Lyric as Comedy

The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

Calista McRae

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501750977
• eBook ISBN: 9781501750984
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she 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.

Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae 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 Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

CHAPTER 1

Comedy in an Age of Close Reading

John Berryman’s Dream Songs

William Empson once divided literary critics into two kinds of “barking dogs”: “those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up.”¹ John Berryman recalls that depiction of criticism in an early Dream Song, where he imagines his soon-to-be-published book as a young tree:

Bare dogs drew closer for a second look

and performed their friendly operations there.

Refreshed, the bark rejoiced.²

This half-resigned, half-gleeful picture anticipates that critics will engage in territorial marking on 77 Dream Songs. First published in 1964, and extended by 1969 into 385 sections, The Dream Songs gave Berryman his reputation for absolute unruliness.

The sequence, which is spoken by someone usually viewed as a lightly disguised figure for the author himself, both “rejoice[s]” at and rebuffs the work of literary criticism. In the lines above, inadvertently reversing Lenny Bruce’s “I’m going to piss on you” threat, Berryman accepts that the audience is going to piss on him: “bark” stands in as a metonym both for a dog, who has relieved his bladder and marked his territory, and for the tree itself, now watered and in fact revived.³ Berryman’s puns allow that poetry and its critics have a close relationship, though he explicitly casts literary criticism as a public nuisance. The Dream Songs is a good example of how poets writing about the personal in the midcentury—as lyric is codified as “the expression of an essentially fictive individual self,” in Virginia Jackson’s words—work with and against the grain of an increasingly dominant way of reading poetry.⁴

In thinking about how midcentury lyric poetry handles the self, I am most struck by how The Dream Songs transforms Berryman’s self-involvement. His letters cycle through self-loathing, self-pity, and self-admiration, traits also touched on in Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson’s compassionate memoir of Berryman and other writers in the 1940s. Those traits are illuminated when one considers his early circumstances: as a twelve-year-old, he lost his father to suicide. Throughout his life, he was insecure and desperate for praise, fearing that he would lose what little fame or financial security he had achieved. Rarely solvent, he moved from one temporary teaching position to another until achieving some stability in the Humanities department at the University of Minnesota. His health was so poor that he was misdiagnosed with epilepsy in his twenties, and from the 1950s until his death in 1972, he was hospitalized repeatedly for exhaustion and alcoholism. In the fall of 1964, he told his ex-wife Ann Levine that his physical condition was “simply my mind tearing my body to pieces with anxiety.”⁵ The Dream Songs moves in an elliptical orbit around these crises, alternately glossing over or exaggerating the truth, or sometimes actually saying what happened.

But that psychological backdrop does not itself convert self-involvement into material for a rereadable long poem, especially not a poem grounded so firmly in a personality as this one.⁶ If you want to represent your state of mind truthfully, and your state of mind tends again and again toward egotism, how do you portray this tendency without repelling yourself or your readers? Berryman does not simply foreground his disorderly personality at a time when both disorder and personality were discouraged.⁷ He takes up an intricate, cinctured stanza, only to diverge from the formalist standards it evokes: he defaces his sestets every way he can. As his use of a blackface dialect suggests, this behavior is in part expressive: he seeks new stylistic strategies to depict the thoughts of his speaker, Henry. His conspicuous violations of meter, form, and grammar—what Kaveh Akbar calls his “chopped and screwed language”—capture an unusually wide range of moods, and even transitions between moods.⁸ On this level, The Dream Songs can be read as a comic representation of an inner life, including its more shameful and unappealing attitudes.

What makes Berryman’s comedy more confounding, however, is an intersection between a pointedly “imaginary” character and a half-fixed, half-malleable stanza. As the stanza is stretched and shrunk from line to line, it begins to seem that Henry himself is responsible for all prosodic decisions; the stanza has been commandeered by the character. Berryman goes against ideals of lyrical interiority handed down from John Stuart Mill: this speaker seems very aware that he has an audience.⁹ And at the same time, Berryman flouts the New Criticism’s emphasis on a fictive speaker. He does so not only through how, like the abject performers of stand-up, his poem cannot shake autobiography, but through how it presses at the notion of a unifying and unified speaker: it incorporates multiple voices and characters. Its structural response to shame lies in how the poem flickers between a supposedly private interior and a performance: here speech is sometimes to one’s self, but sometimes to an analyst, or into a microphone.

We Can Embarrass This Poem

Even at their most turbulent, the Dream Songs are fitted into a form that resembles a well-wrought urn. It is worlds away from the page-ranging, unconfined verse of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 “Howl” or Gregory Corso’s 1960 contemplation of marriage (“O how terrible it must be for a young man / seated before a family and the family thinking / We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!”).¹⁰ Instead, Berryman borrows from W. B. Yeats, an exemplary craftsman to critics of that era. A Dream Song consists of three six-line stanzas: the stanza, in turn, splits into symmetrical halves, consisting of four pentameter lines checked by two shorter lines. These sestets seem to impose order, each with pauses for reflection; superficially, the form suggests the “so-called fifties poem,” described by Edward Brunner as “metrically regular, organized by stanza, and usually in rhyme.”¹¹

The platonic idea of this form is demonstrated in Song 164. Henry plummets through the Song’s first sestet, one netted together by rhyme that recalls the resolution of a Petrarchan sonnet:

Three limbs, three seasons smashed; well, one to go.

Henry fell smiling through the air below

and through the air above,

the middle air as well did he not neglect

but carefully in all these airs was wrecked

which he got truly tired of. (ll. 1–6)

The two couplets, each syntactically complete on its own, are unhurried. Meter is steady, and its variations tend to be conventional. That steadiness requires precise articulation of all three syllables of “cárefŭllý,” and it keeps Henry from expressing his grievances in too theatrical a manner: when he later complains that “His friends alas went all about their ways / intact” (ll. 7–8), his pentameter suppresses “alas” into a single unpunctuated iamb. The figure who falls with a fixed grin through this fixed stanza already seems tired of its “airs”—airs being both the space he falls through, and the songlike sequence. The sestet exemplifies New Critical irony, as well as New Critical order: it staves off deterioration through a form.

In other songs, however, there is little sign of that uniform, polished stanza. Most are riddled with illegal substitutions or prose-like rhythms. Some append random, irrelevant lines to the three-sestet structure; in others, lines bulge out or stop short. As if to draw attention to the model sestet hovering behind each poem, many stanzas begin with pentameter that immediately falls apart. The final stanza of Song 69, for example, opens with clear iambs, made even more deliberate by commas. Here, gripped by a new infatuation, Henry wonders if an as-yet-unnamed woman can be seduced: “I feel as if, unique, she … Biddable?” (l. 13, ellipses in original). Those last few syllables already strain against their iambic base; thereafter, the stanza deteriorates. The next line (“Fates, conspire,” a total of three syllables) drops the usual five stresses for a dramatically short command. Although an unnamed friend tries to persuade him to stop talking, Henry simply reiterates and escalates his appeal, reaching for extravagant heights with a slightly antiquated verb:

—Vouchsafe me, Sleepless One,

a personal experience of the body of Mrs Boogry

before I pass from lust! (ll. 16–18)

This complete deflation stems not merely from the euphemistic “personal experience” and the cartoonishly ugly name “Mrs Boogry,” but from that clumsy penultimate line itself, half again as long as is normal. Lurching from three- to seventeen-syllable lines, this stanza seems a decayed version of Song 164’s symmetrical, balanced sestet.

The Dream Song stanza inhabits an uneasy position between neatness and sloppiness, tension and slackness, closed and bursting form. Its hypermetrical lines (such as the one about Mrs Boogry) offer an affront to critics who value compression. For example, in “The Morality of Poetry” (1937), Yvor Winters asserts that prose-like poetry “lose[s] the capacity for fluid or highly complex relationships between words; language, in short, reapproaches its original stiffness and generality.”¹² R. P. Blackmur, writing in 1952, agrees: it “produces flatness, inhibits song, and excludes behavior; and I see no sense in welcoming these disorders”; such “deliberate flatness” is “the contemporary form of Georgian deliquescence.”¹³ It is difficult to imagine such critics admiring Song 204, in which Henry, listening to Schubert, moves from the gentle pentameter of “I’m playing it as softly as I can” to the bloated, fourteen-syllable boast that “my gramophone is the most powerful in the country.” That line does not seem an example of compressed paradox, in which “resistances [are] acknowledged and overcome.”¹⁴

But as Song 164 makes clear, Berryman’s stanza does not simply flaunt its laxness. It can also suggest the opposite: a kind of bumbling, dutiful attempt to color inside the poem’s lines. As often as Henry rails across borders, he stays within them. In doing so, he adopts the guise of an incompetent versifier who pads or constricts his utterances to obey the form, as in Song 108’s contortions bemoaning “the dead of winter when we must be sad / and feel by the weather had.” That awkward arrival at “had” recalls Ezra Pound’s condemnation of inversion as artificial: “Mr. Yeats has once and for all stripped English poetry of its perdamnable rhetoric.… He has made our poetic idiom a thing pliable, a speech without inversions.”¹⁵ Berryman’s poem is full of inversions, often compounded by a sense that words are being arranged just to suit prosodic requirements. In Song 298, for instance, Henry describes a BBC session where he “was on TV / with his baby daughter, / and Housman’s rhyme O in this case was ’oughter”: improvising Henry just has to survive the line, as he has to survive the evening, in a half-automatic fashion. Berryman’s filler lines and syllables seem to fly in the face of another of Pound’s dicta: “If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.”¹⁶ We often see Henry stifled by his symmetrical form, forced to cram in or pad out his syntax, as if verse warps and even steers his thought. (Such effortfulness reaches a high point in Stevie Smith, where a letter writer named Wilfred, off on a hunting trip that has disconcerted him, struggles to fulfil the obligations of his couplets: “Yesterday I...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1. Comedy in an Age of Close Reading
• 2. Robert Lowell
• 3. A. R. Ammons
• 4. Terrance Hayes
• 5. Coming to Terms with Our Self
• Notes
• Index