Martha Silano
Thoughts on the Use of Humor in Poetry: I’ll never forget the day one of my creative writing professors warned me that if I didn’t stop writing funny poems, I’d be written off as a “comic poet.” As if there was no worse fate than being aligned with the likes of Wendy Cope. As if being able to crack people up didn’t take talent, hard work, all the same stuff it takes to write serious, sorrowful dirges. I felt apologetic, ashamed. God forbid I should be pegged a ha-ha poet. But now I see what she was trying to tell me: Laughs alone will not sustain us. We can’t survive on Spike Milligan (though where would we without “On the Ning Nang Nong / Where the Cows go Bong! / and the Monkeys all say BOO!”?), and though I wish I could confess I’d rather have Mulligan’s work in my satchel than a consistently serious poet’s poems, in truth it would be hard to choose.
But speaking of truth, we don’t have to, thanks to poets like Tony Hoagland take humor and buffet it along to deeper places. We find ourselves laughing, but our minds are also grappling with mortality, loyalty, grief, desire, etc. In “Reading Moby Dick at 30,000 Feet” Hoagland moves from joking about Kansas being “ just a concept, / a checkerboard design of wheat and corn /no larger than the foldout section /of my neighbor's travel magazine” to asking us to
Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime
and never find the door,
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.
Is gravitas inherently superior to inanity and irreverence? Should the poetry police be putting in a call to David Kirby, warning him his mirthful gig is up? Do we need to dump Edward Lear from all the textbooks because he’s—um—funny?
There’s a reason “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” is not only a cliché but the refrain of a famous song. Humor is one of the best ways to stomach pain, namely, the stuff most poems are made of. That’s why I love Charles Simic, Billy Collins, and Harryette Mullen, to name a few. I wish there were more humor in our nation’s literary textbooks, poems that showcase playfulness with language, that tickle and tumble and romp. Poems that make us laugh and think. Poems that chuckle, guffaw, and explode with the news that poetry doesn’t have to solemn to be good.
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Geography Lesson
I was thinking I should move to Goblin Valley
I was thinking in a place like Goblin Valley
they’d take me in complete with my
visible pulse double jointed fingers
pocky occipital nerve penchant for smolt-regurgitating terns
I don’t think I’d be welcome at the Crossing of the Fathers
even if it is just a bridge to another piece of land
especially not after telling my husband
all his belching left me feeling I’d spent the night in a dumpster it seems
downright oxymoronic a place called Thousand Lake Mountain
& yet I’ve seen corn stalks poking from why not call it
bedrock & yet I’ve heard my cousin in the Half Way
Baptist Church hit a note until that moment humanly impossible
these things happen like airplanes a few physics problems
holding them up when I go I’m taking the scenic route
Scenic Route say 12 the same way you’d say
what? 7:30? Fine chuckchuckpurrrrrrr my red Toyota pick-up
the ghosts of Uncles Benny William Peter Aunts Lottie Sophie
of course Helen who’d’ve packed a batch of her apricot-filled
cookies probably uses lard but o they’re good
Previously published in The New Orleans Review
Forgetfulness the Great Bronchial Tree from Which I’m Swinging
Forgetfulness the great bronchial tree from which I’m swinging
nimble as a baby gorilla clenched fists slipping
through the farthest branch
forgetfulness engaging my trapezius
reaching for what’s inside my I thought safely guarded
box of bones where I can’t retrieve the word
for the thing in which I’m soaking
forgetfulness falling to the back of the throat
back there with the uvula with the fauces
not exactly the tip of the tongue more like the sublingual duct
my keys in the yard with the soupy tomatoes
with the weepy zucchini
over the fence pecking seed
forgetfulness the great Volkmann’s canal
from which each day I hop a water taxi
that deep and bony dentin
though forgetfulness too in the ever-eroding
enamel the interstitial spaces my thoughts deciduous
teeth all eruption and loss oh these ossified
ossificiations my husband’s groaning
you forget everything epiglottis glotted
fed-up-ness swelling his Adam’s apple
proof of insurance recipe for ouefs a la neige
a Ho Jo’s in Far Rockaway
which keeps on calling
claims I spent the night
aqueous fluids rushing the scene Impossible!
my vitreous body holding firmly giving light
it’s just I’m not sure I paid the mortgage
plexus of meant to should’ve not again! Limbic system
lesioned? just the woman on the other end
says here you checked in 9/19
Previously published in LitRag
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Martha Silano is the author of two book-length poetry collections, Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books 2006) and What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press 1999). Her poems have appeared in such places as Paris Review, Green Mountains Review, TriQuarterly, and Beloit Poetry Journal; new work is forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, and Prairie Schooner. Martha is the recipient of grants from Washington State Artist Trust and the Seattle Arts Commission, and she’s been a writing fellow at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Whiteley Center, among others. Her work has been anthologized in over a dozen collections, including Not for Mother’s Only (Fence Books 2007) and American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2000). Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near Seattle, WA, where she lives with her two children and her forager/essayist husband, Langdon Cook.