In my last post I offered the generalization that a surpassingly large proportion of the poems included in The Works are clearly intended to be either fun, or funny, or both. Here I’m taking a closer look at what led me to that generalization.
First off, The Works helps me to identify the fun and the funny by being divided into sections, each of them including some poems that Cookson is identifying as a kind. One kind is, specfically, “Humorous Verse.” Some of the other sections offer things like “Puns and Wordplay,” “Riddles,” “Tongue Twisters,” “Limericks,” and “Nonsense Poems” that are usually understood as being fun things to write or to read, and the fun many of them offer is that they are in fact trying to be funny
A limerick’s cleverly versed—
The second line rhymes with the first;
The third one is short,
The fourth’s the same sort
And the last line is often the worst.
John Irwin
Some offer the fun of games with language: “Shape Poems/Calligraphs/Concrete Verse,” “Acrostic Poems,” “Thin Poems,” Some offer the fun of a performance: “Raps,” “Choral Poems,” and, what else, “Performance Poems.”
But beyond that, many of the poems in these and other sections describe funny events in funny ways. They are comic. They invite laughter.
And surprisingly often, they do so by making fun of the people like teachers and parents who are charged with looking after children, usually because of their attempts to stop children from, what else, having fun:
Things I'd Do If It Weren't For Mum
Live on cola, crisps and cake.
Trade the gerbil for a snake.
Fall asleep in front of the telly.
Only wash when I'm really smelly.
. . . .
Find out what it's like to be me.
Let this list grow long ... Get free!
Tony Milton
Almost always, also, as here, having fun is a thing that departs from what adults define as acceptable behaviour.
Children’s Prayer
Let the teachers of our class
Set us tests that we all pass.
. . . .
Let them say it doesn’t matter
When we want to talk and chatter.
Let our teachers shrug and grin
When we make an awful din.
Let them tell us every day
There are no lessons. Go and play.
While there’s humour in imagining chaos—as slapstick reveals, comedy often depends exactly on chaos happening—and while there’s humour in imagining children opposed to adult expectations exactly because their behaviour is then chaotic—the humour depend on what appears to be sympathy with the children’s supposed anti-adult bias. As a results they celebrate chaos, and invite young readers to join the celebration. All the poems you will need at school include a surprising number that encourage children to realize how awful schools and schooling are.
In doing so, they then undermine the school values they claim to support. Needing poetry in school, making it part of a compulsory hour with special language-learning goals, and misrepresenting it in what is surely an over-representation of funny and funny poems might well imply a perhaps unconscious belief that children are most likely to think that poetry is no fun at all—that in fact, unlike obvious fun things like skipping rope or playing basketball or eating lots of candy, it’s only fun in ways that are unlikely to appeal to youngsters. You have to work really, really hard to make it seem like fun. That’s rather sad.