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Useful Resources : Websites for Poets and Writers : Poetry and Humor
asinine poetry
Online journal of humorous poetry features periodic themed contests. Past winners include such treats as "Pottage Canticles 1 and 2" and "Our Love Is Electric (And I'm Yanking the Cord)".
| | Bad Poetry Index
To achieve memorable badness is not so easy. It has to be done innocently, by a poet unaware of his or her defects. The right combination of lofty ambition, humorless self-confidence, and crass incompetence is rare and precious.... For the student, having a genuine insight into the true badness of some poems is, I think, a necessary corollary of having a grasp of what makes good poems good. So these pages present some classics of badness: supreme achievements of the lame, the naive, the meretricious, the bathetic, and the sentimental."
| | Darwinian Poetry
A pet project of David Rea that sometimes attracts enough attention to overwhelm his server. Starting from 1,000 randomly generated groups of words, people vote on their favorites. The favored 'poems' grow and evolve. Curiously addictive. According to an article in New Scientist, over 16,000 votes have been logged to date.
| | Fun With Words
Anagrams, palindromes, rhyming slang, nym words, oxymorons, pangrams, Tom Swifties and all the many other oddities of the English language. Don't miss the stirring tale of Beeping Sleauty.
| | Happy Tales Literary Contest Winners
Fine parodies that provide alternate happy endings to
great literary tragedies. Annual free contest is
sponsored by the Montana Festival of the Book
(deadline September 1).
| | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Poet
Destined to become a classic among T.S. Eliot parodies.
| | Harryette Mullen Raps with the Bard
You've probably heard "My Mistress' Eyes Are
Nothing Like the Sun" by Mr. Shakespeare. Now
hear from Ms. Mullen... My honeybunch's peepers
are nothing like neon. Today's spe-/cial at Red
Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid paper
is/white, her racks are institutional beige....
| | Holy Tango of Literature
Francis Heaney's brilliant poetic parodies with a twist: the subject of the poem is an anagram of the famous writer's name. Hence T.S. Eliot opines on "Toilets" ("Let us go then, to the john..."), Coleridge's ancient mariner goes on an acid trip in "Multicolored Argyle Sea", Blake lauds Fred Flintstone's wife in "Likeable Wilma", and Ogden Nash wonders why his chickens aren't breeding in "Hen Gonads".
| | Idiots' Books
Idiots' Books is a Maryland-based indie press that publishes offbeat, satirical illustrated books featuring the work of writer Matthew Swanson and illustrator Robbi Behr. Books are distributed through a subscription service. Titles include 'Dawn of the Fats', billed as "the oft-neglected examination of that special place where funnel cakes and zombiism collide"; 'Ten Thousand Stories', a book whose split pages can be recombined into 10,000 absurd but still grammatical narratives; and 'After Everafter', which gives ten classic fairy tales the same (mis)treatment.
| | Le Jaseroque
Frank L. Warrin's translation of "Jabberwocky" into French weds nonsense to high culture. "Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux/Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave." Whatever it means, it sounds very important in the language of Racine and Moliere.
| | Light Quarterly
Pleasant and witty, "a quarterly of light and occasional verse, squibs, satire, puns, and word-play." Free excerpts online.
| | Lighten Up Online
British quarterly webzine of light verse. Previously
published poems accepted. Enter by email.
| | LiveJournal: Shakespeare's Sonnets as Haiku
Hilarious "executive summaries" of the Bard's first 20 sonnets, which show that he was obsessed with procreation.
| | Lyttle Lytton Contest
This website collects and publishes the worst first sentences of imaginary novels (and some equally bad quotes from real ones).
| | Marie Osmond Performs Dadaist Poetry
In this charming and peculiar video clip, rediscovered at the Lambda Literary website, television personality Marie Osmond reenacts the origins of Dadaism with Hugo Ball's "sound poem".
| | MC Nuts: William Wordsworth Rap
This YouTube video reinterprets the 19th-century poet's famous "Daffodils" as a hip-hop performance.
| | McGonagall Online
A treasury of the works of William Topaz McGonagall, "widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language." A 19th century native of Dundee, McGonagall is famous for The Tay Bridge Disaster, "Which will be remember'd for a very long time."
| | McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Sestinas
Luscious witty sestinas on topics great and small. "Anna Karenina (Or Like, Most of It)" is not to be missed. Submissions are accepted, if
they're sestinas (definition and examples).
| | Nod to the Low Art of Spam Poetry
Media Life magazine marvels at how art sprouts from the weed-choked wasteland of our inbox. Turning spam into verse, bloggers Kristin
Thomas and Paulette and Lilia Adell massage a messy medium.
| | Nonsense Lit
Portal devoted to nonsense literature includes links to classic humor from Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Punch magazine, as well as contemporary work.
| | Ogden Nash (1902-1974)
Master of American light verse. "How are we to survive?" asks Nash. "Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolousness. I think our best chance - a good chance - lies in humor, which, in this case, means a wry acceptance of our predicament." Bio: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=690. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/07/cohen-g.htm. Large collection of poems: http://www.westegg.com/nash/. Poems by topic: http://www.aenet.org/poems/ognash2.htm. On bugs and animals: http://www.veeceet.com/kids/nash.html. Teacher Resource File: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/nash.htm. Audio interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/nasho1.shtml
| | On Publishing: A Rhapsody
Brian Lalor's satirical poem on the travails of hapless writers won the 2004 Swift Satire Competition. The biennial prize honors Jonathan Swift, author of 'Gulliver's Travels'.
| | Random Poem Generator
The algorithm on this website will create haiku or rhyming quatrains from the text of any webpage. Not all of them are grammatical, but a found-poem can be assembled out of the best attempts.
| | RinkWorks Fun with Words
Explore the freakatorium that is the English language. Contronyms are words that are their own antonyms. To cleave, for example, can mean to separate or to adhere. Insinuate bizarre new additions into your vocabulary. A hoyden, you'll learn, will seldom infucate. Then there are the conflicting proverbs. We also love Crazy Libs, another site by the same person. Together we amended the constitution as follows: We the waffles of the United States, in order to grope a more mushy filing cabinet,/wallop insanity, nuzzle conniving hunger, yell for the silky lust, bonk the greasy charisma, and ridicule the blessings of arrogance to ourselves and our frigidity,/do smack and defenestrate this wig for the United States of America.
| | SatireWire's Annual Poetry Spam
Contestants compose poems from fragments of spam emails. Don't miss Enlarge Your Boss and I Answered All My Spam.
| | Shel Silverstein
Official site featuring the work of this acclaimed author of humor poetry for children. Includes fun activities for kids, and lesson plans for teaching his poetry in the classroom.
| | Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)
Prolific author of children's verse, cartoonist for Playboy, author of nearly 800 songs. Short bio and the poem "Sick": http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=105. Selected song lyrics, including "A Boy Named Sue": http://www.nassio.com/silverstein/ps.html. Books for children: http://www.nassio.com/silverstein/bookindex.html. Audio samples from his last album, Underwater Land: http://www.underwaterland.com/listen.htm. Teacher Resource File: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/silverstein.htm
| | Spam Header Poetry by David Gordon
Juxtaposed subject headers from junk emails (misspellings and all) produces haiku-like gems such as:
"How would you like to be called Reverend?!
STOP SNORING IN YOUR HOUSE IMMEDIATELY".
If you're "tired of nude celebirty's" or have ever wondered if "interest rats" were going up, this site is for you.
| | The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
We are straying from poetry here, but it's worth it. This contest asks entrants to compose the opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels. Named for Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, originator of Snoopy's favorite opening line, 'It was a dark and stormy night.' Entry is free. The winner receives notoriety. Read the Lyttony of Grand Prize Winners.
| | The Emily Chesley Reading Circle
Where a number of odd ducks gather to celebrate the work of Emily Chesley, Dr. Maximilian Tundra and their Victorian familiars. Don't miss their annual contest of speculative poetry and short fiction.
| | The Family Poet
Hundreds of family-friendly humorous rhyming poems, written and illustrated by R. Wayne Edwards.
| | The Flarf Files
"Flarf" is a collaborative poetic technique that creates nonsensical poems from the results of odd Google keyword searches, Internet chat-room lingo, and the "corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness" of the amateur poetry that is popular in online forums. Begun as a spoof of Poetry.com's low standards, the Flarf "movement" also satirizes how so-called "mainstream" poetry is actually produced by and for an irrelevant elite class, while the poetry that most people read is the (generally bad) amateur poetry circulated between individuals and posted on the Internet. For more on the latter point, see the related website http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com/.
| | The Godawful Sonnet Generator
Award-winning poet F.J. Bergmann created this random sonnet generator by writing a dozen cliche-ridden sonnets with the same end-rhymes, which the computer program reshuffles to produce over 15 billion unique, dreadful poems. Submit one to your favorite vanity contest today!
| | The Poetry of Politics
The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld - The unknown unknowns
| | Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest Winners
This contest sponsored by Winning Writers pokes fun at the low standards of vanity poetry contests by awarding prizes for poems so bad they're good. From the off-color to the merely off-the-wall, these poems will give you a good laugh while also instructing you in how well-intentioned serious work can go awry. Squeamish folks beware.
| | Word Chowder
We especially like the parodies page of this site for light verse. If you have a pedestrian name, Word Chowder will help you find your "poet name." Men, click here. Women, click here.
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