Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that American poets of the last hundred years use laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference. Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols the boundary between in-group and out-group, but laughter can also help us cross or re-draw that boundary, creating a more democratic understanding of shared experience. Poets’ uses of humor reveal and reinforce deep-seated beliefs about the possibility of empathic mutual understanding among unlike interlocutors. These beliefs also shape poets’ senses of audience and their attitudes toward the notion that poets are somehow exceptional. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they make a claim about the basic ethical function of poetry, because humor and poetry share fundamental structures: both combine disparate subjects into newly meaningful wholes. Taking W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore on one side and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot on the other as competing models of how humor can embrace, exclude, and transform, the book charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Poets whose race, gender, sexual orientation, or experimentalism place them outside the American mainstream are especially interested in humor’s potential to transcend the very differences it demarcates. Such writers increasingly replace mockery, satire, and other humorous attacks with comic forms that heighten readers’ understanding of and empathy with individuals, while revealing the failures of dominant hierarchical moral and logical systems.

The Documentaries of Barbara Hammer: Lesbian Creativity, Kinship, and Erotic Pleasure in the Historical Margins

Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.

1. American poetry’s two characteristics

“American poetry’s two characteristics” explains the two characteristics which mark American poetry. On the one hand, several of its major figures promoted American poetry as essentially different from any other nation’s. Although the reasons they offer vary, they typically claim that American experience demands a different kind of expression. Such poets advocate for novelty, for a break with what is perceived to be outmoded and foreign. On the other hand, American poetry might be more rightly called profoundly transnational. American poetry often welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions originating from outside it. The two characteristics do not exist separately from each other. Rather, they work in a productive dialectic, inspiring both individual accomplishment and the broader field. Examples include Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes.

You Can Never Be Sure

If you had to name the genre of The Selected Letters of John Berryman, how many different answers could you give? This essay considers a handful of approaches to reading poets’ correspondence and to the particularly disordered case of Berryman’s letters. After reading the letters the predominant way we approach modern poets’ correspondence today—as an assemblage of documentary evidence that stands alongside but not in place of a biography—this essay proposes a fruitful alternative: to focus less on their sender and more on their addressees. In that broader light, The Selected Letters is the best book ever assembled on what John Berryman needed from, and could provide for, anyone who wasn’t John Berryman. The remainder of the essay surveys what Berryman offered several generations of poets, from peers like Elizabeth Bishop, to near-contemporaries like Adrienne Rich, to poets working today. What many contemporary poets have found most useful—and most objectionable—in his work may be a permission-granting hostility, which they have wrested away and turned back on Berryman himself. After speculating about lessons we could take from Berryman’s example, this essay concludes on a central question raised by his tumultuous reception: how can you ever be sure?