Seriously Funny:
NewPages.com
"I was drawn to this collection for two – make that three reasons: I enjoy versifying power-couple Barbara Hamby and David Kirby's individual work, and I believe good, 'funny' poetry is, if not quite as uncommon as some might argue it to be, at least worthy of omnibus analysis and appraisal. I suspected that these two editors, no strangers to humorous writing, would take a broad enough approach to compiling what they deem “seriously funny” poems, and the book's introduction – a fine read in its own right – bears that out.
Hamby and Kirby define the type of poems the title promises as “ones that evoke poetry's timeless concerns but include a comic element as well,” adding ruefully that “a lot of contemporary poetry doesn't do that.” So the poems sought for Seriously Funny also had to include a contrasting darker underpinning, work that “glow[s] with a starry sheen, but often that's because there is a black sky behind it.” During the two years Hamby and Kirby assembled Seriously Funny, they'd “set out [to work] with a couple of boxes in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving would read to the other. When we found a poem that made both of us think deeply but laugh as well,” it was earmarked for the anthology.
And while they argue that seriously funny poetry can be traced as far back as Beowulf (!), in order to keep the book size manageable they begin with the Beats, “no group more deadly serious about American culture and none that uses humor to better effect,” and end with poems as recent as two years old, from well-known poets as well as newcomers, organized under such broadly designated rubrics as popular culture, the self, sex, love and marriage, family, friends, national identity, work, literature, animals, and metaphysics, culminating with an apocalyptic bunch of end-of-the-world poems.
True to their promethean promise, “there aren't many subjects that these poems overlook,” and Seriously Funny is stronger for it. Hamby and Kirby are astute editors, so the poems here comprise a wide variety of voices as well, avoiding an aural sameness or staleness that even the funniest of poems would evince if they all sounded exactly alike. The same is true for the work visually on the page, which varies in length and lineation. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Seriously Funny is well thought out, organized, and assembled.
Part of the joy of this book is discovering its pleasures on your own. If you're willing to accept its editorial edicts, either because you consider yourself an aficionado of humor in poetry, or are looking to gauge this particular project's success, you will not be disappointed. Readers can start at the beginning and continue along that way, browse by topic, or choose work randomly – the abiding strength of Seriously Funny is that it can be navigated successfully from any number of angles. If you expect to find the usual suspects, you will and you won't; Frank O'Hara, Albert Goldbarth, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, and James Tate are here, for instance, but again to Hamby and Kirby's credit, you'll also find poets not exactly known for being ambassadors of wit or chancellors of chuckles, such as Louise Glück, Andrew Hudgins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Galway Kinnell, and Franz Wright. Their very presence bears out the book's ambitions and attests to the vision and discernment of the editors." —Larry O. Dean
On The Seawall
"A poet can accept any criticism except the charge that his or her verse is humorless. Say the work is too trendy, obscure, or anachronistic and the poet will simply regard you as an idiot. But say he/she has no sense of humor and the poet will become violent or morose. Ed Wynn used to say that a comedian isn’t a person who says funny things – no, a comedian is a person who says things funny. Poets who say things funny are the stars of Seriously Funny, an anthology selected by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby who looked for poems “that evoke poetry’s timeless concerns but include a comic element as well.”
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud claimed that “laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far-reaching psychical conformity.” So I speculate that a poet striving for comedy is an artist with confidence and trust in “psychical conformity” since he/she knows the audience arrives hard-wired for collegiality. The poet accesses freedom when he/she proceeds to say things funny, speaking to a listener laughing alongside at the very moment the words appear. In a poet inclined to speak funnily, the comedy is a presence in one’s spirit that precedes communication. This is why the French call comedy “une maladie du regard,” an outlook dooming the writer to perceive and linger over the ridiculous in life.
Seriously Funny brings levity to its own subheads, such as “I Was Alone When It Hit Me: The Self” and “The Heart is a Lonely Perineum: Love, Marriage, Divorce and Hatred” and “It Occurs to Me I Am America: Wrestling with a Huge Rococco National Identity.” The poets one expects to find are here: Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young – but as I read them in tandem with contributors who aren’t routinely characterized as “humor poets,” their poems seem good-naturedly humane, generous, fond of their materials, and impossible to categorize as “merely funny” as some critics like to do.
Humor requires situation and characters, and often, the armature of narrative. (Stephen Dobyns’ satirical poetry reads like the plot structures of novels he’ll never get around to writing.) There is little interest here in the “I don’t trust language because the self is a construct foisted on me by the State” school of poetry. This anthology is filled with a respect for and love of people – including the poems’ speakers who almost always include themselves as part of the cracked world. Aside from O’Hara, Koch, Ginsberg, Berryman, Clifton, Matthews, and Corso, the poets here live and breathe. So many masterful, chatty, hey-listen-to-this voices – Tom Lux, Denise Duhamel, Ron Koertge, Lawrence Raab, Bob Hicok, Albert Goldbarth, James Tate, Lucia Perillo, David Clewell, Kevin Young, Mark Halliday – but also poets one doesn’t immediately think of as “funny,” such as Louise Glück, Stephen Dunn, Michael Collier, Gary Soto, Galway Kinnell, Carl Dennis, and Alan Shapiro. And many more." —Ron Slate
The Literary Review, Fall 2010
"Not just the usual suspects – but a happy mix of the familiar and unfamiliar. The intelligent, (lowercase c) catholic editors have chosen poems that “feature a central self . . . who is creating a reality through language rather than describing what already exists” – a superb guideline for poems period! Arranged by theme, Seriously is a vast and mostly exciting terrain of aesthetics and humors. Surely the editors had the brilliant “Praying Drunk,” by Andrew Hudgins, in mind throughout its compilation: “dear Lord,” Hudgins says, “we lurch from metaphor to metaphor, / which is – let is be so – a form of praying.” Seriously Funny is a prayerbook for every reader." — Renée Ashley