How doth the little busy bee...

Pretty good, considering the busyness. That's not quite a nonsense poem, but I borrowed it from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which along with Through the Looking Glass is full of nonsense poetry. When I was little they were my absolute favorite parts of the books. Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson, your preference) also wrote a bunch of poetry where you have to solve math problems to understand them, and a long poem called The Hunting of the Snark, which is odd and lovely at the same time. I still love nonsense poems and silly poems. More than I like serious poetry, really. This did not help me while I was trying for an English degree. On the other hand it has helped enormously when kids come in to the library asking for poems to do class projects. Shel Silverstein's books are always good (although The Giving Tree makes me sad, and he wrote some stuff for grown ups in Playboy which I think was recently released as a book), I especially liked the one about the little girl who wanted a pony and died when she didn't get it. I memorized that one as a kid and recited it to my parents when I wanted something.  Edward Lear is nice, and was my first introduction to limerick rhythms when I was little.














While most of the nonsense and silly poetry I like was written for children (largely because I spent more time reading poetry as a child I suspect) there are quite a few funny and clever poets I've read that write primarily for adults. Dorothy Parker's poetry tends to be funny, for example, although it's more mixed. I also enjoy Edgar Allan Poe (funny may be overstating this, but certainly fun) although not The Bells. Since, as much as I enjoy the word tintinnabulation, I tend to get annoyed by the repetition when reading it aloud.I'm not quite sure why I group Poe in with the silly poems, possibly it's the rhymes, talking birds, and numerous parodies.  I group The Canterbury Tales in with poetry I like (really good web page too, fyi), and they tend to be funny, although not always. I also really like Robert Burns, partly in the same way as I like ballads in general, and partly because I love dialects. I have big chunks of poetry that I've got memorized because I enjoy it, which includes most of these poets.
The only poem that's perpetually stuck in my memory that I wish weren't there is Robert Frost's Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same, which I had to do for an English class. I'm not a fan of Robert Frost really, although apparently almost everyone I know has been forced to memorize at least one of his poems (I can also do chunks of The Road Not Taken and Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, but other people I know are stuck with the whole things so could be worse I suppose). I really don't know why I dislike his poetry so much, but they always make me feel cranky when I have to do anything with them, so I won't.
I'm leaving out quite a few poems and poets here, so there may be another poetry post in the future.