Friday from the Archives: “Not Always a “Piece of Cake”: Harrowing Humor in the Poetry of Kathryn Stripling Byer” an interview by James Smith in NCLR 2008
Ever noticed how scary stories also contain humor, pathos, and/or anger? Our stories, like ourselves, contain a multitude of emotions, each enhancing or modifying the others as necessary.
Former North Carolina Poet Laureate, Kathryn Stripling Byer, talked about this with interviewer James Smith. While his interview started with the idea that her poetry was funny, they veer into other emotions and perspectives her poetry has, too.
JS: When you think of successful humorous poetry, whose work springs to mind?
KB: “I immediately think of Fred Chappell, even though much of his work, especially the early poems and fiction, is dark, sometimes dauntingly dark. He has mellowed out in his later poetry and fiction. Backsass is one of the best examples of humor in poetry that I’ve seen in many years. The irony is that it sometimes takes a dark vision to bring humor to the surface, and how could Fred not come back home to the humor he knew so well from having grown up in the mountains, hearing the Jack tales, for instance, not to mention all the variants of hunting stories the men told? He soaked it all up, both the hardscrabble and the lightheartedness.
I learned a lot about pacing and inflection from Lee Smith, watching her speak and read from her fiction. I remember asking her before a reading, “Do you ever get nervous before these things?” “No,” she chirped;
“Maybe it’s because I took drama classes in school.” Well, maybe, but I think it also has to do with being comfortable in your own voice and trusting your instincts when it comes to connecting with an audience. Comfortable with telling an audience about how someone walked out of her talk at a Northern university, muttering that she sounded like a hick. Didn’t bother her in the least. It makes a great story, one that makes us laugh because it shows how ridiculous this pretentious Yankee listener was.
My friend doris davenport, an Afrilachian poet, has poems that are intensely pleasurable to read aloud. I’ve read several of them myself at readings, because they make people realize that family banter, for example, can be a joy to hear, and Black speech can render that in ways no other diction can.”
Smith inquires about Byer’s appreciation of Rumi, and after discussing a particular passage and translation, Byer’s answer opens up into this idea of Sacred Playfulness, the necessity of the fool to balance the work.
“I admire the Native American practice of having a character mocking the seriousness of the rituals, just to keep always in mind the vanity of human actions – even the sacred actions. “God loves a joke,” as Isak Dineson wrote. You can find this in all sorts of culture, the seriousness being given a different perspective by the Fool, by Coyote, by the dumb blonde who is so much smarter than everyone else thinks she is – maybe even smarter than she thinks she is. Humor is a kind of fact-checking – or, a reality check, if you will. It has a cool precision about it that pleases us and releases a lot of pent-up tension.
When I watch the Bollywood movies, many of them about serious matters of marriage, death, deceit, the whole nine yards, I am always anticipating the signal that means, okay, now it’s time for a song and dance, often with humorous body language and yes, always the stock clown somewhere in the mix, running around and making a fool of himself and others. I wonder if Indian society could keep going if it didn’t have Bollywood movies. I don’t know much at all about Indian literature and art, but I do know that Krishna, for example, is always smiling – and why not? The voluptuous gopis await their erotic encounter with him, pulses beating, the flute music wafting across the pastures where the sacred cow dung steams in the heat.”
Read the entire interview on Gale Cengage and pick up a 2008 issue today!
