Funny! Funny! Funny!
We may think of parody as a kind of satire: art meant to
improve the world by highlighting its faults and weaknesses. But where satire usually has some moral and
social underpinning (I expose a wrong!), parody has more to do with taste, art
and culture. Parody targets a product of
literature or art, dance or film, even music.
It extrapolates the target’s more salient qualities or features—a
certain style, a telling point of view, a typical subject matter, a “voice”—and
then apes them.
You might satirize a war strategy (Dr. Strangelove), but you parody George W. Bush’s
malapropisms. You might satirize
government by Tweet, but you parody Donald Trump’s personal hygiene or the way
he walks or combs his hair (assuming it’s really his) or pinches up his face
when he talks.
In poetry, you might satirize work that ignores the
political moment or the greater social crises (or vice versa), but you parody a
clumsy or outdated style, or conversely, a style that’s over-the-top new or
“difficult” or avant-garde.
Think of parody and the parodist as calling attention to any
style, subject-matter focus, or treatment that appears to be unself-conscious
or unexamined—taken for granted—by its consumer. Parody says to the thing/person it parodies,
as well as to its potential devotee, “Do you hear yourself?”
Exaggeration is the métier of parody, and this is why most
parody is funny. Sometimes it’s pretty
acid in its humor, sometimes it’s gentle, but it’s often funny. As consumers of parody, we are meant to laugh
at (never with) what’s being parodied.
Here’s a famous example of two poems related by parody . . .
Dover Beach
-- Matthew Arnold, 1867
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The Dover Bitch
─ Anthony Hecht, 1967
A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.’
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.
. . . plus a less famous contribution to the conversation .
. .
The Dover Bandit
─ Clark Holtzman, 2002
I thought of writing this poem in Spanish but
it
came out in Romanian instead, in a remote
mountain
dialect of Romanian, which is strange, not
because
I know so very little Spanish and even less
Romanian,
but because I was thinking about the poem in
Latin,
in Church Latin, to be exact, that is, in an “Italian
way.”
Yes, what a strange thing to be thinking in
the Mother
Tongue that connects me to you and therefore
me
to the rest of the world, the crazy misspelled
un-
pronounceable world we go through talking each
day
like Sophocles with the sea coming in and
going out,
only, I guess, he wouldn’t have thought of it
in Latin?
Well, it is a strange thing that I was
thinking at all,
about the pissy world, about you, this poem.
Are these poems funny? Or
rather, are the two poems responding to the original poem funny, since clearly
the original is not? Make of them what
you will. But another characteristic of
parody, as you might gather from both of the responding poems, is anachronism.[1] Hecht’s poem looks at (rewrites) the theme,
characters and spirit of a mid-19th Century poem (research indicates
it was actually first drafted in 1849-51), from the point of view of a mid-20th
Century poetic/cultural sensibility. The
century and more of war, technology, literary tradition, political and social
change that intervened are folded into Hecht’s poem.
The Arnold poem was famous in its time; it is still a staple of
LitSurv anthologies. It has been assigned reading and a focus of classroom
analysis and “discussion” for a hundred years.
Hecht’s poem is a response not to “Dover Beach,” which I suspect he
admired as a work of art, but to that tradition of study and interpretation
that has calcified around it. He meant
to shock you into a different reading of the original, a 20th
Century reading, and this way his parody was a critique of modern academic
scholarship and teaching.
As for “The Dover Bandit,” all I can say is that I tried to horn
in on that conversation. I used to teach
“Dover Beach” and “The Dover Bitch” in tandem; in fact, some of the anthologies
I worked from grouped these two poems together, just so I could introduce my
students to parody. Many of my
colleagues taught the poems as a pairing as well, so that I began to notice
that the one, having made the other famous, could no longer be discussed in its
absence.
Sometime in the early 2000s, I overheard a couple of graduate
instructors comparing their own experiences teaching the poems in tandem. They approached the topic just as I and my
colleagues had years before; they came to many of the same conclusions; they
emphasized the same meanings and assumed the same intentions as my generation
of teachers had.
That’s about the time that I wrote “The Dover Bandit,” not so much
as a critique of either poem—both of which I admire greatly—but as a parody of
that threadbare literary pedagogy I overheard from the graduate teaching
assistants.
So there! I hope you have
fun writing a parody for Wednesday’s session.
You can focus on a famous poem, the way Hecht does, or you can imitate a
style—think Whitman’s long and flowing lines; Williams’ breathy three-beat
lines and simple subjects; Sylvia Plath’s “daddy” subject; even Jorie Graham’s
splattery, disjointed look on the page.
You can mimic, for parody’s sake, the bombastic oratory of somebody like
Yeats or Jack Gilbert or even the heavy pace/subject matter of the English
poet, Geoffrey Hill (look him up, you’ll see what I mean). It’s high time that somebody parodied W. S.
Merwin, Mary Oliver or Billy Collins! You can parody just about anything or
anyone, but make it a poet, a poetic style, or a poem.
See you next week.
[1] A
topic we might consider for a future project.
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