Writing very bad poetry requires talent. It helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence. The 131 poems collected in this first-of-its-kind anthology are so glaringly awful that they embody a kind of genius. From Fred Emerson Brooks' "The Stuttering Lover" to Matthew Green's "The Spleen" to Georgia Bailey Parrington's misguided "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy", they mangle meter, run rampant over rhyme, and bludgeon us into insensibility with their grandiosity, anticlimax, and malapropism. Guaranteed to move even the most stoic reader to tears (of laughter), Very Bad Poetry is sure to become a favorite of the poetically inclined (and disinclined).

Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, Seriously Funny ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Tour said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of Seriously Funny hope its readers find much to share with others.

This wonderful anthology contains some of the nation's all-time favourite comic poetry. From much-loved classics such as Lewis Carroll's curious 'Jabberwocky' to lesser known and forgotten gems such as Gelett Burgess's 'The Purple Cow', Griff Rhys Jones takes us on a poetic tour of witty, nonsensical and plain laugh-out-loud funny poems. The selection brings together poets from every age and every walk of life, from Shakespeare to Victoria Wood and from Keats to Benjamin Zephaniah. There is Roald Dahl's cunning variation on 'Little Red Riding Hood', Spike Milligan's brilliantly ridiculous 'On the Ning Nang Nong' as well as several entries from the ever-elusive Anon, including one delightfully succint 'Peas'. Remembered, half-remembered, cherished or written on a tea towel, here are some of the nation's favourite comic poems.

This treasury of humorous poems brings together a sparkling constellation of witty poets–from Lord Rochester to Lewis Carroll, from Edward Lear to Ogden Nash, from Dorothy Parker to W. H. Auden–and embraces a wide range of forms, including limericks, clerihews, ballads, sonnets, and nonsense verse. Comic Poemsis studded with unforgettable classics, along with lesser-known comic gems from across the ages, from ancient Rome to modern America. Here is the immortal “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear” beside Noël Coward’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”; the incomparable “Jabberwocky” next to the famous “There was a young lady of Riga.” From Cole Porter and John Updike on love and marriage to Stevie Smith and Dorothy Parker on mortality to the ever-talented Anonymous on almost anything, the lighthearted poetry collected here ranges from the most delightful nonsense to the most sophisticated wit.

Beautiful mutants, vagabond scuba divers, lovers with disordered gorilla hearts: These poetry comics place the lyric and the grotesque, the elegant and the despondent, side by side in one emotionally intense panel after another. At the vanguard of a movement that embraces our increasingly visual culture and believes poetry has an essential place therein, Bianca Stone redefines how we think about poetry, what we expect from comics, and how we interpret our own lives. Although reminiscent of illuminations by William Blake, Thomas Phillips's A Humument, and more recent visual-poetic hybrids by Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey, Stone's comics feature a mixture of dreamy expression and absurdist wit that is entirely her own. Her watercolor panels are filled with anthropomorphic horses and baffled ballerinas that guide the reader through the poet's graphic dreamscape: "I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years... And where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand." This book, its own small universe, erases genre distinctions between the visual and the literary, and offers readers a poetic vision of artistic possibilities.

Comic poetry is serious stuff, combining incongruity, satire and psychological effects to provide us a brief victory over reason--which could help us save ourselves, if not the world. This book champions the literary movement of comic poetry in the U.S., providing an historical context and exploring the work of such writers as Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Billy Collins, Thomas Lux and Tony Hoagland. Their techniques reveal how they make us laugh while addressing important social concerns.