The Importance of Being Humorous
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry The Importance of Being Humorous By Phoebe Pettingell Kenneth Koch, who died in 2002, was the major American comic poet of recent times. Always fresh, sometimes cheeky, he was an...
...The pleasure—and the sense of new meanings—I got from this happy confusion was something I wanted to re-create in English...
...The Artist," about a sculptor who makes enormous outdoor pieces, takes the form of a diary interspersed with press clippings: Pittsburgh...
...Each new work obsesses him, rendering his previous accomplishments puerile in comparison...
...He confessed that the bubbly optimism of his poetry was cultivated to quell anxiety and assuage pain...
...The pleasure Waiden takes in the clang of these curt sounds clashing against one another is infectious...
...Many Old English words are monosyllabic, with predominantly hard consonants...
...I have never been so happy and inspired and Play seems to me now like a juvenile experience...
...Honing such lyrics requires fine-tuned skill rather than creative genius...
...Waiden is intrigued by homophones...
...The Lark" and "Full Fathom Five"—as light verse...
...Their grasp of the effects that constitute various styles helps less acute readers detect those components...
...Disillusion" reads, in toto: Some women in the nude don't show The charms they seemed, when dressed, to promise...
...Hefurtivly downs a few snort?3is To give hisperceptoin a spur and quell indefinible terrors...
...He was equally adept at the pentameters (gloopy or not) used by Romantics like William Wordsworth or the Scottish nature poet James Thomson...
...As a young man during the era of T.S...
...Love was Koch's principal theme...
...Koch's Collected Poems is a joyful tonic, guaranteed to brighten your mood...
...With its puns and comic rhymes, this is deliberately ridiculous...
...he was also a master of the mock epic...
...Koch was not, however, ignorant of life's tragic qualities...
...The reader will pore over and over the text, trying to catch each one of them...
...One of his most captivating works was prompted by a line of Wordsworth: "The stream that issues from Wastwater is named the Irt, and falls into the estuary of the river Esk...
...You missed nineteen errors...
...Waiden revels in the peculiar mannerisms that distinguish various periods of literature...
...Koch transforms Ovid's unsettling account of a nymph ravaged—and later changed into a cow by the amorous god's vengeful wife—into an allegory about a playful adultery that ends happily for all parties, even the mollified spouse...
...Indeed, he tends to deride the contemporary—Beckett's plays, nonrepresentational art, verse that does not scan or rhyme: Good poetry should be tra-la Or dum-dee-doodie-do, And either bring a loud ha-ha Or else a soft boo-hoo...
...He excelled at erotic description, but also celebrated the joys of marriage, parenthood and friendship...
...So far it's white sailcloth with streams of golden paint evenly spaced out With a small blue pond at one end, and around it orange and green flowers...
...he jeers...
...Perhaps more important, they remind us that the happiness life is likely to provide comes from inside ourselves...
...I grew up chortling over nursery rhymes updated for the atomic age—derisive squibs about world leaders and parodies of famous poems in Punch, the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker...
...May 16.1 have abandoned the steel cigarettes...
...These usually brief poems were the auditory equivalents of cartoons...
...Fresh Air," his diatribe against academic poetry, is a scathing attack on its Olympian strictures, and the dullness of those who upheld them...
...In the 19th and early 20th centuries the mission of the American press was to connect and unify people across a vast continent...
...William Waiden, who started out as personal secretary to legendary New Yorker founder Harold Ross, excelled in penning such goodies for all those publications, as well as newspapers and journals like Poetiy...
...Koch's enthralling playfulness never obscures his formidable array of knowledge...
...A sympathetic admiration shines through his raillery...
...Even funnier wordplay drives "Downhill," as a hapless, aging proofreader finds himself losing his grip: His glasses, which used to assist Disconfort him—double distorters...
...Poking fun at other poets was his way of showing that he had read them carefully enough to note their shortcomings as well as their strengths...
...So even as we chuckle at these increasingly megalomaniacal projects, we feel for the sculptor, recognizing his agonies and his pursuit of original expression...
...Parodists possess the gift of mimicry...
...One of Koch's wilder flights of fancy instructs men to dress a girl up as an airplane, then escort her to an open field for sexual takeoff: "You, both pilot and crew, and passengers, and she your loving plane...
...In today's messy, anxious world, wit helps put things in perspective...
...As he explained in the Preface to Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952-54 (2000): "I had just spent a year in France, immersed not only in French poetry but in the French language, which I understood and misunderstood at the same time...
...He especially enjoyed rollicking ottava rima—the meter of Lord Byron's Don Juan and W.H...
...Koch is not disdainful of his narrator, though clearly we are meant to relish his creations' absurdity—some are gigantic enough to be seen from hundreds of miles away...
...Koch, by contrast, is linked with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, his close friends and fellow founders of the groundbreaking New York Poets school...
...An equally ingenious poem bewails the fickleness of rules for hyphenating syllables...
...The line is meaningless, but its empty portentousness makes us hoot...
...Along with the painters Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher, they refashioned our understanding of American art in the latter half of the 20th century...
...A future book will contain his five remaining longer works...
...I am working on Bee...
...while in "Aphoristic Homonymies," he toys with "rain," "reign" and "rein" to hilarious effect...
...Even its vicissitudes are portrayed with retrospective pleasure and gratitude...
...He might have skewered the high-minded pronouncements of others, but Koch's own command of form allowed him to write effectively in traditional modes when he chose to...
...Always fresh, sometimes cheeky, he was an endearingly happy lyricist...
...The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (Knopf, 761 pp., $40.00), consisting ofhis 10 shorter volumes—from Thank You (1962) to A Possible World (2002)—powerfully projects his innovative voice...
...When he began writing in the early 1950s, his style was unlike anything that would characterize his later work...
...American light verse is a venerable tradition, the product of a culture that thrived on periodicals...
...He valorized his intimates in the same way Yeats turned his literary circle into epic heroes and heroines...
...Bee will be a sixty-yards-long coveringfor the elevator shaft opening in the foundry sub-basement Near my home...
...Words would have several meanings for me at once...
...Bret Harte's stories often depict cowboys on the Western range and would-be prospectors of diverse ethnicities camped out in Gold Rush country poring over East Coast literary journals...
...Reading The Collected Poems, I was struck by the remarkable range of styles Koch employed...
...Waiden's style is more reminiscent of Ogden Nash than Kenneth Koch...
...We follow the sculptor through a few zany projects and watch him achieve fame and recognition...
...He lived in a drab, dun, rough hut And rode a big trig nag namedSquig...
...Withdrawal Symptoms: Light Verse for All Weights (Bunim & Bannigan, 130 pp.,$35.00) harvests his output between 1955and 2005...
...Eliot, he objected to the tyranny of a literature dominated by formalist writers and critics...
...Waiden gives the impression that he is more enamored of words than of writers...
...I continue to recall Leigh Hunt's "Jenny Kissed Me" or Nash's quatrain about "one-L lamas" and "two-L llamas,' long after forgetting the unrhymed soliloquies from Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet I so laboriously memorized in school...
...Oh GOODBYE, castrati of poetry...
...Auden's Letter to Lord Byron...
...It should be noted that all 19 mistakes are not in the stanza quoted above...
...Now that MFAs in poetry are granted to students who do not know an iamb from a dactyl or what distinguishes masculine rhyme from feminine, the terse wit that gives light verse pizzazz has become an endangered commodity...
...Blanc (white) was also blank and, in the feminine, Blanche, the name of a woman...
...IN A BYOONE ERA, one of the pleasures of browsing through magazines was reading their humorous verse...
...Struck by the oddity of those names, Waiden created "The Saga of Glug," who had the mug of a mutt, A peg leg, andpaunch like apig...
...I wouddn't give a rusty cent To find out what it means...
...For those with enough drive, setbacks can often lead to a more profound realization of an artist's inner vision...
...But Walden's satire of Dickinson lacks the loving insights present in Koch's send-ups of William Carlos Williams...
...They seem alway clouded with mist...
...His witty send-ups of William Carlos Williams and various South American poets are affectionate tributes that nevertheless tweak his targets' pompous or obscure aspects...
...My experiences in Cleveland affected me so That my throat aches whenever 1 am not working at full speed...
...Diacritical Dialogue" teases those of us who don't pay much attention to the pronunciation guides in dictionaries with their "schwas" and other confusing marks...
...Tunefulness suffers when earnestness reigns...
...Mozart, too, was a habitual prankster, yet his music is unfailingly lyric, dignifying foibles and tragedies while revealing life as a triumph in the face of darkness...
...No great loss, some claim...
...By the conclusion he is making a life-size reconstruction of the Pacific Ocean with 16 million tons of blue paint...
...Farewell, stale, pale, skunky pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop, gloop...
...That he was humorous does not diminish his status as a "serious" writer...
...That is to say, he is a formalist with conservative tastes and no urge to challenge Shakespeare or T.S...
...Conf lound it, the page if a blu...
...Ultimately he aims to describe how the creative process can consume, and frustrate, the imagination...
...Occasionally—but not often enough—it could be genuinely entertaining: The short play "Pericles," a spoof of the heroic historical drama, ends sonorously: "The organ's orgasm and the aspirin tablet's speechless spasm...
...That's why a Peeping Tom may grow To be a Doubting Thomas...
...Ovid's rendition of this story in the Metamorphoses is mysterious, but Koch produces a very different take on the seduction scene: But she had already started running And ran through Lerna marsh and ran through Lincie's budding woods TillJove, impatient, brought a fog upon those neighborhoods, A thick and foggy mist, in which the girl had trouble seeing, And being lost was to her cost one with Eternal Being— Which is to say, Jove had his way and pressed himself inside her And for that portion of the day felt happy as a glider...
...He also reworked Ovid's Ars Amatoria into a ludicrous comedy of unlikely romantic stratagems, including the kind of improbable sexual positions so painstakingly described in the Kama Sutra...
...We do not comb them for deep meanings but, thanks to the mnemonic properties of rhyme and meter, we remember their musical cadences...
...New Addresses (2000) evokes his overserious childhood, the misery of his stammering, the horrors he experienced fighting in the South Pacific during World War II, and his manic tendency to take jokes too far until he embarrassed—sometimes hurt—those aroundhim...
...In "Three of a Kind," he plays with "peek," "peak" and "pique...
...This resulted in some bewildering sentences: "I am waking off in the wooded arms apartments/ Of celebrating trees' bison...
...Such mystifying babblement Does not add up to beans...
...Many of Koch's earliest works were not collected until just before his death...
...I disagree...
...Ovid, the Roman master of provocative love stories, fascinated Koch, and in "Io" he retells a tale of one of Jove's amorous adventures with a nymph...
...You're slipping...
...Most of Waiden 's poems date from the 1960s and early '70s, the last era when comic poetry flourished here...
...Eliot...
...One might well classify the songs from Shakespeare's plays—like "Hark, Hark...
...For all his kidding around, Koch's perspective is balanced and serene...
...Fortunately, Koch quickly outgrew his wordplay phase and began to derive inspiration from working in different voices...
...He rags, for instance, Emily Dickinson's unidiomatic syntax and fey metaphors: What patience can endure The footsteps of a friend Departing through a closed Venetian blind...
...I worry that comic poetry—whether of Walden's kind or Koch's humane variety—may be a dying art...
...Even the Belle of Amherst's most fervent admirers recognize that her perceptions can sometimes seem dotty or just plain mad...
...By satirizing pretentious or dishonest language, humorous writers caution us not to become puffed up with a sense of our own importance, but to strive for modesty in our thinking...
...No one would group him with the lightweight virtuosos—like Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash or Phyllis McGinley—who churned out brief topical witticisms in old-fashioned forms from rather conservative perspectives...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
