Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well”

“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excruciating detail.”

Contemporary lyric poetry desperately needs more widespread comic verve. We live and write in an age in which lyric practitioners as a whole tend toward the dignified, solemn, quarrelsome, plaintive, sometimes didactic. As a percentage of those writing at the highest level, poetry is serious business. Where are you, James Tate? Times are hard, injustice runs rampant, and it seems we must face it with sobriety, because the stakes are high. Wit and humor often are considered fit for second-order, lighter verse, poesy lacking in perspective, in grandeur, in bite, in social relevance. Yet from Alexander Pope to Philip Larkin, a certain number of poets in each epoch of literary history—never enough—has understood the difference between serious and self-serious, as well as the fact that the more painful the human reality is, the more it cries out for comedy. Form, meter, rhetoric, prosody, image, metaphor—these elements do not know the difference between comedy and gravity. They are neutral technical means. Only tone knows, and tone is not telling until it is too late and the poetry is on the page, ready to be dealt with, in its painful contradictions. Just as comic movies are often overlooked (yes, Some Like it Hot, you impish stepchild, you deservedly bucked the trend in 1960 by getting 13 nominations and 11 wins), poetry driven primarily by wit and a sense of the absurd, which ought to be top of mind as proving itself necessary in these grim times, seldom takes away the Pulitzer, the MacArthur, and it has been more than half a century since the blackly comic Samuel Beckett claimed the Nobel.

Menachem Feuer, speaking of the performance style of Charles Bernstein, says:

stand-up poetics, playing the schlemiel on the stage or in a poem, is a way of doing more than theory says it does. The running joke and the act of self-deprecation in language do more to loosen up language and make it playful than any abstraction. Playing with failure is a way of playing with pathos.

Not long ago, I considered in this magazine the work of Anne-Marie Turza, who shares a profitably eccentric sensibility with Anthony Immergluck, whose recent The Worried Well brings sharp wit and a robust feel for the absurd to his poetic fretting, in which he often assumes the persona of the schlemiel. In the book’s first section, “The Dybbuk,” the poet, like the disembodied human spirit he evokes, begins his wander through a landscape that mainly offers the potential for failure and disaster to his overthinking mind. The first poem, not surprisingly named “Worry (The Dybbuk),” explains the familial precedent.

I have a worry mother and

I have a worry father and

once they shared a worry and

my own worry, a sprout in

this worry dirt, bullied by

the worry weeds, spoiled by

the worry sun and rain and

I the runt among a litter of

suckling worries and the

worry is the current and

we are its conductors and

On and on goes the lament, as if he were reciting the Book of Lamentations on the feast day of Tisha B’av. The comedy derives from neurotic overstatement of the case, as if he were mourning the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians. Although the poem lasts barely more than one page, the concatenation of “ands” suggests that it is interminable, like the speaker’s tendency to worry about nothing and everything. In fact, the poem ends when the poet says, “I don’t/know why I told a worry/child not to worry when/surely the trick is to give/the worry a name and then to call it again and again.” However irrational this fretting, he is determined to pass it on, creating a familial worry, genealogical, theoretically extending back to Babylonia and forward to eternity. If this is a joke, it is a cosmic one, undergirded with a layer of seriousness.

Immergluck’s tone manages to be both hysterical and deadpan, as in “Deadsong,” wherein the speaker imagines the many ways in which he will absolutely, most certainly, and without a doubt, die in a cruel, violent, disastrous manner.