Ha, well, then! - two days after writing about poetry that might seem too difficult (Language Poets, Temblor), I got a copy of Dylan Thomas' Death of the King's Canary, his bizarre murder mystery pastiche, complete with parodies of individual 'difficult' poets/poems. Very fun, very obnoxious, fairly silly...
Admittedly most of the poets parodied have vanished into history. I managed to find somebody's PhD dissertation online where one section explained some of the sources - most of them, aside from Auden, Eliot, Empson, etc., are unknown to me. But the nasty caricatures are still funny (titling a poem 'Lamentable Ode', or a short bio written for the Prime Minister that says, "Sound man, but American wife.... Scarcely suitable").
Hmm, something amusing for relaxation after a mildly chaotic day.
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[Later:]
There is real humor here, but much is rather heavy-handed – and heavy-handed for an unexpected reason: Thomas seems to combine a real irritation at 'difficulty' with a tendency to dig into the poems and really write them. A lighter touch would have made the parodies funnier; but a bit more work might have made some of them into real poems, if peculiarly directed ones. That ambivalence is perhaps what killed the book, and prevented him from publishing it during his lifetime (the dissertation by Amanda French claims that Thomas was more interested in 'difficult' poetry than he might have been willing to admit). Nevertheless, it's fairly enjoyable – perhaps this has what some 'serious' poetry lacks: it needs to give the reader permission to find passages ludicrous, and to thereby enjoy them.
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