Humor in Poetry with Melissa Fite Johnson

In this workshop we’ll discuss how often poetry is perceived as something very serious—unsmiling writers wearing black and spouting purposefully obscure references. And while poetry is certainly sometimes that (or a version of that), it absolutely doesn’t have to be. There’s so much room for playfulness and joy and humor in poetry—and those qualities don’t mean the poems themselves are necessarily light or light-hearted.

     Humor can happen for many reasons, one of which is that it can help make traumatic topics more palatable and accessible. Of course, another reason to write with humor is just to give others something to read that moves them to tears of laughter rather than tears of despair, and now more than ever that is as noble and necessary a purpose as any.

     Together we’ll read terrific humorous poems by writers like Erin Adair-Hodges, Chen Chen, and Luisa Muradyan—and then we’ll…