
Seriously Funny
Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else
University of Georgia Press
Published on 15. April 2010
Book
Hardback
440 pages
978-0-8203-3087-7 (ISBN)
Description
This is an anthology of irreverence and humor in the hands of our best poets. Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, ""Seriously Funny"" ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Toure said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of ""Seriously Funny"" hope its readers find much to share with others.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Georgia
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
792 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8203-3087-7 (9780820330877)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Barbara Hamby is the author of Delirium, which won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, and the Kate Tufts Award; and The Alphabet of Desire, which won the New York University Poetry Prize and was chosen as one of the twenty-five best books of 1999 by the New York City Public Library. She teaches creative writing at Florida State University.