Happy Leap Day! This day only comes once every four years, so let’s make the most of it, in verse! I’ve blogged about my emailing pen pal Eric Jonas, especially how I’ve sent him limericks and poems about air guitar. On New Year’s Day ’16, Eric said, “Since this year is a leap year, we have an extra day to cram in even more emailing ….” This led to many emails on Leap Day! On February 29 that year, I sent him…
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Michael Croland
From Punk to Presidents: Incongruity
Posted on February 19, 2024After seven books, there’s a glaring incongruity in my oeuvre! How can someone who wrote three books about punk praise presidents? My new book, Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology, showcases presidents’ verse. I don’t offer uniformly positive depictions of presidents in the chapter introductions, criticizing Warren G. Harding’s adultery and the poor quality of James Madison’s selections. But for the most part, I offer sanitized overviews of presidents’ biographies, with a general audience in mind. Anthologizing presidents’ poems inherently…
John Quincy Adams’s “Hymn for the Twenty-Second of December”
Posted on December 22, 2023In Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology, published by Dover Publications last week, John Quincy Adams is the indisputable star, in terms of both quality and quantity—he penned about 350 poems, more than seven times as many extant poems as any other president. In a book collecting his poems shortly after his death in 1848, the publisher’s note boasted that Adams’s hymns were “among the finest devotional lyrics in our language.” One even bears today’s date, “Hymn for the Twenty-Second…
How Poems by Presidents Was Inspired by My Limerick and Acrostic Anthologies
Posted on December 13, 2023Today is the publication date for Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology. It’s my third poetry anthology to be published by Dover Publications in the last year and a half, and it was inspired by its predecessors: There Once Was a Limerick Anthology and Acrostic Poetry: The First-Ever Anthology! Whereas Poems by Presidents includes two limericks by Woodrow Wilson, There Once Was a Limerick Anthology includes one: I sat next to the Duchess at tea; It was just as I…
Negative Acrostics: “Curses of All Ages Will Attend Your Name”
Posted on September 20, 2023Acrostic Poetry: The First-Ever Anthology (published by Dover Publications last month) primarily features poems that portray subjects in a positive—often effusive—manner. That’s the primary association for this poetic form, dating back to 1599, when Sir John Davies penned 26 acrostics spelling out Queen Elizabeth I’s name. Acrostic Poetry includes only four acrostics that treat their subjects negatively, and they’re remarkable because they’re so against the grain. Highlights include a scathing selection by First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams and a poetic…
Acrostic Hybrids: Sonnets, Limericks, Haiku, and More!
Posted on August 16, 2023Acrostic Poetry: The First-Ever Anthology is out today, published by Dover Publications! The book includes several acrostic sonnets—some by Edgar Allan Poe and other renowned poets—and I considered devoting a chapter to them. Acrostic sonnets drive home the point that a poem can be both an acrostic and another form. The acrostic structure lends itself to hybridity. Here are examples of acrostic hybrids, including the acrostic sonnet, limerick, and haiku. I even created my own hybrid form: the acrostic clerihew!…
Acrostic Limericks: A Hybrid of Two Forms
Posted on April 21, 2023My most recent book, There Once Was a Limerick Anthology, was published by Dover Publications in August 2022, and my next book, Acrostic Poetry: The First-Ever Anthology, will be published by Dover in August 2023. There’s no better way to transition from one poetic form to another than by discussing a hybrid of the two: acrostic limericks! Madeleine Begun Kane, aka Mad Kane, has written myriad limericks for Mad Kane’s Humor Blog, which she founded in 2006, and runs a…
Tongue Twister Limericks
Posted on December 2, 2022One of my favorite chapters in There Once Was a Limerick Anthology is the tongue twisters! As I explained in the chapter introduction, “The limerick’s limited real estate, intrinsic rhyme scheme, and penchant for puns invite tongue twisters.” Here are a half-dozen selections. Two are by Carolyn Wells, who is tied with Edward Lear for the most limericks in the book. Her outstanding Book of American Limericks yielded many of the selections in my anthology. Also included is one of…
Limericks with Creative Misspellings
Posted on October 7, 2022Many limericks have creative misspellings, and in There Once Was a Limerick Anthology (which was published in August by Dover Publications), they appear together in one chapter. I’m usually a stickler for following spelling conventions, but these limericks delightfully break the rules and tickle my funny bone. As I explained in the chapter introduction, “The poets revel in the idiosyncrasies of spelling and pronunciation, showing tremendous love for the English language in order to butcher it so cleverly.” I continued,…
New Jewish Punk Memoir by Joe Trohman, Lead Guitarist of Fall Out Boy
Posted on October 2, 2022On September 12, I was interviewed by a University of Oxford student conducting ethnographic fieldwork on alternative Jewish music. I pointed out that even though Jewish punk has largely been on the back burner during the pandemic, there continue to be exciting developments since I published Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk in 2016. Case in point: Joe Trohman, the cofounder and lead guitarist of Fall Out Boy, was releasing a memoir, None of This Rocks, the next day!…