In his preface to this book, W. S. Merwin makes a strange assertion. "[C]omedy," he writes, has been "absent from poetry for ages at a time, as though it had been banned." Now, perhaps Merwin had a particular age in mind when he wrote this sentence, when comic poetry was nowhere to be found. He does not list one, and I cannot think of one, and it seems to me that one must squint very hard at the timeline before the claim looks reasonable. I would have thought comedy as ubiquitous in the history of verse as women's breasts and the phases of the moon. But Merwin's idea that comedy is rare in poetry at least explains what he sees in Famous Americans, a book of comic verse of a very common sort.

Loren Goodman, Merwin writes, "clearly loves nonsense for its own sake." He also loves being clever, and most of the poems in Famous Americans are the kind of clever nonsense verse that many young poets are busying themselves with today. Spontaneity, playfulness, and a love of popular culture are its self-advertising features. Surrealism is a justification, not a principle; a sanction, not a code. The dizzying variety of pop culture is often the hidden subject of this verse, and its mingling with high culture, though not exactly a novel experiment, affects it like a giddy breath of helium—as in these lines, from Goodman's "Who Would Win":

Julius Erving vs. Irving Goodman—who would win???
Dialectical Hegemony vs. Axiological Heterogeneity—who would win???
Herman Melville vs. Herman Munster—who would win???

"Who Would Win" turns out twenty-six lines of this sort of thing, and the effect is mechanical; we see why it is meant to be funny (the absurdity of staging contests between dissimilar figures who happen to share the same name), but we are never moved to laugh.

And so with much of the book. Too many of Goodman's poems are only glib within their formulae: in addition to "Who Would Win," there is a poem chronicling the life of Benjamin Franklin, year by year, and a poem listing imaginary film casts, and an imaginary "Index of First Lines," and so on. It probably gets a laugh at poetry readings, and so satisfies perhaps the lowest standard to which comedy can conceivably be held. But its verbal interest is slight. Against the backdrop of comic verse from Chaucer to Kenneth Koch, it hardly shows up at all.

— Brian Phillips