The Power of Laughter

...As machines make ice We made enemy soldiers, in Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands...

...Beds crack, capsize, And spill their occupants on the floor to drown...

...There has always been a comedic aspect to Koch's verse, and evidently to his life...

...The best humor is always the kind that helps us cope with life's vicissitudes...

...In "To Kidding Around," he gives an alltoo-clear picture of the kind of clown who easily slips from being funny to upsetting others with his antics...

...Unfortunately, by defining "serious" poetry as weighty and often hard to comprehend, the literary establishment ensured it an ever-dwindling audience...

...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...

...The Man with Night Sweats, which bleakly elegized the AIDS epidemic, Boss Cupid usually manages a laugh in the face of adversity...

...Furthermore, the same teacher who shuddered at Old Possum's cats nursed a passion himself for Don Marquis' archy andmehitabel...

...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...

...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...

...Unhappiness and pain" underlies the cheerfulness...

...The adjective "boss," however, has numerous meanings— including "stud...

...That climate has changed...

...The poet muses about the fundamental nature of his subject...

...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...

...Koch tells Life, "You must be very busy, very powerful, and manic, why/Do you want to keep up such a huge organization...

...Here she focuses on the creepiness of a man in love with the statue of a woman he has made...

...Not Shakespeare's sonnets, but songs from the plays, or the mostly anonymous texts of period madrigals...

...Inevitably, in this poem, some of the memories grow darker...

...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: Early on you introduced me to young women in bars You were large, and with a large hand You presented them in different cities...

...observes: There are many different varieties of the New Jerusalem...

...Love then makes craning saplings crowd for light...

...The nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, was the daughter of Proteus, who could change shape at will...

...Eliot stooped to penning light verse about cats...

...We say: Love makes the shoots leap from the blunted branches...

...He becomes a portrait of the kind of male who loves to dominate, who is attracted to passive frigidity because frightened of female passion...

...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...

...Verve alone can't carry a book of 30 antiman gags...

...I'd only return to one...

...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...

...It isn't often that poetry collections appear on the bestseller list in this country...

...Was the painting of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol worthy of museum space...

...Admittedly, this is a cheap shot, distorting the story of someone who outlived his own contemporaries by a century...

...Not all the women in this book are played for laughs...

...Bitterness spoils the fun of all those relentless diatribes about male shortcomings...

...What hopeful hopelessness...

...Gunn's own examples of lovers cover a wide range of types...

...Sweet, sweet, was the small song thatlsang, till I felt the squeeze of his fist...

...Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings Out of the nest, to spatter on the ground...

...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...

...Returning to literature, Gunn catalogues some of the characters who 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...

...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...

...Did Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" have artistic merit, or should it be declared pornography...

...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...

...Gunn's beautifully crafted lines, for all their contemporary subjects and slangy panache, are perhaps most reminiscent of Elizabethan love lyrics...

...In fact, this spring three such volumes—by Thorn Gunn, Carol Ann Duffy and Kenneth Koch—have been issued...

...The book's premise is to give "forgotten" wives of great men of history, literature and myth a chance to have their sassy say...

...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...

...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...

...In a recent interview in Publishers Weekly, Koch explains, "To talk to death as John Donne does—it's a...

...We can laugh at this...

...Love makes birds call, and maybe we are right...

...Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafés...

...A t length the baths catch fire and then burn down...

...Mattresses lose their springs...

...Duffy is a spirited writer and her humor can be raucous...

...Except occasionally in bitter lyrics about the tense relations between parents and children, Gunn's compassion usually shines through his sometimes mocking manner...

...the sort who frequently serves as muse to its author...

...For the sexual New Jentsalem was by far the greatest fun...

...Koch certainly does...

...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...

...Piano lessons become a relationship that just didn't work out...

...The poem begins as a nostalgic testimonial to the power of Eros, and the paradisal-seeming freedom of those days...

...Well, I was in you...

...Walls darken with the mold, or is it rash...

...As Mark Twain remarked, "Against the power of laughter, nothing can stand...

...Much of his new book's charm lies in its unexpected perspectives...

...Darwin noticing her Victorian husband's resemblance to a chimpanzee, or Frau Freud rehearsing all the comic names for the male sexual organ...

...I watch, I wait— The embraces slip, and nothing seems to stay In our community of the carnal heart...

...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...

...The difference is that Koch actually became a poet, and found a way of incorporating startling images mockingly into his work...

...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...

...When I was in high school, my English teachers felt embarrassed by the fact that T.S...

...The poet ended up fighting in the South Pacific...

...On Poetry 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...

...And blackened beams dam up the bays of ash...

...I can't be killed 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...

...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: Beautiful and ridiculous...

...Duffy comes nearer the mark with her satiric version of the Pygmalion story...

...For love has gouged a temporary hollow Out of its baby-back, to help it kill...

...Their blend is Koch's most appealing characteristic...

...Emerson suggested that it is the force of love itself, not the love object, that holds people in thrall...

...Furthermore, the satiric potential of Duffy's concept eventually goes a bit stale...

...Calverley...

...The nymph's metamorphoses teeter between passive and aggressive in a manner that evokes adolescent romantic role playing...

...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...

...indeed, the only example in recent memory is the late Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, an English import...

...Here a tribute to his former mentor...

...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 CS...

...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...

...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...

...Political, pharmaceutical—I've visited most of them...

...fooling around for a laugh meant pandering to the masses...

...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...

...Dealers move in, and murmuring advertise Drugs from each doorway with a business frown...

...Then there is the humor of outrage, from Jonathan Swift to Carol Ann Duffy...

...Gradually, though, the reader realizes that under the guise of being introduced to all these "characters,"— manic Life, overbearing World War Two, sexy French, we are being shown what motivates the writer better than any of his earlier books did...

...Thorn Gunn, in this new wry examination, ultimately agrees and pays tribute not to lust but to the power of inspiration...

...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...

...Sometimes horror inspires the laughter, as with the story of Mrs...

...One of his short aphorisms, in a section called "Jokes, etc...

...The weak being jostled off to shade and death...

...All you cared about was existing and being won...

...Duffy gives her the same gift: I shrank my self to the size of a bird in the hand of a man...

...In contrast to the poet's 1992 work...

...But of all the embodiments ever built...

...chance to have control over things that we ordinarily don't control...

...It has been selling spectacularly in Great Britain for several months...

...The lyric probes a young woman's anxiety about what persona to assume for her lover, but also for herself...

...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...

...Irony and satire were appropriate in "high art...

...The War becomes the kind of overbearing former acquaintance one realizes one didn't like all that much...

...It is now possible to find well-regarded verse eliciting not merely smiles but an occasional fullthroated laugh...

...In the end, I couldn't help recalling why few critics take humorous poetry seriously...

...He then decides that it would be wrong to judge them against one another because each, even the psychopathic and tormented Dahmer, "struggled through the thickets as they could...

...Sure enough, the cover of this book shows a painting of a young tough in blue jeans and Doc Martens...

...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...

...Thorn Gunn's latest collection, Boss Cupid (Farrar Straus Giroux, 111 pp., $22.00), strikes a cheeky pose starting with its title...

...One of them compared it to discovering that Jackson Pollock or Lucien Freud had asked to be taken on as a Disney animator...

...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...

...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 andjolting/As if nothing mattered but today/In fact nothing/But this precise moment....' Readers have wondered why Koch loves such transformations...

...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...

...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...

...Boss Cupida culmination comes in "A Wood Near Athens...

...Could some jazz rank with Mozart...

...Of course, many people who have survived combat carry around similar talismanic memories...

...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...

...The book's weaknesses come to the fore when Duffy turns humor into jokiness, as with Mrs...