Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

by Calista McRae

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501750984
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Calista McRae is Assistant Professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Consider What That Feels Like
1. Comedy in an Age of Close Reading: John Berryman's Dream Songs
2. Robert Lowell: The Noise of One's Own Voice
3. A. R. Ammons: Comic Badness
4. Terrance Hayes: Floundering Interiors
5. Coming to Terms with Our Self: Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, Monica Youn

What People are Saying About This

Rachel Trousdale

Calista McRae wittily and incisively examines how the inwardness and embarrassment of mid-century lyric resembles the abjection of stand-up comedy. A tightly-argued, beautifully written book, Lyric as Comedy reveals the complexity and slipperiness of the speaking "I" on the page or the stage. McRae shows how pervasive and important comic technique is, even in apparently quite serious poems.

Gillian White

This is an immensely pleasurable book to read. McRae is a beautiful reader of poetry, and her attention to form and her serious thinking through of her material is evident on every page. I cannot overstate the quality of McRae's subtle way of reading.

Editorial Reviews

McRae's scholarly exposition of the comic in contemporary lyric is exhibited by her close-readings of poets in the later chapters of her book.

Intertext

Lyric as Comedy is a sophisticated and challenging study that usefully draws our attention to the myriad ways that poets use the paradigm of the conventional lyric as a foil and source of humor, especially in their writing about the self. The book's incisive central idea—that contemporary poems are often funny because they resist the genre conventions and expectations of the form—opens the door to further exploration of the many comic modes flourishing across the landscape of contemporary US poetry.

ALH Online Review

The poets examined are diverse, as are the poems McRae discusses, and gender and race awareness play a significant role in her conversation. McRae writes in a relaxed style with a wit and humor that belies the deep knowledge that informs her observations. A solid resource for those interested in poetry and current critical theory and practice.

Choice