A.M. Juster is the pseudonym of a long-suffering Washington civil servant whose posts included a humorless tenure as commissioner of Social Security during two administrations. No wonder, then, that his secret life as a poet has the character of a release valve. Apart from his first short collection of poems—The Secret Language of Women (2002)—Juster has mostly published volumes of translations, including Horace’s satires and St. Aldhelm’s riddles (see “Mystery Play” by Joseph Bottum, August 22), and many short comic poems in little magazines—just the kind of work to provide an alternative to, and a relief from, the daily grind of federal bureaucracy.
This selection of his comic original poems and translations includes his “Letter to Auden,” which serves almost as a mission statement for the volume. “Uh, Wystan?” it begins, “Please forgive my arrogance; / You know how most Americans impose.” He proceeds to say he does not expect a reply—”Unless you can’t resist some biting crack”—before confessing his own inadequacy compared with Auden’s “bracing pace” and “style and verve.” Although most contemporary poets
Juster counts himself among those “few eccentrics” who “still support” Auden, because he is one of “Those poets who can scan lines properly.”
The young Auden had seen the rise of political ideologies in the 1930s as a sign that the British public had lost sense of being part of a community with a life and a good held in common. It had become nearly impossible for one person to speak to another with a sense of a shared culture, language, and interest. He would later plead, “We must love one another or die.” But before then, Auden tried to thicken the social bonds by encouraging the public to laugh at the same things. He edited The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938) to help, and he partnered with Louis MacNeice to write the most hilarious book of poetic modernism, Letters from Iceland (1937). The heart of that book was Auden’s own witty account of British life in rime royal, “Letter to Lord Byron.” Juster’s “Letter” is a brief pastiche of Auden’s, very much in its spirit though expressly falling short of its ambitions.
Eli Lehrer’s review in these pages (“Paths Not Taken,” July 4) of Dana Gioia’s 99 Poems reminds us that most modern poets try to find a commonality with their readership through tragedy, the passions of pity and terror. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats claimed long ago that only in suffering do the walls of individuality collapse as we share in a single passion. Auden’s efforts at comedy in the thirties stand out as eccentric in this regard. Is it laughter rather than tears that unites us? Can comic verse unite poets and readers better than the poetry of sorrow?
Juster is one of the most distinguished of a number of new formalist poets who have sought to revive the craft of meter and rhyme while also writing mostly light or comic poems. This accomplished, fluent, and witty selection invites us to ask: What do we as a people laugh at together? And what aspects of our humor do we share with the wits of centuries past?
Not that much, it might seem. Juster makes two references to Windows Vista, but his best humor is gently satirical in suggesting what divides one generation from another, as in the superb “A Plea to My Vegan Great-Grandchildren,” which begins,
“Visions of the Serengeti” probes a similar divide when it recalls the old Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom—whose decorous creatures never indulged in “sex and gore”—only to contrast it with contemporary documentaries on the Discovery Channel, where “jackals disembowel / the wildebeest.” But perhaps all of us can laugh at some of Juster’s “Proposed Clichés.”
Juster’s selection of “Inside Jokes” and his excerpts from The Billy Collins Experience offer amusing comments on the insular, often self-possessed, quality of contemporary literary culture. He parodies Collins, the lonely comic lyricist, brilliantly—perhaps even a little too well.
For most readers, his selection of translations will be the highlight of the volume. Juster’s colloquial ease with rhyme and the pentameter line is as sure when translating Horace’s Latin as it is when he prays for salvation to Bill Gates. What he chooses to translate is intriguing. Two poems from medieval Welsh, “The Poem of the Prick” and “The Poem of the Pussy,” are just what their titles suggest and reveal the origins of that strain of bawdy British humor that often makes me so embarrassed to teach Shakespeare to my undergraduates. The second of these poems declares its intention to correct the wayward “highmindedness” of poets. They spend all their lines praising a lady’s face and breasts, meanwhile,
Juster’s renderings of the ancient epigrammatist Martial constitute the weakest stretch of the volume. Martial’s wit has savage implications but is on the whole “well-tempered,” and in consequence, some of it does not translate well to an age used to being shocked by satire. That said, this one reminds me of one of Mark Twain’s old aphorisms (though I would have reversed the order of the last two lines):
The volume ends with Juster’s original epigrams. The most accomplished is “Elegy for a Horseshoe Crab,” which compares us conservatives to that ancient and stubborn creature:
“Gift Shop Blues,” however, testifies to what the humor in these poems so often contemplates: how thin our culture has become, how lacking we are in a common language, comic or tragic.
A great people must share in a rich language and culture. It should be able to laugh together. We barely have such a thing now. A. M. Juster’s former day job reminds us that we often seem united only in being ruled by a monolithic bureaucracy, but his work as a poet follows Auden in trying to draw us together in better ways, at once light and profound.
James Matthew Wilson teaches at Villanova. His latest book is The Fortunes of Poetry.
