[New-Poetry] Re: Re: FYRP: Divine Comedy

[Crisman Cooley]

Hal,
I'm piling on...

I've been thinking about this in terms of what I've been reading  
lately.  I admit that I'm quite a dud when it comes to discussing new- 
po because I don't seem to get around to much that's really new.  In  
fact, I laughed my way through the blog discussion, remembering how  
Silliman's original August 2002 posts struck me: "How would anyone do  
a blog and still have time to write?"  I have the same sense today,  
as I continue editing the same book I was working on five years ago.   
My book will be perfect soon, and will have a place in heaven (next  
to the hippopotamus) without my having to dirty my hands at blogging.

Nonetheless, your response and your original post interests me... so  
much so that I think I've read the Gough piece three times.  A lot of  
it I really think is hogwash... like the loss of Aristotle's _Comedy_  
dooming us to 2k years of tragedy.  After all, Joyce claimed  
Aristotle as his philosopher and the proximal cause of exact  
transcriptions of farting, and other antics, for example.

Chaucer was pretty hilarious sometimes.  And, naturally, I accept  
your nomination of Shakespeare to the club of comic poets.  To begin  
with, his conception of love is fundamentally comic: that is, love  
never works out, even when it works out.  I realized too that though  
I love Blake, he never told a joke in his life... (well, I haven't  
completed Jerusalem or Milton, but if I do, I won't be looking for  
jokes.)  Lorca in poems or plays: completely unfunny.  Yeats is  
terminally serious.  (Yes, but even his essays are  
beautiful!.......)    But there is hope, in the strangest of places:  
TS Eliot is funny!  Yes, it is true!  Prufrock still makes me laugh:  
"I grow old.  I grow old.  I shall wear my trousers rolled."  Some  
lines from Waste Land aspire to black humor in the Bretonian sense:  
"'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to  
sprout?'".   And the _Hippo_ is a fine and twisty satire (see below),  
and I recall Sweeney's erection.  As he got older, though, TSE  
succumbed (as Gough says) more and more to the church, to authority,  
to his desire to belong-- and this was fatal to his sense of humor,  
even more so than to his poetry.  When I read _Four Quartets_ this  
last time, I laughed---- not because it's funny but because it  
isn't.  In fact, it reads to me like bad philosophy with line  
breaks.  WC Williams isn't funny.  Crane could not have been.  Pound:  
forget it.  Stevens could be funny but his wit is too interior and  
self-absorbed, his imagination stifled in the tiny closet where he  
kept it....  I did not laugh at a single one of his collected poems.   
Heaney never cracked a joke.  I laughed at a couple of Liz Bishop's.   
I know Ginsberg was pretty sure he was funny, but his humor is so  
tainted in my mind by the dull hipster humor that followed him that I  
really cannot laugh at any of it (except _Vineland_ by Pynchon).   
Simic has made me smile a time or two.  Zukovsky... I did not  
understand, therefore could not laugh.  I don't find O'Hara funny.    
I think Ashbery was funny a few times, and I was often expecting to  
laugh... then not laughing, just feeling kinda sad and alienated.   
Funnier and more interesting than his contemporaries (though never  
considered by them to be a poet-- though I know that he was!)... is  
of course... John Cage.

Tips to David: I have found several of the Mark Halliday poems quite  
amusing.  Also, _Thank You (Walt Whitman)_ by Matt Cook is  
hilarious.  But when I went to Cook's website, I didn't like the  
cover poem or find it amusing.

There was a poet on this list Gabe Gudding that started a HumPo  
list.  I asked Rachel Loden by email if I could join and never got a  
response.  And I'm not terribly ambitious in this direction, I  
suppose, since I never asked again.  It is certainly intrinsically  
funny to write about Richard Nixon.  And if anyone I ever heard of  
writing Simpsonesque poetry it would probably be GGudding.  But there  
is something about his poetry and about that show-- viciousness, I  
believe, and the tendency to draw human beings as violent, selfish,  
petty and ugly-- that is impotent to make me laugh.  (btw: I'm not  
denying that humans are these things... but this is where Blake has  
the leg up: the ability to imagine the beautiful.  Cervantes made the  
greatest novel based on beautiful but impractical human  
aspirations.)  Humor is after all a very delicate matter!  The  
treatise by example of chaotic power of laughter is _Tristram  
Shandy_ ... my essential guidebook.  On film: Charlie Chaplin and  
Marx Brothers.  In poetry... well, I'm still looking.

THE HIPPOPOTAMUS

by: T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

THE broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The 'potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo's voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus's day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way--
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the 'potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr'd virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.


"The Hippopotamus" is reprinted from Poems. T.S. Eliot. New York:  
Alfred A. Knopf, 1920.




> Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 14:49:14 -0500
> From: Halvard Johnson <halvard at earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: FYRP: Divine Comedy
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;	Views"
> 	<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Message-ID: <FAACCDB9-6C41-43B0-9D17-5C266180BD5A at earthlink.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
>
> Oh my, this is the conventional anthology critique: "But where are
> X and Y and Z?"
>
> "Who are the great funny poets?" is an interesting question, although
> I'm not sure that the comic is always funny.
>
> I'll nominate Shakespeare for starters.
>
> Pile on.
>
> Hal
>
> "Take what you can use and let the rest go by."
>      --Ken Kesey
>