Creative Writing Studio: The Comic Muse: Humor in Poetry

Undergraduate / Graduate

Humor is often treated as poetry's guilty pleasure - the thing serious poets do between serious poems. This seminar rejects that premise entirely. From the ribald fabliaux of medieval verse to the deadpan surrealism of Russell Edson, from Swift's savage ironies to Natalie Shapero's sardonic restraint, comic poetry has always been doing the most sophisticated work: puncturing authority, negotiating pain, and telling the truth at an angle. We will study humor not as decoration but as epistemology - a way of knowing and saying what other modes cannot reach. Topics include: the rhetoric of the joke; bathos and anticlimax as poetic structure; the long tradition of parody and mock-epic; nonsense verse and its philosophical undertow; the relationship between comedy and elegy; and the political uses of irony and satire. Students will read widely, write critically, and compose original comic poems in a range of modes."