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| Image courtesy of University of Akron Press. |
Reading this book, I was struck by the unwavering voice that carried the poems. There is no other way these poems could be, I kept thinking. In their Wes Anderson-esque tone, Bredle’s poems do everything in their power to convince you that the scenes they are presenting are completely normal or random; it’s as if a local news anchor is calmly reporting on chaotic events (including werewolves, superheroes, amusements parks, snuggly cats, and raccoons). It’s not the narrator that’s unreliable in Bredle’s poems, but the weird world.
NOTE: After the interview below, be sure to read “The Promise,” and “The Death March,” which both appear with the permission of the author.
Q: The poems in Carnival possess a fascinating tone--they are funny and absurd, but they are also tinged with darkness, sadness, or danger. I also noticed the impeccable timing in your poems. I'm curious to know--in your opinion, what is the relationship between humor and poetry? Is there any connection between poems and jokes? How do tone and voice work for you in your writing?
A: In my case, I fell in love with comedic writing at a young age, and it’s been central to my livelihood ever since, although my real life joke writing experience is limited to two sessions I took at Second City before deciding I was kind of being scammed and quitting. I’m probably more of a student of humor and popular culture than most poets, though. For me, central to writing both jokes and poetry is the idea of manipulating words to create some type of maximum effect. In humor, the effect is laughter, but in poetry, it can be anything, which is why I prefer poetry, although being humorous in a poem upsets the sanctimony of poetry for many readers in my experience, which is unfortunate. It’s somewhat of a curse in terms of trying to get published, too, even though I don’t consider myself funny, or my poems funny for that matter. I mean, there are aspects to what I write that I enjoy in that way, but what’s more important to me is that the reader experience some kind of effect that makes him or her feel something. Poetry allows me to manipulate sentences for maximum effect of whatever effect I want to create – laughter sometimes, but also serious considerations of the self, relationships with others, anxieties about life, confusion, and sometimes all at the same time. To achieve this, word choice, word order and word conservation are paramount to both humor and poetry. There was a recent profile of Jerry Seinfeld in The New York Times Magazine which offers a compelling argument for the similarities between the two. The success of a line can be dependent on one or two words, or the particular way a sentence is phrased, more so than the actual idea behind the joke. You can have a great idea, but if you don’t craft it properly, it’s going to fail, regardless if it’s a poem or a joke.
