Hi Susan. Thanks for your question.
No one's ever advised me to de-humorify my poems, and I think that if they did, I'd balk. Not, mind you, because I somehow know better, but because I'm in love with the funny things that words do when they get together. I haven't done a formal tally, but I'm pretty sure that no less than 100% of what's funny in my work is straight-up low-brow punning. And some of the puns are so woven into the poems that to take a scalpel to the poem would be to stab it in the very heart that beats its living blood.
I moved out of the country a few years ago and, because my intention was to live out the rest of my life in marital bliss (whoops) I packed up everything that was dear to me and took it along. Of the things that were dear, a couple of now thirty year old jokebooks that I've had since elementary school. When last year I was packing everything away to return to the States, I found them and re-read them. All the dumb puns, all the ancient groaners-- what I realized was that what I loved about them when I was a kid is the same thing that I love about the poetry that moves me now as an adult, and its this: how words can have unexpected interactions with each other.
As for being taken seriously as a poet: I have a poem coming out in an extremely well-respected journal in a couple of months that has the single groaniest groaner I've ever written in it-- I don't know how readers will feel about it, but the eds. thought it was ok. And the only poem I've published in the Best American Series (their erotic anthology) was so low-brow it was veritably chin whiskers. These journals and series are fairly serious.
And you know, I don't only ever go for the one-two punch of a cheap laugh. I hope that all my poems are, if nothing else, baldly earnest. And some things you just don't joke about.
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