- At August 01, 2005
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
5
Some good-ish news and how is James Tate like The Barenaked Ladies?
Well, along with a couple of rejection slips in the mail, today I got a notice that I was a finalist in Kent State’s Wick Book Prize. Not as good news as say, winning, but you’ve got to take what you can get…
I’m preparing a talk for the It’s About Time series on humor in poetry, and so I was reading a bunch of James Tate. One of his poems is going to be my example for Farce, which is defined as, “a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots.” That pretty much sums up Tate’s work for me. One thing I noticed as I was reading was how closely the sense of play versus darkness and the turns in tone in Tate’s poems resemble the same action in the lyrics of the typical Barenaked Ladies song, which can switch from sincere grief or anger to flip jokiness with a turn of a line. Which makes you question whether the darkness you thought you saw in the piece was really there in the first place. Thoughts? Responses?
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
David Vincenti
Hmm.
Hmmmmmmm.
You make an interesting correlation. I’m much more a fan of BNL than Tate, though I have to say hearing Tate live contributed quite a bit to the length of leash humor gets in my work today.
I don’t think humor and darkness are incompatible – most humor has a dark core, after all. Darkness of desparate situations, injustices; BNL and JT use both these and others, I think. Maybe the farce exaggerates these to the point where we can wrap our brains around the issues.
Or maybe I’m full of crap.
Are you using “How The Pope is Chosen”, by any chance?
jeannine
Dear David, good points. Yes, there’s nothing that keeps humor from having dark elements, but I think both BNL and Tate back away from their own admissions of sadness or darkness at just the point where you want them to be “real.” I just love the whole song “Pinch Me,” which I think is one of the best examples of that absurd/dark edge that BNL has. I wish I could steal their line, “You try to scream but it only comes out as a yawn.” Very existential x-er, don’t you think? I remember when I got a bootleg copy of one of their concerts back in 91 or 92 from some very enthusiastic Canadian boys. I thought they were genius. Little did I know they’d be mainstream pop in a couple of years.
I think I’m going to use “Book Club,” which is one of my favorite Tate poems, although “How the Pope is Chosen” is very entertaining. It’s hard to pick just one poem to exemplify an idea like “Farce.” Right now I’m struggling with picking poems for “Dark Humor” and “Word Play.”
Wendy Wisner
Good news! Yay for you!
Peter
HI Jeannine: cangrats on the Wick nod. Did you hear Charles Jensen was a finalist too? Yay for both of you.
Re: Humor & Darkness. I’m all for it. They are each other’s long lost twin. They are meant for each other.
jeannine
Thanks Wendy! And Peter-thanks too! Yes, I saw that Charles was also a finalist – don’t those nice readers at Kent State have good taste 🙂 I think, with Charles’ common love of Buffy and Rufus Wainwright, that he may be my long-lost twin.