[Orwn Acra]

I've only LOL'd at a Gavin Ewart poem. It took me by surprise and it's so true:

For Translation into Latin

The sailors love the beautiful girls.

The wise poets love the sailors.

The girls often love the sailors.

The bad poets love the beautiful girls.

The bad girls love the farmers.

All the poets hate the farmers.

The bad girls hate the good girls.

The good girls love all the sailors.

The bad girls love the bad girls.

The farmers hate all the poets.

The good girls love the bad poets.

The bad poets hate the good poets.


Of course, the whole thing isn't funny. I only laughed at the idea behind it and those who haven't been forced to take Latin wouldn't understand.

I tend to find the most idiosyncratic things funny. By George Starbuck:

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are no rhymes)”, pt. II

I liked that when I wrote it. By the time I got to bilge,
It even had a moral. All of that! And out of bilge!
It made me so blamed proud I bought some i-beams from the store
And welded me a Sculpture to bestride my study door:
A five-piece ten-foot Sculpture spelling out forevermore
B-I-L-G-E BILGE, to match the Late-Pop-Art décor.

I stood back to admire the thing. I beamed, but not before
I started to detect a tapping at my study door –
A featheriest tapping, tapping at my study door.

Imagine my surprise. It was John Hollander. He wore
The quizzical expression of the vanquished, but he bore
No malice. Quite the contrary. He said, “What perfect bilge!
Something of yours?”
Something of yours?”“You know,” he said, “it’s curious but bilge
Once struck me as unrhymable. A lead-pipe cinch like bilge.”

“You killjoy!” I exploded. I snatched up* the B in BILGE
And went for him. He countered with a well-aimed I from ILGE,
But his next words were his last words: “No don’t! I’m not a killj—”

*Literalists may question this. Not even a Mad Turk
Could “snatch” four hundred pounds of monumental ironwork.
Snatch is poetic license. It was more a clean-and-jerk.

I can't remember if I laughed out loud but it always makes me chuckle because the poem is SO absurd. Just completely ridiculous.