I have decided that someone, somehow, should make the audience laugh - at some point in a performance. It breaks the ice; it lets the audience move around a little in their bodies. Laughter does this; it loosens you.I got to thinking about this yesterday afternoon. Three women I know had put together a reading at the Women's Club in town. The women were all sophisticated in their outfits (each in some shades of black and gray), and I expected the same sophistication of the poems. I knew these women's writing, and admired it.
But, there were funny parts, amidst the poems of memory and obsession, health and worry. Someone used the word "fart" in a poem, and we laughed. One of the women read a dog sonnet. I think something changed in that room when we giggled and snickered.
If poems are everything that is, poems are also body parts that don't do things right in public and snorts and stupid little imaginings.
It felt good to laugh, and then to have them turn us back to more serious subjects. Then, I was ready again for the heavier work of poetry - the grittier, powerful poetry of anything else.
I need to remember this. I so rarely write funny poems....
the line between funny and clever often becomes tickle territory. your word smything makes me laugh when youre merely musing. I'm vulnerable to the cryptic while some need obvious and most live in the universe between.
ReplyDeleteYou're right. We all have different tolerances for humor. What can make someone else giggle uncontrollably might have me rolling my eyes. But, if the reader can find a way to bring in some release (cryptic or not), laughter seems like a good thing. When it works, it really works.
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