48, 49, 93, 131, 137, 187n9. See also idealization, of lyric/poetry; lyricization of poetry Miller, Cristanne, 190n55 Miller, Tyrus, 11, 50 Milton, John, 173, 199n53; Paradise Lost, 42, 55, 73 minstrelsy, 21, 26, 33–34, 37, 40, 47, 54, 149, 189n44, 190n49; and Jewish comedians, 181n33; digital blackface, 189n45 modernism, 3, 12, 22, 34, 183–184n58; and Ammons, 83, 103; and Berryman, 50; and black poets, 12, 182–183n50; and Hayes, 135; and Lowell, 59, 61, 75 Monty Python, 16 Morreall, John, 121 Muldoon, Paul, 132–133 Mullen, Harryette, 24, 128; Trimmings, 140 Murray, Bill, 41 Nancherla, Aparna, 153, 154 Nash, Ogden, 72

nature poetry, 83, 88–90 Nelson, Chad, 33 Nelson, Deborah, 194n25 New Black Aesthetic, 135 New Criticism, 5–7, 8, 12, 88, 117, 173, 201n17; and Ammons, 85; and Berryman, 14, 21, 27, 28, 30–33, 48, 49, 84, 188n25; and Hayes, 23; and Lowell, 61; and Pico, 85; and Youn, 172 New Lyric Studies, 3–4. See also lyric, definitions of; lyricization of poetry; lyric reading Ngai, Sianne, 16, 65, 121 Nichols, Mike, 41 Noah, Trevor, Lost in Translation, 157–158 North, Michael, 34 Notaro, Tig, 154 Notley, Alice, 195n35 Notorious B.I.G., “Warning,” 206n20 Objectivism, 22, 204n1 O’Brien, Flann, At Swim-­Two-­Birds, 43 Ogden, C. K., 68 O’Hara, Frank, 102; “Naphtha,” 17–20, 102 Olson, Charles, 87–88, 95, 97, 100 Omi, Michael, 200n3 Orr, Linda, 196–197n2 Parker, Morgan, 13, 23, 24, 144, 161, 163, 175, 206n20, 206n23; and ­actual jokes, 147; excess in, 7; form in, 154, 156; grammar in, 149, 151–152, 206n29; and gender, 156; irony in, 146, 148, 153, 155; and multiplicity, 149, 155; punctuation in, 157; and race/racism, 147, 148, 150, 155, 205n16; and representing lived experience, 8, 147–148, 150–151; and skepticism of humor, 147–148, 157–158; titles of works of, 151 Parker, Morgan, works of: “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl,” 155; “99 Prob­lems,” 152–154, 156; “Heaven Be a Xanax,” 7–8, 12; “Hottentot Venus,” 149; “How to Piss in Public and Maintain Femininity,” 151; “I’d Rather Sink . . . ​ Than Call Brad for Help,” 151–152; “If My House­mate Fucks with Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1),” 151; “If you are over staying woke,” 156–157; Magical Negro, 147, 156; Other ­People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night,” 151; “Poem Made of Empty Prescription ­Bottles from the Garbage in Front of Bill Murray’s

I n d e x House,” 151, 158; “The President’s Wife,” 149; “RoboBeyoncé,” 149; ­There Are More Beautiful ­Things Than Beyoncé, 147, 149, 152, 154, 155; “We Are the House That Holds the ­Table at Which Yes We ­Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat,” 148, 150, 151; “White Beyoncé,” 149 Peele, Jordan, 16, 115 pentameter. See meter per­for­mance, in poetry, 8, 9–10, 12, 16, 92–93; Ammons and, 82, 93–94, 103, 108; Bamford and, 175–176; Berryman and, 27, 43–49, 51, 63, 93–94; Hayes and, 130, 131, 132, 144; Lowell and, 52–55; and ­people of color, 133, 149; Youn and, 171. See also audience per­for­mance, live, of poetry: Berryman’s, 41, 63; Lowell’s, 63, 64; Pico’s, 200n59 Perkins, David, 188–189n35 Perloff, Marjorie, 101, 197n6, 204n2 Pico, Tommy, 13, 15, 96, 106, 150–151; background of, 110; chaotic style of, 111, 114; influence of Ammons on, 23, 82–83; live per­for­mances by, 200n59; and notions of poetic quality, 85; and proximity of poem and reader, 112, 113; punctuation in, 112; speaker in poems of, 111, 112, 113; syntax in, 112 Pico, Tommy, works of: IRL, 111; Junk, 15, 23, 85, 106, 110–114 Plath, Sylvia, 41, 60–61, 165; “Morning Song,” 160 Plato, 17, 185n73, 186n86 poetic effects. See allusions; badness, comic, in poetry; chiasmus; excess, in poetry; form, in poetry; grammar, in poetry; line breaks; meta­phor; meter; punctuation, in poetry; rhyme; syllepsis; syntax, in poetry; per­for­mance, in poetry; typography, in poetry; voice, in poetry poetry, styles of. See avant-­garde; confessional poetry; experimental poetry; formalism/formalist poetry; modernism; nature poetry; postmodernism; spoken-­word poetry postmodernism, 11, 50, 83, 97, 110 Pound, Ezra, 29, 34, 172 Prins, Yopie, 3–4 privilege and poetry, 13, 15, 113, 150; Robert Lowell as exemplar of, 53, 65, 66 Pryor, Richard, 3, 93, 105, 148, 179n6, 202n31; Live on the Sunset Strip, 1–2, 20, 108, 150

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psychiatric treatment, 41, 70, 176, 183n52 punctuation, in poetry, 97, 112, 157 puns: in Ammons, 91, 98, 106, 107; in Berryman, 25–26, 38, 40, 42, 46; and comic theory, 19; in Hayes, 121, 124, 127, 128, 140, 141, 145; in Lowell, 57, 61, 76–77; in Pico, 111, 113; in Shapero, 159 puzzles, 22, 121, 128 quality, poetic, 6, 13; Ammons and, 96, 102; Pico on, 85; Terada on, 3, 8, 14; Youn on, 172 Quashie, Kevin, 118, 122, 123–124, 125, 137, 144–145, 205n5 queerness, 66, 181n33 queer poets, 12, 110 Quintilian, 186n87 race: and Berryman, 33–34; Bruce on, 33; in Hayes, 115–121, 126–127, 133–134, 138, 141–142; in Lowell, 65–66; Mailer on, 140; in Mullen, 128, 140; in Parker, 147, 148, 150, 155, 205n16; in poems, invisible or buried, 206n23; and stand-up, 181n33; in Youn, 172–173. See also blackness; racism; ste­reo­types, racial and gender; whiteness racism, 200n3; and Berryman, 33–34; Bruce on, 33; Hayes on, 115–121, 126–127, 133–134, 138, 141–142; Parker on, 148, 150, 155, 205n16; Pico on, 113; Youn on, 173 Rae, Issa, 149, 153 Rajan, Tilottama, 5 Ramazani, Jahan, 55, 92 Rankine, Claudia, 173, 204–205n5 Ransom, John Crowe, 31, 54, 73 Rasula, Jed, 204n2 Rayner, Alice, 81 Reeves, Gareth, 188n25 relief theory, 185n72 religion: in Ammons, 84–85, 108, 197n10; in Berryman, 37–38, 44, 188n22; in Lowell, 55, 64, 75–77; in Shapero, 161, 164, 165 rhyme: in Ammons, 103; in Berryman, 27, 29–30, 33, 37, 43, 44, 45, 188n22; in Bishop, 62; in Hayes, 119, 126, 127, 132, 140; in Lowell, 22, 65, 72, 73, 75, 76–77; in Shapero, 24, 159, 164–165, 167, 175; in Youn, 172, 173 Rice, Thomas “­Daddy,” 34 Richards, I. A., 7, 8, 68 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 161 Rivers, Joan, 32, 93

21 6 I nde x

Rives, Rochelle, 10 Robinson, Fred Miller, 185n78 Rock, Chris, 115, 138 Romanticism, modernist understandings of, 59, 61, 62, 194n25 Rosenthal, M. L. 32 Ross, Fran, Oreo, 135 Ross, Ralph, 32, 31 Ross, Stephen, 8889 Roth, Philip, Portnoy’s Complaint, 105 Sahl, Mort, 32, 92 Sansom, Ian, 96, 199n36 Santayana, George, 61–62, 72 satire, 110, 115, 183n55, 186n88; in Bruce, 33; in Hayes, 23, 137–138, 143; in Parker, 150; in Youn, 170 Saturday Night Live, 184n64 Schneider, Isidor, 60 Scott, Darieck, 13 Seidel, Frederick, 143 Seinfeld, 92, 105, 196–197n2 sestets: in Berryman, 21, 26, 27–28, 30, 35, 36, 43, 44, 47, 100; in Lowell, 74–77 Sewell, Lisa, 204–205n4 sex/sexuality: in Ammons, 105–108, 174; Auden on, 171; in Berryman, 49, 95; in Hayes, 127, 140, 155; in Lowell, 65; in Youn, 169, 170–171, 174 Sexton, Anne, 47 Shakespeare, William, 183n57, 191n68; allusions to, by con­temporary poets, 35, 103, 164, 180n21; humor in, 35; “I am” construction in, 57–58; sonnets of, 73, 78 Shapero, Natalie, 13, 23, 147, 207n45; diction and grammar of, 163, 167; form in, 24, 158–159, 163–166, 207n45; on motherhood, 158, 159, 160, 162, 167; rhyme in, 24, 159, 164, 175; and self, 165; similarities of, to Lowell, 73; speaker in poems of, 160–161; tonal inconsistencies in, 164; and trauma, 161; typography of, 163, 164 Shapero, Natalie, works of: Hard Child, 158–167; “Hot Streak,” 166; “My Hand and Cold,” 166–167; “Teacup This,” 162–165 Shaughnessy, Brenda, 10; “Liquid Flesh,” 160, 207n39 Shaw, Robert B., 196n62 Shockley, Evie, 12, 148 similes. See meta­phor Simpson, Eileen, 26

sitcoms, 16, 147, 149, 196–197n2 Skelton, John, 22 sketch comedy, 16, 115 Skillman, Nikki, 70, 102 slapstick, 19 Smith, Stevie, 29 Snodgrass, W. D., 34, 60 social commentary/critique, 5, 23, 116, 118, 147 social media, 111, 189n45 Solange, A Seat at the ­Table, 151 solipsism, 59, 71, 72, 85, 140, 161, 204–205n4 sonnets, 2, 24, 61, 196n62; and forms read as white, 128; Hayes’s, 23, 118, 120, 128, 133, 139, 143–145; Lowell’s, 57, 58, 70, 73–78; mimicked by Youn, 172; Petrarchan, 27, 30; Shakespeare’s, 35, 73, 78, 201n17; Words­worth’s, 60, 61 Spaide, Christopher, 116, 200n4 speaker: in Ammons, 85, 88, 92, 101, 112; in Ashbery, 71; in Bishop, 62; as conflated with poet, 66, 120; in the dramatic monologue, 192n83; first-­person, 87, 111, 112, 140, 169, 172; in Hayes, 123, 125, 131, 135, 136, 141; normative, according to the New Criticism, 8, 12, 117, 126; in Parker, 155, 156; in Pico, 111, 112, 113; in Shapero, 160, 161; solitary, according to Mill, 21, 27, 47; in Youn, 168, 169, 174. See also audience; solipsism; subjectivity; voice, in poetry Spender, Stephen, 57 Spiegelman, Willard, 197n6 spoken-­word poetry, 12 stand-up comedy, 160, 196–197n2; and abjection, 10–11, 14, 22, 53, 182n45; affinities of, with poetry, 8, 9, 14, 16, 17, 24, 85, 91–94, 109, 153; alluded to in poems, 3, 92; and the audience, 10, 12, 93, 175–176; and callbacks, 105, 106; history of, 63, 92, 181n30; Hong on, 3, 24; Limon on, 9–11, 14, 16, 18, 53, 93, 158–159, 181n33; as an opposite to poetry, 3, 24; performers, 115, 181n33. See also specific performers Starr, G. Gabrielle, 184n64 Stein, Gertrude, 34 Stein, Sadie, 53 ste­reo­types, racial and gender, 116–117, 142, 147, 150, 155, 200n3. See also essentialism; racism Sterne, Lawrence, Tristram Shandy, 43 Stevens, Wallace, 75, 103

I n d e x Stuffed Owl, The (Lewis and Lee), 55, 59–60 subjectivity, 5, 154, 155, 201n17; in Ammons, 90, 94, 104; in Ashbery, 71; in Berryman, 34, 48–50; in Hayes, 23, 117, 121–126; in Lowell, 80; and the lyric, 4, 11; in Parker, 153; and poetic style, 146, 204n1; and whiteness, 183n55; in Youn, 168, 173. See also solipsism; speaker, in lyric; voice, in poetry subversion, and comedy, 18–19, 23, 38, 121 superiority, and comedy, 17–18, 23, 38, 42, 137 syllepsis, 120 syntax, in poetry, 112; in Ammons, 103, 107; in Berryman, 27, 29, 30, 36, 38–40, 46; in Hayes, 122, 123, 132, 139; in Lowell, 74, 79; in Pico, 112; in Youn, 172, 174 Tate, Allen, 31, 32, 54, 61, 189n40 Tennyson, Alfred, 41, 48, 60 Terada, Rei, 3, 8, 14, 61, 193n10, 204n2 theatricality, in poetry. See per­for­mance, in poetry therapy. See psychiatric treatment Thurber, James, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” 44, 45, 46 Tiffany, Daniel, 183–184n58 Tolson, Melvin, 12, 182–183n50, 189n40 Trakl, Georg, “Zu Abend mein Herz,” 182n44 trans poets, 12 trauma, and poetry, 132, 155, 161 Trinidad James, “All Gold Every­thing,” 145 trochees, 49, 138, 192n87 Trousdale, Rachel, 184n65 Tucker, Herbert, 5, 48, 51 typography, in poetry: in Ammons, 98–102; in Berryman, 49; in Pico, 113; in Shapero, 163 unruliness, 2, 8, 12, 124, 139, 153; in Berryman, 25, 33, 46, 100 Van Doren, Mark, 31 vaudev­ille, 33, 37, 49, 50, 92, 133 Vendler, Helen, 33, 36, 37, 46–47, 54, 79, 101, 201n17 Vernon, John, 179n4, 192–193n2 voice, in poetry: Anglo-­American ideals of, 113; in Berryman, 9, 27, 45, 47, 49, 54; in Bishop, 62; defined, 54; in Hayes, 200n4;

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in Lowell, 54, 66, 73, 74; in Youn, 173. See also minstrelsy voltas, 74, 75, 77, 78 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 20 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 182–183n50 Wallace, Ronald, 187n7 Wang, Dorothy, 150, 153 Wanzo, Rebecca, 12, 15; on “precarious-­g irl comedy,” 149, 156–157 Warren, Robert Penn, 31 webcomics, 184n64 Wheeler, Lesley, 54 White, Gillian, 3–4, 47, 59, 123, 201n16, 204n2, 204–205n4 Whitehead, Colson, 115 whiteness, 144, 149, 154, 173, 183n55, 189n45; in Ammons, 96; and apathy, 138, 141; and assumptions about black culture, 118; and assumptions about identity of poets and their audience, 13, 35, 125, 128, 183n55; and beauty standards, 138; and Berryman, 33–35; and femininity, 151, 176, 205n5; in Lowell, 53, 65–66, 71–72; and male heterosexuality, 138, 142; and privilege, 13, 15, 34–35, 65, 150; and Shapero, 73, 161 See also racism Whitman, Walt, 87, 97, 199n53 Wicker, Marcus, 1–3, 24, 175, 186n87; “Self Dialogue Watching Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip,” 1–3 Wilbur, Richard, 64 Williams, William Carlos, 60, 61, 87, 89–90, 100, 135, 142, 198n15; “As the cat,” 96–97 Wimsatt, William K., 29, 48 Winant, Howard, 200n3 Winters, Yvor, 20, 28, 31, 32, 96–97 Winters, Jonathan, 16–17, 95 Wolfe, George, The Colored Museum, 138 Wolosky, Shira, 6 Wong, Ali, 160 wordplay. See allusions; chiasmus; meta­ phor; puns; rhyme; syllepsis Words­worth, William, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” 83, 89; “While Anna’s peers and early playmates tread,” 59, 60, 61, 62, 194n29 Yeats, W. B., 29, 137; Berryman influenced by, 27, 31; in Dream Songs, 35, 36, 37, 39; and the poet’s audience, 5, 7 Yenser, Stephen, 195–196n58

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Youn, Monica, 13, 15, 23, 174; and abjection, 146, 168, 175; experimentation in, 172–173; on expressive poetry, 146; and gender, 147; humor and playfulness in, 165, 168, 169; influences on, 172–173, 208n58; and pentameter, 207n47; on romantic obsession, 24, 168–175; source material of, 169, 170, 171; and subjectivity, 173; and theatricality, 169, 171 Youn, Monica, works of: Barter, 170; Blackacre, 173; “Ersatz Ignatz,” 169;

“Goldacre,” 173; Ignatz, 168–172; “Ignatz Pacificus,” 169–170; “The ­Labors of Ignatz,” 170; “On Ignatz’s Eyebrow,” 171; “Redacre,” 173; “Semper Ignatz,” 174; “So Sweetly Slumbers Ignatz in His Sylvan Bowers,” 172 Young, Kevin, 33, 50, 65, 188–189n35, 192–193n2 Zimmerman, Sarah MacKenzie, 4–5 Zupančič, Alenka, 18–19, 56, 69, 89, 186n87