A love/hate kind of day

A funny thing happened on the way to my Concepts of Comedy class: each student who submitted reading comments thoroughly hated one poem--but no two students hated the same poem, and any poem hated by one student was loved by another.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when students respond passionately to poems dealing with passionate topics: love, hate, death, suicide, and religion. We looked at incongruity of style and substance in Stevie Smith's "Sunt Leones" (link) and Dorothy Parker's "Resume" (link), and we examined love poems you'll never find inside a Hallmark card: Parker's "Love Poem" (link) and Julie Sheehan's "Hate Poem" (link). A love poem full of hate and a hate poem full of love: the perfect recipe for either comedy or tragedy.

Speaking of love/hate relationships, I tried to enrich our discussion of Ambrose Bierce's "The New Decalogue" (link) by reading aloud some entries from The Devil's Dictionary, including his long definition of Regalia, which includes the incomparable phrase "The Blatherhood of Insufferable Stuff." Half of my students bore up under the onslaught as if being pelted by bloody entrails while the other half wore smiles that threatened to break their faces wide open. I ignored the hateful half and kept reading. Bierce may be a polarizing figure, but on a day when we're discussing dark comedy, he's worth pursuing.

"You know he's still out there," I told my students. "Bierce's body was never found, so he's still out there wandering the Mexican wilderness--or else he's sitting at a bar with Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa while Elvis warms up to sing a few tunes."

Did anyone laugh? Maybe a little. Most looked puzzled, a look I see frequently in that class. All in all, it was a love/hate kind of day in a love/hate kind of class that is turning out to be a perfect recipe for either comedy or tragedy.