Asinine Love Poetry
by
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Formats
Softcover
$10.00
Softcover
$10.00
Book Details
Language :
Publication Date :
2/15/2005
Format :
Softcover
Dimensions :
6x9
Page Count :
106
ISBN :
9781413481099
About the Book
Asinine Love Poetry
Edited by the Editors of asininepoetry.com
Love means having to buy something nice every once in a while
So, the wife wants you to be more romantic? You think, "Hey, poems are romantic, right? That's what Morty in accounting said. And he should know." But you can’t write a poem, not even if World Series tickets were at stake. And you can't find a poem you even half-understand. Say, buddy, try this (read it slowly):
Slug Head
by Dustin Michael
If all your hairs went limp and dull
And fell out of your head
And where your hairs before had been
There grew back slugs instead
I wouldn’t poke or point at you
Or say it’s all your fault
I wouldn’t paper bag your head
Or chase you down with salt
I’d let you leave your trails of slime
Upon my pillowcase
And wouldn’t say “Slug Head” behind your back
Or ever to your face
Sure, it’s odd. And kind of gross. But at the same time it is romantic, and it is a love poem. It’s just a different kind of love poem, the kind you can understand. Try that with “Sonnet XVI.”
Asinine Love Poetry features more than 70 poems love poems, including "Varying the Location," by Hal Sirowitz; "Video-Date-a-Kong" by William Trowbridge "Inez My Dental Technician," by R. Narvaez; "Cannibal Love Song," by Houghton Piker; and “Use This Poem to Pick Up Girls,” by Stephen Kunc. There are haikus, limericks, sonnets, ballads, and free verse—all about love, and all asinine.
Say, what do you mean by "asinine"?
Webster’s 10 defines “asinine” as “marked by inexcusable failure to exercise intelligence” and “of, relating to, or resembling an ass.” That is part of what the book means by “asinine.” Yes, there are incredibly senseless poems and stupid poems and bathroom-humor poems. In fact, Asinine Love Poetry may do for verse what Dumb & Dumber did for cinema. However, for the most part, “asinine” is an umbrella term that includes the silly, the bizarre, the saucy, the clever, the cranky, and the funny.
With exceptions such as the works of Stephen Dobyns, Billy Collins, and Hal Sirowitz (featured in Asinine Love Poetry), most contemporary poetry is chillingly humorless. As poet William Trowridge (also featured in Asinine Love Poetry) writes in his recent humorous poetry collection, The Complete Book of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press):
“Much of [contemporary poetry] is wonderful, sometimes brilliant . . . [and it] hasn’t shied away from colloquial wit . . . ; but it has, by and large, kept well clear of the pratfall and the belly laugh, which are among our most potent defenses against the insanity and brutality of contemporary life.”
Asinine Love Poetry does not shy away from the pratfall and the belly laugh, the fetish reference and the dirty joke, the darkest black humor or the most obvious one-liner. The poems in the book are not afraid to be funny. The humor and the edginess of the poems will draw in readers who might usually avoid poetry. Like you.
Spawned from what Web Site?
Thousands of Web users every month visit asininepoetry.com, the humorous online literary journal established in 2001. The award-winning site’s growing catalog of weirdly comic and oddball verse contains more than 800 poems written by established poets as well as talented amateurs. The site was chosen as Cool Site of the Day (2/19/03) and Cool Site of the Month (February 2003) by CoolSiteoftheDay.com (“the arbiter of taste on the Web,” according to the New York Times). The site has also been featured in Time Out New York, New York Metropolis, among many other publications. With Asinine Love Poetry, asininepoetry.com is now following the path of other humorous