Jim Behrle is an American poet, essayist, cartoonist, and radio personality whose work treats literary culture as both artistic material and public comedy. His poems use abrupt turns, jokes, social observation, self-mockery, popular references, and deliberately unstable tones. Across poetry, essays, drawings, online projects, and broadcasting, he has built a body of work unusually attentive to the rituals and absurdities of literary life.
Poetry and comic pressure
Behrle’s poems often move through collision. Intimate statements meet grotesque images, cultural references interrupt lyric expectations, and a line can change emotional direction through a joke. The comedy carries structural weight: it exposes ambition, embarrassment, desire, status, resentment, affection, and the strange social performances surrounding writers and readers.
Chapbooks and small-press work
Behrle’s publication history includes chapbooks such as Succubus Blues and It Serves Me Right to Suffer. His work has circulated through the small-press and independent-literary networks where short books, readings, collaborations, and informal publishing projects can develop alongside more conventional magazine publication.
National Poetry Month is a Joke in Your Town
In 2026 Behrle published National Poetry Month is a Joke in Your Town, a volume of new and selected poems. The title condenses one of the recurring energies of his work: poetry remains a serious lifelong practice while the institutions, ceremonies, ambitions, and reputations surrounding it become material for comic scrutiny.
Literary satire and criticism
Behrle has also written essays and commentary about the poetry world. His essay “24/7 Relentless Careerism,” published by the Poetry Foundation in 2010, turns professional ambition, literary status, prizes, networking, and self-promotion into a comic anatomy of poetic career culture. The essay’s satire belongs to the same larger practice as his poems and drawings: close attention to how literary communities behave in public.
Cartoons and digital literary culture
Drawing is another major strand of Behrle’s public work. His cartoons reduce literary arguments and personalities to quick visual premises, often using deliberately plain graphic forms to sharpen the joke. He has also experimented with online literary projects, including the Twitter-era magazine Baby Trotsky, extending his interest in how poetry adapts to changing media and social platforms.
Radio and performance
Behrle appears on WFMU as Jim the Poet, where broadcasting adds another form to his mixture of poetry, comedy, music, improvisation, and conversation. Radio makes the performative side of his literary persona audible: timing, interruption, voice, and spontaneous association become part of the work.
A poet inside literary culture
Behrle’s writing is especially alert to the fact that poetry exists inside communities of readers, editors, institutions, reputations, friendships, rivalries, and jokes. He turns that environment into subject matter while continuing to write from within it. The result is a distinctive American literary practice in which poetry, criticism, drawing, performance, and comic observation continually overlap.
Where to read Jim Behrle
The Poetry Foundation collects biographical context and Behrle’s writing, including his essays on literary culture. WFMU preserves broadcasts featuring Jim the Poet. Readers can continue with contemporary poets, modern poetry, and poetic forms.