In Monostiches

Modern poetry and the self-mocking one-liner

Translation: "However pissed you are, Goethe was more pissed”

*taps mic* I’ve been thinking this week about the relationship between poetry and comedy. On Sunday night, I saw a virtuoso performance by Joelle Taylor from her T.S. Eliot-Prize-winning C+nto and Othered Poems (2021). The book itself isn’t funny — although celebratory in tone, it’s essentially tragic in its narration of the traumatic histories of butch lesbians in the Nineties. But Taylor is an extraordinary performer, and in between poems made comments as memorable as lines of poetry. Dressed in a three-piece suit, complete with shining silver fob watch, she looked out to the back of the auditorium and delivered the following with precise comic timing:

I’m a lesbian… like my father.

Told in this way, it was a perfect six-word joke. And it reminded me of a post I enjoyed last year by the comedy writer Joel Morris, about how the team behind the spoof local newspaper The Framley Examiner came up with the following small ad:

The whole post — which explains how the absurd idea of a child dressing up as the singer-songwriter Paul Simon began with a misreading of the phrase “Paul Smith suit” — is worth reading:

Still crazy after all these years...

But it was this bit of Morris’s analysis that made me think of poetry: the aim of such tiny one-liners is to provide “all the elements for the audience to finish the gag, and explore the implications”; the creative process is in the “packing down, the reduction of each joke to a tight little stock cube bursting with potential flavour”.

Or, as Ezra Pound put it in his ABC of Reading (1934):

Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is almost as old as the German language. “Dichten” is the German verb corresponding to the noun “Dichtung” meaning poetry, and the lexicographer had rendered it by the Italian verb meaning to condense.

As far as I can tell from fumbling about with dictionaries, this works as follows: the primary meaning of “dichten” in German is to compose a poetic work (we might say “to pen”), but the secondary meaning is “to seal” (a leak), which takes us to the adjective “dicht” (thick, dense, close), a word that is cognate with the English “tight” — and therefore with the idea of something “condensed”. So there’s a funny and curious footnote here, which is that English and German both have the same slang meaning for “tight”: drunk (i.e. “full to bursting with drink”). But because we don’t have the association between writing poetry and making things as tight/dense as possible, English can’t translate the one-liner about poetry at the top of this post: Goethe will always have been more pissed than you, because Goethe war Dichter.

So compression is one thing that modern poetry and comedy have in common on a technical level. But there is also something else, which Joelle Taylor’s performance handled perfectly: an ironic relationship with audience, which often manifests in a spirit of self-mockery. Here’s what I wrote in an essay from 2007 about the poet Peter Manson, and his deliberately distorted use of joke structures as a poetic device: