Laugh Lines
Laugh Lines
Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry
. focuses on poetry that wields humor to espouse sociopolitical critique.
To show the range of recent American poetry that uses humor to articulate sociopolitical critique, Conners highlights the work of poets working in four distinct poetic genres: traditional, received forms, such as the sonnet; the epic; procedural poetry; and prose poetry. Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson provide the main focus of the chapters, but each chapter compares those poets to others writing humorous political verse in the same genre, including Terrance Hayes and Anne Carson. This comparison highlights the pervasiveness of this trend in recent American poetry and reveals the particular ways the poets use conventions of genre to generate and even amplify their humor. Conners argues that the interplay between humor and genre creates special opportunities for political critique, as poetic forms and styles can invoke the very social constructs that the poets deride.
Carrie Conners’s Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry is a delight to read.
Conners is a fine critic, and the strength of Laugh Lines is in its individual case studies.
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., was named a finalist of the 2021 Main Street Rag Book Award. Her essays and poems have appeared in the ., ., among other publications.
