Satire Note 2

What I’m trying to do is register the ripples and twists and growths of the term in the work of people I read. I think satire is incredibly important to poetry, and in particular to contemporary political poetry. There is satire at work prominently in E.A. Markham’s Lambchops poems. There is satire in the work of Francis Crot, whose Cuntomatic (2007) takes aim in some deeply weird and uncomfortable ways feminism and men in the poetry-scene (see ‘Commentary on an untitled poem’ [2015]), it is there in Tim Atkin’s Horace (2007), and throughout Mairéad Byrne’s work, especially that piece on poetry and stand-up comedy. Then there’s Tom Raworth’s ‘Coda to a Laureate,’ and ‘Envoi,’ both published in Windmills in Flames: Old and New Poems (2010), and Peter Manson’s ‘The Baffle Stage,’ written as a satire of the poem’s ego, published in Poems of Frank Rupture (2014) (see ‘Null-Exit Pamphleteering, or #VALUE!’ [2019]), and Danny Hayward’s Pragmatic Sanction (2015), which messes with the binary choices set up in electoral politics. (Jane Elliott would probably call this the ‘microeconomic mode.’ Elliott, The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics [2018].) Lisa Jeschke’s The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women (2018) has a satirical poem in the voice of a transphobe. Recent work by Sam Solomon, which I saw read on 13th Feb. 2019 in London, explores and satirizes the attitude of Universities to “care,” in which for the University “care” means nothing more than not getting sued by a student.