Poets’ Corner

Famous Americans, Loren Goodman, Yale University Press: 80 pp., $24.95

It is very difficult to be funny (especially in our present extremely unfunny world!). It could be argued that it is hardest of all for poets to be humorous, though satiric/comedic poets from Catullus to Pope to Max Jacob to Ogden Nash to Billy Collins, James Tate and Heather McHugh manage more than a few serious laughs per stanza.

Accompanying its announcement of the appointment of Louise Gluck as new judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the prestigious press has announced this year’s winner of the Young Poets Award (the final selection of Judge W.S. Merwin): Loren Goodman. Goodman operates within the tradition of the Funny Poet -- with one difference. Young Mr. Goodman is essentially without a style -- beyond a dazzling ability to mimic any style, from Hollywood “script-ese” to Stupid Interview format to Holy Hard Sell, in an elliptical ADD tour of American Pop Culture.

Goodman’s sense of the absurd is colossal. His capacity for ridicule is vast, wandering, egalitarian and infectious -- a kind of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of spot-on cultural observation. He sends up one dopey rhetoric after another from the spitless, witless language of textbooks, cultural studies demagoguery and school reports to New Age twaddle -- all conflated in fast repetitive takes, as in “Remembering Werner Heisenberg”:

“I am doing my report on Werner Heisenberg / And his principal of uncertainty. Werner / Heisenberg was a young German boy born in / 1959 of an Italian sharecropper and a / Dynamo. He was born in 1959, the proud son / of a shoemaker and an air balloon. Werner / Heisenberg, born in 1959, was the young son / of a Jesuit and a coughdrop. The other kids / Did not like Werner, they were known to have / Affectionately referred to him as ‘Werner.’ / Of ancient Swiss heritage, Werner was born / Of two happy parents in the year 1959. Werner / Heisenberg is famous for his development of the / Heisenberg uncertainty principal. His roots / Lie in 1959, when he was born of two very shy / Teenage equestrians.”

Here, in its entirety, is another poem, “The Beginning of an Amazing Novel”:

Thad, a three-hundred pound man,

did not feel like moving. Big Thad.

An occasional poem falls flat, succumbing to terminal archness (not a pun) and a couple are a little lame -- but overall, Goodman’s debut is pyrotechnic, polymathic and wild as a naked deb on a skateboard.

*

Waterborne, Linda Gregerson, Houghton-Mifflin: 66 pp., $23

Linda Gregerson is a distinguished voice in American poetry. She is this year’s winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry for her third book of poems, “Waterborne,” and the honor is richly deserved. The poems in “Waterborne” reflect Gregerson’s breadth of knowledge as an English Renaissance scholar, but also establish indisputably the power and resonance of her lyric gift.

Written in startling, flexible tercets, the poems allow us to see into our 21st century fate, a catalog of fear and harm that is nonetheless redeemed by her luminous impeccable speech:

Months later -- I’d been clearing

my desk --

These bits of gold foil spilled to the ground

a second time, five-pet- aled blossoms of public

gaud

unloosed from the folded playbill as in

August from the heavens at Swan, Act

Five,

to mark the child Elizabeth’s birth.

Here is a poet of proven eloquence who consistently shapes the perfect vessel for her grieving and vigilant but capacious poetic perspective. She mourns the polluted rivers and waterways, hence the haunting title of the book, hence this compassionate discursive flow of her wise attention to the world.