A poet walks into a bar... this book explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, the book finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. The book draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. It reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in the book also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, the book captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.
