A. R. Ammons

This chapter illustrates A. R. Ammons's lyric ideals as sources of comedy for poets who are less firmly situated in institutional traditions and mid-century lyric practices. It probes how Ammons let his poetry fall short of the aspirations of canonical lyric decorum, of more experimental movements like Objectivism and non-literary communication. It also includes the explicit enactments of failure found in Ammons's first published book titled Ommateum, which strives for vatic power and finds the glimmerings of a ludic style. The chapter discusses Tape as Ammons's initial attempt to convey insignificant thought processes and emphasize his growing interest in an explicitly comic mental life grounded in the failures of intellect and communication. The chapter then considers poetry of Tommy Pico, who alludes to Ammons and extends some of his techniques.

Introduction

This chapter explores mid-century and contemporary poems that work within and against their status as lyrics, which rustle against the “fiction of quality” that has become intertwined with poetry in the twentieth century. The chapter discusses how poetry begins to be idealized and more vulnerable to abjection. It also highlights postwar poems about the self that cannot cast off all ties to the elevated critical discourses around them. The chapter explains how literary criticism of the last fifty years has tended to assume that poetry must avoid lyric in order to be funny. It describes humor as the territory of avant-garde projects or other kinds of poems that are expected to have more distance from personal feeling.

Comedy in an Age of Close Reading

This chapter focuses on John Berryman, who situates himself at the center of what he calls “the world” and uses everything else in the world to define his self. The chapter includes a poet reacting to the critical atmospheres in which Berryman developed, which is described as having been spoken by someone who seems to have chosen the wrong form and genre. The chapter also examines how Berryman flouts the canonical expectations of mid-century formalist criticism and suggests how he breaks and defaces his form to depict an unusually wide range of mental states. The chapter points out an iridescence between a lyric reading of The Dream Songs and the ways Berryman undermines that reading. It then explains how Berryman transcribes the less-than-perfect mind, such as its irrationality and obsessions.

Terrance Hayes

This chapter presents Terrance Hayes as a contemporary poet who continues to implement and push back against lyric reading as handed down and evolving from the New Critics. It recounts the experiments of Hayes's first book that began with a simple desire to challenge, impress, and piss off the people. It mentions how Hayes's work continues to have the ambivalent self-consciousness that shapes how one writes about one's self. The chapter talks about Hayes's main comic iridescence between expression and something beyond expression. It looks at centrifugal effects of Haye's poetry that seem in excess of a poem's meaning as it affirms a view of both a mind and a lyric as taking in more than their most visible apparent subjects.

Robert Lowell

This chapter looks at the ways in which being alienated from and encumbered with one's self, of inevitably being caught in a role, can be funny. It discusses how Robert Lowell wants to shed the way he sounds, the thoughts he gravitates toward, the reputation he has, and the physical brain he fears and depends on. It also mentions Lowell being at odds with his own style as he keeps changing style and undercuts the one he is working in. The chapter refers to Lord Weary's Castle and Day by Day, describing the act of writing about the self that is loaded with one's extreme instability, predictableness, and self-dramatization. It then talks about Lowell's frequent revolutions of form which question the tonalities of humor that change when poetry loses the guarantees and obligations of rhyme and meter.

Coming to Terms with Our Self

This chapter draws together multiple aspects of lyric. It discusses how Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn assert the value of humor to a record of personal experience and consider how to handle feeling that is bound up with gendered expectations and critical discourse around mainstream poetry. It also mentions how Parker splices lyric with extraliterary enumerative forms and with dramatic monologue in order to document the experience of contemporary black womanhood in the United States. The chapter analyses Shapero's incorporation of splinters of the well-wrought formalist poem that convey ambivalence about a tumultuous contemporary world. It then explains how Youn dissects romantic obsession and reflects how it has been depreciated by avant-garde and traditional criticism.