Authors: Jennifer Michael Hecht
ISBN-13: 9780299214043, ISBN-10: 0299214044
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Date Published: November 2005
Edition: New Edition
Jennifer Michael Hecht is a historian who has published several scholarly volumes and one previous collection of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
A tour de force, Funny is a stunning masterpiece of poetic, as well as philosophic and comic, invention. It creates a musing world, where the issues are philosophical but the focus is always on people, on our most private ways of balancing our accounts. The poems are psychological; tender and humane, and somehow ruthless. This is poetry that swarms with ideas, that revels in rhythmic intricacy and literary references, but is also clear as a bell, and tells marvelous stories.
Hecht's sophomore effort is one of the most entertaining, and most original, books of the year. Its conceit, barring a few introductory sonnets, is to riff on jokes-become-aphorisms, dismantling assumptions as quickly as she dishes punch lines. "What did the sadist do to the masochist?/ Nothing" generates a brisk, hyperintelligent lyric about the ideas of need and mastery, studded by frequent half-rhymes and internal rhymes. "How many gorillas does it take/ to screw in a lightbulb?" prompts three pages of subtle, wise meditation on human evolution and human error. "Are You Not Glad?" turns a knock-knock joke into smart couplets about regret and love: "Orange you glad? No, I'm not. I ate the berries./ I was hungry. I was young." Switching deftly between the caricatured protagonists of the jokes themselves and more nuanced memories from real lives, Hecht sees how many jokes depend on familiarity and surprise, and how many highlight the disappointments ordinary experience can provide: "One way or another we all become/ the other." The New York-based Hecht (The Next Ancient World), who also writes books of popular philosophy (Doubt: A History), appends a neat 11-page prose essay about the relations between jokes and poems: even without the essay, this book brings the two forms tantalizingly close. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Sonnet on mirth | 3 | |
One end of an orange cat | 7 | |
Hat trick | 10 | |
Blind love | 13 | |
Gorilla in a darkening room | 14 | |
The sound of those drums | 17 | |
Betty | 19 | |
Family life | 20 | |
Funny ha ha | 25 | |
Prosody on comedy | 29 | |
Horse makes a decision | 33 | |
Song of innocence and experience | 37 | |
The propagation of the species | 38 | |
Are you not glad? | 42 | |
Switch | 43 | |
Cannibal Villanelle | 45 | |
Parrot in the cold | 46 | |
Fear of flying | 49 | |
Funny strange | 50 | |
Sonnet on the ribs of laughter | 53 | |
A little Mumba | 57 | |
Three boats, one afternoon | 61 | |
Chicken pig | 64 | |
Love explained | 66 | |
Story of my life | 68 | |
Naked man in the window | 69 | |
Catch | 71 | |
Lifesavers | 72 | |
Cycling down | 74 | |
Afterword : an essay on the philosophy of funny | 77 |