Poems can put FUN back in funny

Poems in literary journals occasionally reflect dark times or a dark mood with humor sharply drawn toward someone else. My humor sensors often take that as a put-down or sly form of word weaponry, but if dark humor appeals to you, examples abound on television or movie screens. There, you’ll also be likely to find an assortment of heightened drama with no comic relief whatsoever.

At its lightest, humor releases laughter like an unexpected intermission, interrupting high tension.

At best, humor stays good-natured, adding levity where none previously existed. If anyone gets targeted by light humor, the fun pokes at oneself – sort of like a cheery confessional.

Humor also increases the entertainment value of a story in these refreshing Ways:

Way to surprise by connecting this with that where no relationship or similarity seemed to exist

Way to connect with your readers

Way to overcome age barriers

Way to get a reader’s attention at any age

Way to help people remember more readily

Way to show off wit a bit :)

Way to keep it short and pointed with no jabs to anyone but oneself

Way to play around with words and alliterative sounds

Way to play with heavy, endline rhymes, preferably paired with words of 3 or more syllables

Way to bump up the beat with a lively, foot-stomping, howdy-partner-rhythm

Way to use clichés creatively with little change in sound but quick change artistry in meaning

Way to spice haiku with an amused insight, adding extra seasoning beyond the traditional references to one of the four seasons

Way to win nonpoetry-readers over to poetry as our former Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins and our former Children’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman have been doing.

After you have a chance to study the amusing and often insightful works of those prized poets, we can talk about ways toward humor as seen from a literary perspective. For now, here’s a light example of bouncy humorous verse on a topic Sandy Brooks, the director of the former Christian Writers Fellowship International, once asked me to write about – marketing!

As a close friend, Sandy knows how much I dislike to market, which admittedly made me take forever to put together a book of poems and also drag my feet from getting caught in the Internet marketing web. Maybe you’ve felt that way, too, but you might connect with this poem even more if you’ve ever signed someone’s copy of your new book in pen only to discover you’d misspelled the person’s name.


Book Promo From Lake Como
by Mary Harwell Sayler

I've twittered, linked, and booked my face
on social network pages.

I've mailed and emailed into space
and sought advice from sages.

I've written flyers, book jacket blurbs,
and releases set in tinsel.

So please buy my books at a roadside curb,
and I'll autograph in pencil.


© 2013, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved. Poem previously published in a 2009 issue of Cross & Quill newsletter for CWFI.

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The story behind the Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry

When I began instructing students of Joan Unger’s Personalized Study Program in the early 1980’s, we had no poetry home study course, but then, no one else did either. Joan and I decided to add one to the correspondence courses (yeah, by snail mail) she had written on fiction and nonfiction. So I wrote the PSP course in Poetry, which we also called the “V” (for “verse”) units.

Joan did the formatting and everything else – not only for PSP studies, but also for the Christian Writers Fellowship (CWFI) she had founded and directed. After she retired, I headed CWFI for a few years until turning it over to Sandy Brooks and the fiction and nonfiction courses to Marlene Bagnull with my blessings – and relief!

By then I had all sorts of writing projects but kept working, one on one, with poetry students until I needed help. Thanks to a former PSP student, very successful writer, and poet-peer Mona Hodgson, I got caught up and continued to tweak and use the PSP poetry home study course for years with poetry students.

With the advent of the Internet, however, online help became instantly available for poetry lovers and students with fewer and fewer interested in poetry courses by mail. I tweaked the course to aim toward a more secular audience and found a traditional publisher for the book version Poetry: Taking Its Course.

By the time I ran out of copies, e-books had made books readily accessible to people all over the world, so self-publishing on Kindle seemed like the way to go. First, however, I returned the text to its original emphasis on a Christian poet’s perspective then changed the name to the Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry.

You can find the new e-book on Amazon, but in case you don’t get a hand-held Kindle for Christmas, you’ll be glad to know you don’t have to have one. Just download the free Kindle viewer onto your computer, and you can order this and other e-books online.

As a poet who still prefers pencil and paper, I’m happy to say the e-book formatting process on Kindle was simple enough that, Lord willing, I’ll upload an easy-reader poetry dictionary soon. Meanwhile, if you find any errors on the Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry, please let me know. And, if you get anything helpful out of the book, let other people know in your review. Thanks and blessings.

(c) 2012, Mary Harwell Sayler