Ann E. Michael
Many poems benefit from a bit of humor. Life requires the leavening of humor, else we cannot bear it long; as long as poetry intersects with or reflects life, there's a place for humor in verse. I love dark humor, and irony--when I write poetry, however, what tends to show up is goofiness. Puns. A little tongue-in-cheek...a slight skewering in a simple observation. The odd perspective, the malapropism. A twist in meaning can be funny, even if sometimes a bit world-weary in tone. I like funny poems, and usually I'm pleased when a little humor creeps into in a draft I'm writing.
Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Anne Stevenson, Billy Collins, Thomas Lux, XJ Kennedy, Sam Gwynn, Rhina Espaillat, Dorothy Parker, Simon Armitage, they can be hilarious. And sad, and pointed, and worldly. Human existence is complex. We can laugh and cry simultaneously. Might do us good if that happened more often.
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DIVISION OF LABOR
You wash the cup.
I’ll fetch water from the well
haul wood to
lay the fire; I
will make the soap
and the bucket, you—
you wash the cup.
YOUR MOVE
If language is a game, what space are you on?
On what word, phrase, clause, and for what duration
are you here? What’s your modality, and
is yours an ergative verb? Are you intransitive? Tense?
Lost a turn, have you? Jumped five spaces
over a prepositional phrase and found yourself
spinning the wheel! Some directive got you to this point
but which imperative are you trying to avoid?
Maybe you can cheat. Drop the dice, palm
a helpful card, slide the gamepiece when no one’s looking,
it’s only a token, representative, like words
themselves following invented rules
in an attempt to get somewhere. Around the board,
back home, into heaven, out of debt, out of jail,
journeying to and fro through finite clauses,
causation, conjunctives, circumstantial adjuncts.
Your postmodifying descriptor bids you to note
the transitivity of action processes. The board is empty,
the cards are blank. Roll again, raise your rhetoric,
it’s not about winning but how you play the game.
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Poet, essayist, librettist, and educator Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania, where she’s writing coordinator and teacher at DeSales University. She is a past recipient of a PA Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the author of three chapbooks, including More than Shelter and The Minor Fauna. www.annemichael.com