https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/serious-art-thats-funny-humor-poetry
“Why is John Ashbery considered a serious poet? His poems are often ridiculously funny and campy satires of all we hold sacred. Yet Helen Vendler says “in short, he comes from Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Stevens, Eliot; his poems are about love, or time, or age.” And Harold Bloom claims that “Ashbery has been misunderstood because of his association with the ‘New York School’ of Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and other comedians of the spirit.” There’s a suspicious double standard applied to certain humorous poets who have, for mysterious reasons, been welcomed into or excluded from the canon of serious art. Ashbery’s critics obviously find his idea of funny funnier than Frank O’Hara’s funny or Ron Padgett‘s really funny funny. Padgett and O’Hara have written scores of poems about “love, or time, or age,” and some of them have been funny, and some have been serious, but they are written off as “comedians of the spirit.”
Some people seem to think that writing humorous poetry is a terrible crime, like pissing on Plymouth Rock. Certainly there are lame poems out there that just tell jokes, poems that are just elongated puns or which simply fulfill a first line’s jokey promise. Criticizing these poems is easy, but it’s a slippery slope: if these poems with jokes in them are dull and unserious, then all poems with other kinds of humor must also be unserious. But there’s a kind of humor that is bigger than a giggle, bigger than a laugh. There’s a kind of humor that is as serious as the most earnest exhortation to support the troops. I’m talking about satire and irony. Satire and irony make people laugh. But they’re serious and multidimensional in a way that earnestness often just can’t be, and to discount them is to be blind to the possibility of serious art that’s funny.
Carolyn Forché, someone who has never been accused of being a funny poet, has said “irony, paradox, surrealism . . . might well be both the answer and a restatement of [Theodor] Adorno’s often quoted and difficult contention that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But what did the philosopher and critic Adorno mean by this fatuous statement? No poetry? Or just a very, very serious and earnest poetry? Because, let’s face it–earnestness is almost always bad art. Good art makes us think; it has more questions than answers. Often, but not always, satire does this too. But earnestness almost never does this–that’s not its job. Earnestness is comforting. It wants to hug us. And we want to be hugged sometimes. But sometimes we want to laugh while poking holes in self-righteousness and oppression, whether it be literal political oppression or oppression of a quieter sort – cultural and aesthetic oppression. Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it.”
Read more by clicking the link at the top
http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/14/cant-live-without-nonsense/
The tempest loud is blowing
The good thing is that a child of immigrants from Pakistan is Home Secretary.Apart from that the actions of ~Amber Rudd and T.May are despicable.
Roasted Rudd with Earl Grey Flea and cabbage [Amber Rudd]
Copyright P. Limbrey
I’ve been trying to drop a hint all day.Will I ever learn?
After so much sun, the cold returns
How my heart speaks 