I’ve got a working theory about what I think might be the relationship between poetry and laughter – why wit feels so at home, to me, within poetry. I’m not saying it’s a good theory, and in fact many of my theories are my theories for the reason that they’re not good, and probably most people would reject them outright. Nevertheless (as I am wont to do with my own poetry) I’ll press on.

I can think of two scenarios in which a person has cause to open their mouth and make an utterance at the same time another person is also making an utterance. One of these is combative – the argument, when people interrupt each other, drown out their adversary in order to make their own, ostensibly more righteous and correct opinion, known. Although it’s true that in this moment you can find two people communicating simultaneously, their respective messages are not in sync, and the consequence is a direct affront to communication and closeness – the rebuttals are born from a person’s belief in their own control of the language of their subject matter, the inherent wrongness of the other person’s contribution, so wrong that it warrants suppression.

The other scenario is laughter, when two people are joined in a moment of accidental communion, responding to something they have both found funny. The laughter response is not a matter of control, it’s an animal reaction to a very human creation – a joke. With this, two people get to communicate something entirely in sync with one another, without rehearsal or planning. That the response is an uncontrolled one, yet it yields a moment of near mechanical synchronicity, tells us something, I think, about what the foreign, and unknown, within us can offer.

Poems, for me, are always a little bit about the tension between the known and the unknown, the controlled and the uncontrollable. The poem as a form has a capacity to contain some instance of unexpected connection, but in order to do so the poet has to yield a little of their own authorial ego. Some of these poems are funny, many aren’t (this introduction is now a roast), but what drew me to them was how they permitted the unfamiliar, the sense that there was some kind of union taking place here between human and non-human, if non-human can here be a synonym for that which we don’t totally understand, that which we can’t completely control. A true attentiveness to language often involves admitting that language is more than a tool we use to relay a thought, that the thought is inherently changed by our interaction with language. In these poems, thoughts spill out from language, language grows out of thought, and as a result the language feels vibrant and dynamic, the speakers uttering their increasingly unfettered utterances. None of the speakers of these poems seem totally in control, and it is this that prompts my own uncontrolled response. In these poems, language games yield almost reluctant profundities, an errant image prompts a spiral into philosophical enquiry, jokes and bathos invite in quiet tragedy. With these poems, we find each other in the spaces between that which is deliberate. To quote ‘portents’, by Eleanor Cousins Brown: ‘I am told that words are good enough / but what good is that?’

— Susannah Dickey
March 2025