Seriously Funny
 

Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else, edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby, has just appeared from the University of Georgia Press. I have two poems in it and am trying to figure out what's funny about Louise Gluck.

Nice going, Sam. Maybe she's the "serious" half of the title?

Congrats!

Gluck rhymes with duck, and ducks are funny.

Actually, Glück rhymes with dick, but that's funny too.

Susan

and with ick.

Two more feathers in your much-feathered cap. Thanks for letting us know about it.

Seriously good news, Sam. Great to hear.

Louise Glück's
Poetry sücks.

--Richard Moore

And let's all say a prayer for the repose of Richard Moore's soul on Palm Sunday. Congratulations, Sam.

I like Glück's poetry, and I do find it funny on occasion. I find a deadpan kind of humor in these lines, for instance, which end one of her books:

I thought my life was over.
Then I moved to Cambridge.

I also discovered when I did a reading of her dialogue poems from Meadowlands with a man reading the husband's lines and a woman reading the wife's, some of the poems got laughs. She has a good ear for some of the frustrating ways couples talk to one another. I am not saying humor is her dominant mode, and her particular kind of humor won't work for most people.

Susan

I think Susan was the one to point out to me the deadpan humor in Gluck. It certainly helps to read some of them that way! Kudos...

Gratitude by Louise G. is a good example of that deadpan humor.

http://www.wisdomportal.com/Gratitud...Gratitude.html

Black humor, bitter amusement.

Better than a belly laugh sometimes.

Congratulations, Sam!

Janice, there's a difference between "funny" and ironic or "funny" and simply using some of the common techniques or ingredients found in funny poems. Most sugar cookie recipes list salt among their ingredients, but that doesn't mean we would say sugar cookies are a "salty" food. I like that Gluck poem, but it's certainly not funny. Why can't we reserve "funny" for things that tend to make us laugh? Gluck doesn't.

Yeah, irony can be rather ... heavy sometimes. "Seriously Funny" has been a category in Bumbershoot for a couple of years and for it I look for more in the way of actual laughter, however warped or wry. I'm a bit miffed at the seeming "theft" of my title ... then again, who could own such a thing? It's been in the zeitgeist.

(Deleted a not-funny attempt to be funny.)

Kate, defintely zeitgeisty. The exact phrase "seriously funny" appears 10,000 times in a Google search that is limited to the year 2005. I didn't go back further than that.

PS--
I went back. It appears just 1,700 times in 2004, which means either that the zeitgeist gained steam in 2005, or the number of internet pages (at least those searched by Google) jacked up during that period.