Book excerpt: For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humour encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political and discursive hierarchies - whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. 'Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry' explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers.