The Laugh in Grief's Way

I am reading the new Colorado Review, and there is a poem by Graham Foust called “Nine-Eleven in a Joke.” It ends with these lines: Today’s blazing is a place we’ve only heard of. And you say: “The laugh in grief’s way Is grief’s way with us.” This poem arrived in my mail box just a few days after writing this, about the difficulties (or supposed difficulties) between Bix Beiderbecke and his stern German father Bismark. They are difficulties that have been chalked up to jazz or sex, but could have simply been adolescence. And remember, in the 1920s, the whole idea of adolescence was quite new. Okay. Let’s try another tack. To understand Bix & His Father, one must first understand irony. Not the irony of Oedipus & Fate, but the irony of rock and roll. To understand the irony of rock and roll, however, one must understand “the stink of shit,” to quote Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, “the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient,” which was “[m]ixed with the mud, and t... Read more