Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America Calista McRae 9781501750977

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.

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

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.

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.

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.