Making people laugh is a visible kind of response that I relish; it's harder to see other kinds of responses. I like to think that I can occasionally move a reader too, and I like the alternation of tonalities that moves the reader/audience from low to high—it's like the drunken porter scene in Macbeth.

My influences were my father, who had a lot of problems but could be very funny when he told local stories about Mr. Redmond, the nasty weenie man from Leaksville who claimed that the secret ingredient in his wonderful hot dogs was "filth." Or about Shug Church, who ate a brick on a bet. "What happened?" I asked. "He died," Daddy said. Etc. I am drawn to poets with a similar sense of the outrageous—that's why Leon Stokesbury is one of my favorites. Mr. Arnold would fault me for lack of high seriousness. Actually, I think he's a riot. "Dover Beach" has always struck me as one of the funniest poems in the language (as Mr. Hecht has also perceived).

In no particular order: Brother Dave Gardner, Woody Allen, John Updike (before his poetry turned serious), W. S. Gilbert, Cole Porter, Wendy Cope, Bruce Bennett, X. J. Kennedy, Dorothy Parker. I particularly like Cope because there seems to be some kind of strange prejudice against women poets being funny—hard to justify in an age with so many great female comics.

A lot of light verse has a short shelf-life and is quickly disposable. Sometimes I like the idea of writing a poem that I know will be incomprehensible in ten years. Or ten minutes.

I have written some poems that are clearly satirical, but I don't think of myself as primarily a satirist. Most of my humorous poetry is intended to explore something that's fundamentally dark.

As Donald O'Connor said, "Make 'em laugh make 'em laugh make 'em laugh."