“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.
I.
I will die in a gasping panic
with plastic in my windpipe.
II.
I will die in a rat king
of shrapnel and rubber,
piecemeal by the interstate.
(It will be my fault—
I do get moony.)
III.
I will die trying to fix
a household appliance
I do not understand.
IV.
I will die the way my father
says I will: trying to pet some
wild and cornered creature.
Let it be said that the “wild and cornered creature” is decidedly him. His self-talk does nothing to console that forlorn being. On the contrary, the overheated hysteria only spurs him to further self-abuse, as he imagines dying by hatchet, maniac, benzo overdose, half-pipe, silica packet, desert, mole, fascist fracas, curable malady, failing to apologize, shame, sea tempest, Leviathan. His outsized imaginings extend to an eighteen-part poem, each part a fresh demise, the poet refusing to simply pick one fatal blow and have that be the kicker. If anything, he will die when his brain explodes from overworking itself. 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. For in the end, Immergluck entertains us and connects with us by staging an ongoing mock self-absorption that strays into narcissism, which is the necessary obverse of the genuine schlemiel, who, before his imminent demise, must command our attention for a spell, lest we fail to witness his dying words. “Narcissus at the Pharmacy” begins:
Now that I am sick,
I have become
so important
to myself.
My reflection in every
surface, no matter
how marble or matte.
My story swelling
like a Magic Eye
in every page I read.
The world is ending, yes,
but am I not a world?
With energetic, unquenchable verve, Immergluck manifests paradoxically as infinitesimal and gigantic as the Leviathan who putatively consumes him near the book’s beginning. Yet he goes on and on, a glimmering object of (self) fascination. The poet is a master of obsequiously self-effacing discourse, accepted because the persona offered is so perfectly constructed and consistent. He is a first-rate rhetorician, a supreme tactician, and a successful stand-up comedian.
Daniel R. Smith, in Comedy and Critique: Stand-up Comedy and the Professional Ethos of Laughter, observes:
stand-up is about the shame of ‘who we are’ trying to be mollified. This is the power of a comic persona and it faces a contradiction: it begins with a move to see that which is abject, that which you live with but cannot expel, as something you are invested in as much as you wish to expel it.
This latter paradox lets The Worried Well strike deep into the conflicted desires common to human beings. The flaws a person possesses, in the self-justifying mind, are what keep us going, make life worth living. We accept the torments we have created as necessary, as “being human,” forgiving our shortfall retrospectively and in advance. Except that in the case of the persona governing this book, they are more likely to lead to the “enjoyment” of self-torment.
This volume’s apotheosis is the superb Suicidal in Paradise, wherein the speaker seems to be vacationing in a tropical seaside resort of some sort, surrounded by all the amenities, and worse, by other people unselfconsciously enjoying them. That setting provides the ideal/worst possible occasion for life-canceling carping and silently obstreperous suicidal ideation, as gothic as it is comic. He imagines himself as a soon-to-be skeleton, like the shipwreck victims he mind-summons littering the beach.
When I see driftwood, I think shipwreck…
An animal is at its most vulnerable
when its belly is prone, and seagulls
have been circling my stress-sweat for hours.
So I button up my bowling shirt
and wave away a mai tai.
I scour the beach for horseshoe
crab shells fragrant with roe;
For neglected SOSs of pebbles and pearls
and for the skeletons that spelled them out.
The use of couplets here is incisive, as the potential victim of forces of chaos scans the beach for sources of damage. This king of the stress-nerds takes a benign bucolic situation being enjoyed by volleyball players and swimmers and turns it into a doomsday landscape in which not only he, but everyone around him, with no lifeguard on duty, stands on the verge of annihilation. If there had been a lifeguard, he would doubtless appear in the person of an angry, punishing God, more apt to drown beachgoers than save them. In The Worried Well, Immergluck gives us the gift of a hyperbolic, cosmic schlemiel, one in whom we can see, albeit exaggeratedly (thus clearly) our own many flaws and petty neuroses. Like the best stand-up comedians, he has a humane purpose in his relentless summoning of destroyers. In his lyric counterpoising of rhetoric and image, he creates vivid scenarios. Having established such Renaissance virtues in the carefully balanced, oppositional structure of each poem, full of latent and manifest paradoxes worthy of Shakespeare’s sonnets, his inner schlemiel goes for broke.
Let it be said, however, that this comic treatment of the self/character/archetype is not simply pessimistic. Underlying it is the odd optimism regarding who survives real disasters or outlasts imagined ones, and how. Abraham Avny catches this note in his book review of Ruth R. Wisse’s The Schlemiel as Modern Hero.
His attitude is typified by the Jew who, when confronted with the bad news that his house and possessions have burned down, consoles or even congratulates himself because the fire rid him of the bothersome rats too. Also, he lets loose an avalanche of words to mitigate his disasters so that he converts them into verbal triumphs. Moreover, to Sholom Aleichem the Jews in general were a schlemiel people, powerless and unlucky but spiritually the victors in defeat.
Such an attitude is present in the final poem of The Worried Well, “David Comes Home.” The unexpected reversal in tone is singular as is the placement of this recounting of the homecoming of one of the Bible’s most successful examples of enduring in the face of adversity. The speaker admires this sudden hero who has appeared in his pages at the last possible moment, like a deus ex machina.
I’d share any well for drinking.
any well for drowning.
I’d follow you in vengeance
and I’d follow you in song.
To the hilts of other champions,
however cruel and towering.
To the crumbling garrets
of temples besieged.
To whichever home you claim as yours
when the warring finds it loves you.
This schlemiel cannot help thinking of David and him drowning together (remember that absent lifeguard?) even in the midst of a paean to a proven victor. He will never stop being himself. At the same time, after many times snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Immergluck finally snatches victory from defeat.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
