Johann Goethe said, “Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable.”

Maybe that’s why this feels so profound. Elisa Gabbert makes two lists — one of things she finds funny, the other of things she finds sad.

Without the benefit (or hindrance) of context, we learn something about Gabbert. I’m not sure what, but something.

Coincidentally, it has been awhile since I coaxed my coworkers into writing redactive poetry.

So, in the spirit of newsroom cooperation and creative exploration, I present The News-Herald Funny/Sad lists.

Jason Lea
Things that are funny:
Richard Pryor. Delonte West YouTube freestyle sessions. A Different World. Grandparents. Horace Grant’s goggles. Sherman Alexie. Actors when they play themselves.

Things that are sad:
Three-legged puppies. Darryl Strawberry. People who peak in high school. Infanticide. The Trix rabbit. Delonte West firearm charges. Richard Pryor.

Cassandra Shofar
Nose blowing. My dog, Lakota. Sneeze attacks. Conan O’Brien. My friend, Shawn McKinley. British curse words. My grandma. My shadow-boxing neighbor. 80s hair bands. Brat Pack movies. Daffy Duck. Stirrup pants.

Lonely people. Abused animals. Nursing homes. Poverty. Hospice. Outcast children. Obesity. Mourning widowers. Dilapidated buildings. Genocide. Balloons stuck to ceilings. Burned out wicks.

Brandon Baker
Coming to America. Sports talk radio. Co-workers. The burp chorus my cousins can perform. Ron Artest post-game interviews. ARRA fund recipients who deny being ARRA fund recipients. Chapelle Show reruns. Public Enemy’s “Cold Lampin’ With Flavor.” Off-target PR pitches for coverage.

Off-target PR pitches for coverage. Our fascination with crap like Jersey Shore. Giving money to an auto shop. The inability to accept change. Youth sports coaches who devise tactics to benefit themselves more than the children who suit up. Twenty-somethings who can’t seem to grow up. A depleted marriage that was once a union of two people you love and admire.

Jacob Lammers
Dave Chapelle. South Park. Really bad TV broadcasters. Water balloons. My roommate’s dog. My nephews. My oldest brother. Mother Goose & Grimm comic. Cheryl and Danielle’s pranks. Robin’s attempt at pranks. The plot of Zoolander. The fact that there will be a Zoolander 2. My childhood. The pitchfork story. The truck into the garage story. Sh*t My Dads Says. Columnist Dave Barry.

The state of newspapers. The departure of Tom Brokaw. Cold rain. The Lovely Bones. Child predators. Leniency toward career criminals. Covering the crime beat. Writing about crime/disasters involving children. The Cleveland Browns. The playing ability of any Browns quarterback. Watching the Steelers beat the Browns (almost always). Onions. The mullet hairstyle.*

*Could also be funny.

Tracey Read
Larry David. David Sedaris. Amy Sedaris. Jason Lea. My kids. My dad ripping his pants while chasing people who T-pee’d my house in high school. Strangers with Candy. Beavis and Butthead. Snoop Dogg’s TomTom directions. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Seinfeld.

People who brag. People who take Little League too seriously. Turning 40. The scene in Brokeback Mountain with the shirt. Hoarders. Me at 16. When my kids would rather play with their friends than me. Living paycheck to paycheck. People not buying newspapers anymore. Moms who judge other moms.

John Bertosa
Both Airplane! movies, otters, South Park, the Jesus twitter page, Monty Python, comedian Emo Phillips, Mystery Science Theater 3000, very drunk people, Tosh.0

Cleveland pro sports teams, that anti animal cruelty commercial with the mournful soundtrack and the dog looking pathetically from inside the cage,  “Everybody Hurts” by REM, dead animals on the side of the road who had just enough strength left to rest their heads on their paws, homeless people in plain sight

Angela Gartner
Random acts of people I know falling to the ground. The Hangover. The sasquatch from the Jack Link’s Beef Jerky commercials. Johnny Test. My son who believed me when I told him there was an elephant in grandma’s basement.  Vintage Louie Anderson. South Park. Stephen King – On Writing, the book made me laugh unexpectedly. Overheard in the Newsroom on Facebook.  Phone conversations with my mom.

Jock and Mackenzie, my Scottish Terriers that died. Atonement. Medical bills. Sirius Black’s death in the Harry Potter series. P.S. I love you. Doggy Heaven.com.  My Dog Skip -- last 15 minutes. Stories of child abuse. The Holocaust. Eight Below. Daycare payments.

Sandra Klepach
My three-legged cat Muppet. Three Amigos. Shared childhood memories. Grandmas. Safely falling in private. ‘70s high school yearbook hairstyles. Spoken words accidentally merged. Unicorns.

Weight gain. False impressions. Roadkill. Illiteracy. Teenagers without role models. 9 to 5. Native American history. My three-legged cat Muppet.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Elisa Gabbert of The French Exit asks a much better question than, “Is poetry dead?”

She asks, “Is poetry boring?”

Her answer:
“Is poetry boring? Yes, of course it is. Life is boring. Writing of all kinds (novels, movie reviews, the news) is boring, museums are boring, TV and movies and the Internet are mostly boring, exercise is boring, work is boring, school is boring, even sex can be boring. Most of modern life is an elaborate exercise in killing time, since there is little doubt we’ll all live into our nineties, if not eternally. Anything novel is a temporary cure for boredom (a new hobby, being pregnant for the first time, drugs) but things become boring again eventually (even money).”

Gabbert’s being glib, but she is also raising a worthwhile point.

First, let’s clarify the obvious. Not all poetry is boring. Gabbert is a poet. No one needs to tell her this.

But poetry can seem boring, especially when you’re inundated with mediocre examples. If somebody told me that they thought music was boring, I’d laugh them off. If somebody told me that they thought reading was boring, I’d tell them they were reading the wrong stuff.

But if somebody called poetry boring, I might let their point slide.

I’ll admit that this says something about me. I haven’t worked hard to find new poets that excite me (unless you count Skyzoo.) Poetry is no more boring than any other form of entertainment. If you’re only aware of the mediocre examples; then, yes, you’ll think it’s boring.

But the academia in poetry have also (inadvertently) cultivated this perception of stuffiness.

Poets are aware of this perception. That’s why Gabbert writes a post titled Is Poetry Boring? That’s why Clay Banes had a blog called POETRY IS SO BORING. That’s why Amiri Baraka wrote an essay headlined Why Most Poetry is Boring, Again (page eight of the PDF.)

Baraka writes, “One wonders, is it still called “high art?” Now too high to deal with the angst and pain and ignorance of the real world – though certainly an obtuse registry of it. Content with the masturbatory inoffensiveness of an actual loyal opposition, inferred loudly as “deep” intellectualism. Childish feints at surrealism, useless abstraction, jokey pop art, inside jokes for the uncognoscenti, all pass as, wow, poetry!”

Baraka’s not expressing anything new here either. Joseph Joubert already said, “How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound? The great part of abstract terms are shadows that hide a vacuum.”

So how does poetry stop being boring? How does anything stop being boring? It needs to ditch the abstraction and navel-gazing and say something worthwhile. In the words of Pharcyde (last hip-hop reference today), they need to kick something that means something.

Until poets and any other artists do, they will remain boring.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Gabbert later clarifies in her comments that “The subtext of this post is that I think there’s value in boredom. Running is a lot more boring than watching TV, which is why I think a lot more when I’m running than when I’m watching TV. The only escape from boredom is your own thoughts.”

She is taking a different tact than me. She is finding value in the boredom, which is admirable. Sadly, I can't do that. Boredom bores me.

I was less than my prolific self last week.

I would have written more, but it’s poor form to blog from someone’s murder trial.

But I’m back and so is Michelle Kerns. If you don’t remember Kerns, she is the woman analyzing literary critics’ dependence upon clichés.

Her analysis (and accompanying graphs) are many positive things — fascinating, insightful and accessible. Unfortunately, those words are clichés, so I’ll just post a link instead of trying to describe it.

Of the publications she is following, Entertainment Weekly packs the highest percentage of clichés into their critiques. (Smart money bets EW remain the frontrunner through the entirety of Kerns’s experiment.) They averaged 1.1 cliché per 100 words. Time Out New York and Publishers Weekly trailed at .93 and .92 Kerns, respectively.

Yes, “Kerns” are the metric measurement for clichés per 100 words in a book review.

Kerns — the writer, not the unit of measurement — specifically picks on alliterations in her dissection of April’s reviews. Some of the alliterations, like “parboiled profundities,” I found clever. Some are admittedly pretentious, for example, “craziness crazily” and “This promising premise begins on promising premises.”

Elsewhere, Elisa Bassist asks, Have I Earned these Clichés? She writes about why she writes and comes up with, “It’s the closest definition I have of living.” Yes, she notes that her conclusion is a cliché. That’s why she gives her essay that title.

It’s much better than I’m making it sound, though I disagree with some of Bassist’s points. She describes writing as a “social act.” I would argue that it’s the opposite. Reading might be a social act; but writing, almost always, is done alone and for your own sake. If someone else reads a personal meaning into your own writing — wonderful! — but writing is a selfish process. It’s about you, even when it isn’t. (And, now, I have added my cliché to the stack.)

Bassist seems to acknowledge this when she quotes Jim Harrison.

“A writer [is] a small god who has forty acres as a birthright on which to reinvent the world.”

Two final notes — first, Elisa Gabbert has fun with Venn diagrams.

She says that most people separate “women poets” from “poets.” How can anyone divide the two? Whether right or wrong, I identify femininity with poetry. Most of the women I know are poets. Many just don’t bother to write it down.

Lastly, we finally have an e-reader that I would consider buying. The Kobo reader, from Borders, will cost $149 and come stocked with 100 classics, according to the Associated Post. That’s $1.50 per classic. Sure, I probably have most of these unidentified classics on my bookshelf already. (Whether I’ve read them or not is a different issue.) But it still sells for $100 less than competing e-readers.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

We’re talking about poetry again.

Not because I know poetry, but because people who do know poetry keep saying interesting things.

Elisa Gabbert, of The French Exit, calls out publications that publish mediocre poetry from recognizable poets.

Here’s what I’d like to see more of in submissions: IDEAS. Why don’t poems have more ideas? So many poems I read are essentially just descriptions. So you went outside. It was beautiful. Or not. I don’t care how creatively you describe it, if it didn’t trigger any thoughts beyond “Hells yeah I am going to describe this,” it’s not a poem. It’s just showing off to yourself, or as Matt Rass used to say, “masturbating to language.”

Love it. Every last word of it. In fact, it’s not just poets who get caught “masturbating to language.” How much of Moby Dick is Herman Melville describing the scenery? The same could be said of James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. An entire generation of American authors decided “Hells yeah I am going to describe this.” Yes, they had some ideas ensconced between the chapter-long descriptions, but not enough to justify their exhaustive exposition.

And, despite my love for Wu-Tang Clan, I have to acknowledge that about 65 percent of their discography is “masturbating to language.”

On an unrelated (or, at most, barely related) note, I want to thank Patrick Gillespie of Poemshape for responding to my post. He made a point during his reply that is worth revisiting.

He said: A poor poet, but brilliant marketer, will probably be far more successful than the brilliant poet (we see it all the time). However, marketing also goes where the money is. If a publisher sees money in a writer, they will market him or her.

Then, I said: This is true, but it also leads us to a circular argument. Marketing tends to follow money and money follows marketing. Yes, poetry would be more lucrative if it were better marketed; and publishers would market it better if it appeared more lucrative. A few extraordinary types — Gillespie listed Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss — might slide through, but that’s about it. But even Silverstein and Seuss don’t apply to this discussion because neither of them are current poets.

Finally, Bloomsbury has refused to learn its lesson. They, once again put the image of a white woman on the cover of a book whose heroine is described as having brown skin. This would have been a post by itself had Bloomsbury not done the exact same thing last year.

Bloomsbury has already apologized and said it will issue the book with a new cover — just like they did before.

If Bloomsbury does this again, I’ll be convinced that it is for the free publicity.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com