Light verse workshop and panel this May and June
 

Calling all you funny poets...

These events are filling fast, so if you'd like to attend one or both, I recommend signing up soon.

1-On May 26, as part of the five-day Poetry by the Sea conference in CT, XJ Kennedy, AM Juster, Nan Reiner, and I will speak (and maybe sing!) in a presentation on comic song lyrics.

2-June 8-11 at the West Chester University Poetry Conference in PA, I'm co-leading a 3-day workshop in light verse and parody. My partners in crime/rhyme: poet and light-verse maven Frank Osen and Pat Myers, who runs The Washington Post's irreverent weekly humor contest, the Style Invitational. (Like my fellow Light editors and me, Pat vets thousands of light-verse submissions a year. Unlike us, she gets to be called The Empress.) West Chester workshop description: What makes some poems and parodies funnier than others? Are the standards of craftsmanship different for light verse? Can contests help you get better at writing it? What the heck is “light verse,” anyway? We’ll seek answers to these questions and more, with help from poets living, dead, and (in the case of parodies) sometimes both. Topics to be explored include humor-friendly forms, rhyme and meter, subject matter, line and syntax, and types of poems that light-verse editors don’t care if they ever see again.