Journal, Day Two

Stephen Burt has almost pre-empted one of my major questions of late. In his review of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new book in The Believer, he asks what the difference is between a verse line and a punch line. . . .

. . . I’m always attracted to arresting first lines, to being pulled into the stream of a poem trying to guess “How’s she going to follow up on this?”

“Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.”—John Ashbery

“You jerk you didn’t call me up”—Bernadette Mayer

But what is it beyond the semantic content of a line that makes it arresting? At random I grabbed a few books considered funny or witty and pulled out lines:

like the glass electric gun of Alexander Volta
—Ron Padgett

Fupp! Fupp! He shot the eyes
Out of Billy the Squid
Tailed Butch Bassy and the Sunfish Kid
—Loren Goodman

Et tu,
cutie?
—Rachel Loden

Cardamom for the sensorium is what I call eating.
—Connie Deanovich

Be careful with that bassinet, Yvonne
To change the course of history from the piano
You must keep Gieseking from the clarinet
—Christopher Edgar

At this point I paused; it was all just too obvious. The kind of humor I find essentially poetic (or the poetic I find essentially humorous?) comes right out of the click and crash of consonants and vowels, as if phonemes were feathers applied to a particularly ticklish part of the brain:

A long time you have been making the trip
From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,
Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.

It is the author of “The Comedian As the Letter C” who created the blueprint for this tone-mixing noun-bumping proper-name-beeping poetry. How odd that Wallace Stevens is seen as a great poet of meditative inwardness when he consistently wrings the comic potential from mere syllables, let alone images (“No Possum, No Sop, No Taters”; “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade”)

It was also Stevens who taught me to hear rhyme as essentially funny. It’s true I can’t take rhyme seriously. The Greeks couldn’t either: according to my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, there isn’t much rhyme to be found in the ancients, but “Euripides in the Alcestis has a drunk Hercules speak in rhyme, a passage clearly meant to be comic.” And when I think of my favorite rhymers I think of Pope and Byron and early Stevens and Paul Muldoon.

If we don’t foreground the physical properties of language in order to get a totally proprioceptive shiver, what’s the point of writing poems? Or, what’s poetry got that no other genre has? Perhaps nothing! Perhaps just a very elastic notion of “the line,” as in “When James Schuyler read at DIA the line stretched around the block.” That oft-repeated anecdote attests to a secret correspondence: it is Schuyler’s poetic line that famously goes around the block.

Well, it is the end of winter, and the sensorium is depleted here in the Northeast waiting for a vernal miracle. No wonder I want so much. But I stepped out back and saw a pale green shoot in an urn – I had worried that some varmint had dug out the corms I planted – and the weather forecast looks good. O, one more fragment from our Comedian, please:

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.