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New Leader
May/June 2000
The Power of Laughter
By Phoebe Pettingell
| ONE OF THE HAPPIER developments in postmodern culture
has been the disintegration of hard and fast boundaries between "high" and "low" art. Not so many decades ago tastemakers, critics, and at times courts of law, agonized over the proper assignment of such distinctions: Was Gershwin's Porgy and Bess grand opera or a musical? Could some jazz rank with Mozart? Was the painting of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol worthy of museum space? Did Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" have artistic merit, or should it be declared pornography? When I was in high school, my English teachers felt embarrassed by the fact that T.S. Eliot stooped to penning light verse about cats. One of them compared it to discovering that Jackson Pollock or Lucien Freud had asked to be taken on as a Disney animator. Irony and satire were appropriate in "high art"; fooling around for a laugh meant pandering to the masses. Even back then, I noticed that while Ogden Nash hardly passed muster in modernist circles, our school anthologies included those 19th-century masters of comic verse, Lewis Carroll and C.S. Calverley. Furthermore, the same teacher who shuddered at Old Possum's cats nursed a passion himself for Don Marquis' archy and mehitabel. Unfortunately, by defining "serious" poetry as weighty and often hard to comprehend, the literary establishment ensured it an ever-dwindling audience. That climate has changed. It is now possible to find well-regarded verse eliciting not merely smiles but an occasional full-throated laugh. In fact, this spring three such volumes--by Thom Gunn, Carol Ann Duffy and Kenneth Koch--have been issued. Thom Gunn's latest collection, Boss Cupid (Farrar Straus Giroux, 111 pp., $22.00), strikes a cheeky pose starting with its title. The pagan boy love god who pierces mortals with his arrows, causing them to become enamored of often quite unsuitable people, does indeed control the lives of many of his victims. The adjective "boss," however, has numerous meanings-including "stud." Sure enough, the cover of this book shows a painting of a young tough in blue jeans and Doc Martens; the sort who frequently serves as muse to its author. A resident of San Francisco, Gunn has been in the United States for some 40-odd years, but his verse formed itself on British models before he immigrated. He can be a wizard with rhyme schemes and complex meter, forms of prosody that for many years were almost relegated to light poetry on the American scene. One of his short aphorisms, in a section called "Jokes, etc." observes: There are many different varieties of the New Jerusalem, Political, pharmaceutical--I've visited most of them. But of all the embodiments ever built, I'd only return to one, For the sexual New Jerusalem was by far the greatest fun. In contrast to the poet's 1992 work, The Man with Night Sweats, which bleakly elegized the aids epidemic, Boss Cupid usually manages a laugh in the face of adversity. Gunn uses humor the way he uses rhyme and meter: to give form to fear and emptiness so dreadful that they threaten to overwhelm thought and emotion. Years ago, he disarmingly explained why he had chosen to write about his acid trips in the most formal prosody possible: "Otherwise, there was the danger of the experience becoming so distended that it would simply unravel like fog before wind in the unpremeditated movement of free verse." Here a tribute to his former mentor, Robert Duncan, is suffused with gentle, comic moments that illuminate the sad decay of a once vital writer, reminding the reader of Duncan's irrepressible energy and generosity. Except occasionally in bitter lyrics about the tense relations between parents and children, Gunn's compassion usually shines through his sometimes mocking manner. "Saturday Night" recalls the old homosexual bathhouses of his adopted city's Castro District back in the mid-1970s, when, unbeknown to their patrons, they were helping to spread the aids virus. The poem begins as a nostalgic testimonial to the power of Eros, and the paradisal-seeming freedom of those days. Yet after it reaches the seedy pleasure palaces' grim downfall the poet sees an event akin to the burning of the Library at Alexandria--that tragedy of the late Classical world--which left the learning of an entire culture in fragmentary ruins.
The embraces slip, and nothing seems to stay In our community of the carnal heart. Some lose conviction in mid-arc of play, Their skin turns numb, they dress and will depart: The perfect body, lingering on goodbyes, Cannot find strength now for another start. Dealers move in, and murmuring advertise Drugs from each doorway with a business frown. Mattresses lose their springs. Beds crack, capsize, And spill their occupants on the floor to drown. Walls darken with the mold, or is it rash? At length the baths catch fire and then burn down, And blackened beams dam up the bays of ash. and slangy panache, are perhaps most reminiscent of Elizabethan love lyrics. Not Shakespeare's sonnets, but songs from the plays, or the mostly anonymous texts of period madrigals. Those poems laugh ruefully at the humiliations of love, its ludicrous pratfalls that at times spill over into disaster, or even tragedy, yet at other times make lover and beloved feel transformed, the pain justified. Gunn's own examples of lovers cover a wide range of types. They include King David, one of the Bible's notorious philanderers, and Milwaukee serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed young men and often kept their corpses preserved, sometimes eating parts of them. Boss Cupid's culmination comes in "A Wood Near Athens." The poet muses about the fundamental nature of his subject. Dropping his insouciance, he segues from the pastoral world, where nature is fresh and benign, to the Darwinian vision of survival of the fittest and Freud's Augustinian comprehension of warped psyches illustrating Original Sin:
Love makes the shoots leap from the blunted branches, Love makes birds call, and maybe we are right. Love then makes craning saplings crowd for light, The weak being jostled off to shade and death. Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings Out of the nest, to spatter on the ground. For love has gouged a temporary hollow Out of its baby-back, to help it kill. have illustrated various forms of love: Ruth and Naomi, Romeo and Juliet, the saintly Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, Emily Bronte's tormented obsessives in Wuthering Heights. He then decides that it would be wrong to judge them against one an other because each, even the psychopathic and tormented Dahmer, "struggled through the thickets as they could." Emerson suggested that it is the force of love itself, not the love object, that holds people in thrall. Thom Gunn, in this new wry examination, ultimately agrees and pays tribute not to lust but to the power of inspiration. Although sexual desire may be a starting point, its effect is what makes our fellow creatures matter to us, and what makes life seem significant. IT ISN'T OFTEN that poetry collections appear on the best-seller list in this country; indeed, the only example in recent memory is the late Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, an English import. No doubt the publisher of another import, Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife (Faber and Faber, 76 pp., $22.00), hopes it will duplicate the feat. It has been selling spectacularly in Great Britain for several months. The book's premise is to give "forgotten" wives of great men of history, literature and myth a chance to have their sassy say. Duffy is a spirited writer and her humor can be raucous. Mrs. Rip van Winkle adjusts happily to her hubby's long sleep by traveling the world and painting its beauty spots, Until the day I came home with this pastel of Niagara And he was sitting up in bed rattling Viagra. Admittedly, this is a cheap shot, distorting the story of someone who outlived his own contemporaries by a century. Duffy comes nearer the mark with her satiric version of the Pygmalion story. Here she focuses on the creepiness of a man in love with the statue of a woman he has made. He be comes a portrait of the kind of male who loves to dominate, who is attracted to passive frigidity because frightened of female passion. Sometimes horror inspires the laughter, as with the story of Mrs. Lazarus, who, believing her husband gone for good, passes through the stages of mourning and then moves on with her love life, only to discover the dead one rising from his putrescent grave. Not all the women in this book are played for laughs. The nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, was the daughter of Proteus, who could change shape at will. Duffy gives her the same gift:
to the size of a bird in the hand of a man. Sweet, sweet, was the small song that I sang, till I felt the squeeze of his fist. for her lover, but also for herself. The nymph's metamorphoses teeter between passive and aggressive in a manner that evokes adolescent romantic role playing. Anne Sexton did this kind of thing very wittily in her fairy tale poems, and myths seem to bring out a comparable quality in Duffy. The book's weaknesses come to the fore when Duffy turns humor into jokiness, as with Mrs. Darwin noticing her Victorian husband's resemblance to a chimpanzee, or Frau Freud rehearsing all the comic names for the male sexual organ. Furthermore, the satiric potential of Duffy's concept eventually goes a bit stale. Verve alone can't carry a book of 30 antiman gags. The World's Wife explores some interesting territory, but reading it straight through you feel as if you spent a trivial hour with one of those coffee-table joke books like Great Housewives in Art. Bitterness spoils the fun of all those relentless diatribes about male short comings. In the end, I couldn't help recalling why few critics take humorous poetry seriously. LEST ONE BEGIN to assume the British are more prone to poetic comedy than we are, Kenneth Koch demonstrates that American verse can provoke smiles and laughter as well. New Addresses (Knopf, 73 pp., $23.00) is an autobiographical meditation written as a series of apostrophes: "To Life," "To My Father's Business," "To Orgasm," "To Jewishness, Paris, Ambition, Trees, My Heart and Destiny," "To Old Age," and so forth. In a recent interview in Publishers Weekly, Koch explains, "To talk to death as John Donne does--it's a ... chance to have control over things that we ordinarily don't control." Initially this inspired him, Koch says, and then adds: "After I discovered the form and the tone, which I liked, I began to think, 'What do I really want to talk to?'" Donne's apostrophic poems preach to the attribute being addressed. Koch has always been the consummate conversationalist, so even when talking to "World War Two" he sounds like a man reminiscing over drinks with an old pal he hasn't seen for a number of years:
You were large, and with a large hand You presented them in different cities, Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafes. becomes the kind of overbearing former acquaintance one realizes one didn't like all that much.
We made enemy soldiers, in Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands... I was carrying one, I who had gone about for years as a child Praying God don't let there ever be another war Or if there is, don't let me be in it. Well, I was in you. All you cared about was existing and being won. because of my poetry," he kept telling himself in the midst of battle, and describes how a terrible line he thought of--"The surf comes in like masochistic lions"--helped keep him alive in the carnage. We can laugh at this; Koch certainly does. Of course, many people who have survived combat carry around similar talismanic memories. The difference is that Koch actually became a poet, and found a way of incorporating startling images mockingly into his work. Much of his new book's charm lies in its unexpected perspectives. Piano lessons become a relationship that just didn't work out. Koch tells Life, "You must be very busy, very powerful, and manic, why/Do you want to keep up such a huge organization?" Gradually, though, the reader realizes that under the guise of being introduced to all these "characters,"--manic Life, over-bearing World War Two, sexy French, we are being shown what motivates the writer better than any of his earlier books did. There has always been a comedic aspect to Koch's verse, and evidently to his life. In "To Kidding Around," he gives an all-too-clear picture of the kind of clown who easily slips from being funny to upsetting others with his antics. Yet, in telling us the attractions of kidding around, he disarmingly confesses it can be a way "To be rid of the troubles/Of one person by turning into/Someone else, moving and jolting/As if nothing mattered but today/In fact nothing/But this precise moment...." Readers have wondered why Koch loves such transformations. Now, having been allowed to glimpse the overserious world of his childhood where he stammered, or the effect of the War in the Pacific on a sensitive young man, his fooling seems to take on deeper overtones. "Unhappiness and pain" underlies the cheerfulness. Their blend is Koch's most appealing characteristic. The best humor is always the kind that helps us cope with life's vicissitudes. Sometimes, it makes us laugh at what we can't quite face, as does the tittering that so easily breaks out during solemn occasions like funerals, or the joking about events such as the Columbine high school shootings. Then there is the humor of outrage, from Jonathan Swift to Carol Ann Duffy. But what moves us most are the people whose laughter enables them to remain hopeful about life, who trust in its power to overcome those forces that drive us to despair. As Mark Twain remarked, "Against the power of laughter, nothing can stand." |