Humor Empathy And Community In Twentieth Century American Poetry

For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humour encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political and discursive hierarchies - whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. 'Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry' explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers.

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies—whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.

Humor in recent American poetry has been largely dismissed or ignored by scholars, due in part to a staid reverence for the lyric. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that humor is not a superficial feature of a small subset, but instead an integral feature in a great deal of American poetry written since the 1950s. Rather than viewing poetry as a lofty, serious genre, Carrie Conners asks readers to consider poetry alongside another art form that has burgeoned in America since the 1950s: stand-up comedy. Both art forms use wit and laughter to rethink the world and the words used to describe it. Humor’s disruptive nature makes it especially whetted for critique. Many comedians and humorous poets prove to be astute cultural critics. To that end, Laugh Lines focuses on poetry that wields humor to espouse sociopolitical critique. To show the range of recent American poetry that uses humor to articulate sociopolitical critique, Conners highlights the work of poets working in four distinct poetic genres: traditional, received forms, such as the sonnet; the epic; procedural poetry; and prose poetry. Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson provide the main focus of the chapters, but each chapter compares those poets to others writing humorous political verse in the same genre, including Terrance Hayes and Anne Carson. This comparison highlights the pervasiveness of this trend in recent American poetry and reveals the particular ways the poets use conventions of genre to generate and even amplify their humor. Conners argues that the interplay between humor and genre creates special opportunities for political critique, as poetic forms and styles can invoke the very social constructs that the poets deride.

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies--whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.

Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar---Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman---and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful, moving insights into American social life in the transforming decades of the 1940s through the 1960s.In addition to having worked during the broad middle of the last century, these poets constitute the center of twentieth-century American poetry in the larger sense, refuting invidious connotations of “middle” as coming after the great moderns and being superseded by a proliferating postmodern experimentation. This middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its prodigious body of poetry, even as it complicates historical and aesthetic categorizations.Taking diverse formal and thematic angles on these poets---biographical-historical, deconstructionist, and more formalist accounts---this book re-examines their between-ness and ambivalence: their various positionings and repositionings in aesthetic, political, and personal matters. The essays study the interplay between these writers and such shifting formations as religious discourse, consumerism, militarism and war, the ideology of America as “nature's nation,” and U.S. race relations and ethnic conflicts. Reading the Middle Generation Anew also shows the legacy of the middle generation, the ways in which their lives and writings continue to be a shaping force in American poetry. This fresh and invigorating collection will be of great interest to literary scholars and poets.

Seven chronologically arranged essays--each covering roughly a decade from 1908 through 1988--plus two special-focus essays on black and female poets, an introduction by Ed Folsom, and a preface by editors Jack Myers and David Wojahn, outline the critical, creative, aesthetic, and cultural forces at work in the American poetry of this century. Several contributors, including Michael Heller, Richard Jackson, and Jonathan Holden, have recently published important book-length critical studies in their essay area; all have published well-regarded collections of their own poetry.

A comprehensive guide to American poetry, from 1900 through the early twenty-first century, profiling a selection of poems, popular and lesser-known authors, themes, concepts, periodicals, and movements.