Gabe
for many of those writers, I'd have to say that humour, absurdity, plays
into some of their work, plays across some of it, but would one, thinking
about their oeuvres, call them comic? I'm not so sure, although I value the
little explosions of the comic into their poetry...
From this list, & what it suggests, I could certainly suggest a whole bunch
of Canadian poets (& Australian, New Zealand ones) whom I don't usualy
consider comic poets:
Al Purdy, Sharon Thesen, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Steve McCaffery,
Chris Dewdney, etc (but there you are, Stephen Scobie & I found some funny
poems by various poets for The Maple Laugh Forever, but we wouldn't have
called them comic poets).
NZ: definitely some of the mordantly satiric poems of such as RAK Mason, CK
Stead, Bill Manhire, Anne French.
Oz: Les Murray has some laugh out loud ones. Etc...
I think we might have to start pointing to poems, rather than just poets,
for pure comedy. And, of course, there's the problem of personal response
(which we ran into as editors, with readers often wondering if we even had
a sense of humour, given some of the poems we found funny...)
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
I'm going to swim for my life
to another shore. The human shore's
too much
You can speak. You're on safe
ground, you mandala, you. I'm
getting out of here
Charles Olson
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