Post-Poetry, Part 5: LulzPo, Avant-Comic, YA Poetry Mix-Tape

With a tip of the hat to Elaine Kahn and her mix-tape posts on Harriet, here's a mix-tape of some of my favorite comic poems. I'm calling these selections LulzPo, or avant-comic, and YA Poetry to offer some possibilities beyond the kind of provocatourist schlock of, say, Tony Hoagland—the Dennis Miller of poetry—, and the relative safety of Billy Collins who'd make a great Poetry Month guest on Jay Leno. Having grown up on a steady diet of Saturday Night Live, George Carlin, Limericks, insults, and punk records, it surprised me for a long time that there weren't more poets writing comic poems, especially given that comedy and satire have been the vernacular (where popular critical discourse and political speech are concerned — see: Dave Chapelle, Jon Stewart, Louis CK, Key & Peele, Tina Fey, et. al.) since the 90s. This is entirely non-comprehensive, but some of my favorites.

I was drawn to the cartoonish lettering on the spine of Great Balls of Fire when I saw it in a small used bookstore in Colorado Springs when I was 21. I pulled it out, opened it up, and snorted involuntarily after I read the last line. This was the poem that, for me, opened up the possibility that poems could be absurd, funny, difficult, and accessible all at once.

 

My friend Nico Alvarado (see below)  gave me a copy of Mark Leidner's  The Night of 1,000 Murders several years ago. Leidner seemed to be working in Padgett's lineage the way Padgett works in Kenneth Koch's lineage or Chris Rock works in Richard Pryor's or Louis CK works in Lenny Bruce's. It's more contemporary, updated, wholly immature, and unconcerned with any kind of pure originality or atemporal poetic genius.

 

This bilingual edition of Dominican poet Frank Baez is brand new from Jai-Alai Press. I hadn't heard about Baez or Jai-Alai until a month or two ago when my friend Han brought this amazing flip-over translation back from the Recto Verso book fair in Seattle. The sardonic, Catholic wit in Baez's poems is Sunday-school gold.

Also new to me: James Gendron's first full-length with the kind of one-liners that made Twitter the new comedy circuit, but darker?

Sommer Browning does poetry comics in the New York School tradition better than they did. She's been my favorite poet for a long while, and also does stand-up sometimes, which blurs back into her poems, and vice versa. All her puns have razor blades on the elbows. Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman should take note. You can listen to her deliver her one-liners in one big list poem HERE.

Justin Sirois is mostly a novelist. His SO SAY THE WAITERS trilogy is amazeballs, and so is this book and its uneasy, bathetic lulz.

Nico Alvarado is a Colorado Springs poet. He's so self-effacing that he has to write persona poems and leave his name off the cover of his book. Some of these poems got picked up by BuzzFeed.

It's just as funny to imagine Dodie Bellamy channelling for these poems as she lands on some TNT rerun of The Terminator. Spiritualizations of "the medium" of our time. Funny cuz they're true.

Puerto Rican poet Guillermo Rebollo-Gil invites gangster rap, the New York School and WWF wrestlers to queer the minds of the other Fire Island.

All THESE POEMS by Sampson Starkweather.

Funny cuz your not sure.

The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird singin' in the dead of night.

Owen Hill's an unsung master of cheeky camp in the Bay Area. This pre-ConPo appropriation of excerpts from actor George Sanders' biography from 1998 is a classic of that awkward period just before small-press poetry popped.

Needs not explanation.

Which one?

Hallowed gallows. Maged Zaher moves between all modes with grace.

The best!

The Duck Soup of poetry.

Hilariously smart poems hidden behind this publishing genius.

The impossible: language poetry yuks.

Dutch boy Cralan Kelder always with the brevity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ifSrOqIRE

More like Burt Reynlulz, Brandon Downing.

See you later, poetry.