Preposterous Poetry: 53 Limericks to Brighten Your Day

What are the origins of Preposterous Poetry?

I am 46. Too young to be considered old, too old to really look, act, and feel young anymore. It’s an odd time in life. Where wisdom is slowly creeping in, but only so much as to be able to convincingly remind yourself at all times of your own ignorance, and how little you’ve accomplished in comparison to where you expected to be at this point.

But sometimes you need to step back. You need to reevaluate. You need to see where you have made inroads, where you need to move on from your dreams, or where you need to turn up the heat to get a step closer to where you want to be.

Those thoughts, in many ways, are the birth of my latest book: Preposterous Poetry: 53 Limericks to Brighten Your Day.

My North Star

I have a north star. I have a writing dream. I want to write a novel. It’s been my guiding light for many years now, yet there are two main things holding me back. The first is not possessing the right idea. I keep hoping that one day I will wake up to find myself in possession of the perfect story, and then the book will just start flowing from my fingers to the keyboard.

The other thing is a nagging feeling that I’m not ready yet.

This feeling keeps leading me to choose other, dare I say simpler endeavors. It has resulted in four non-fiction books. Four works that are born out of decades of contemplation about my life and what I’ve picked up along the way. Writing them was an intense and rewarding experience. However, it didn’t leave me nearly as fulfilled as I hoped it would.

And I still sat around knowing I had not yet written my novel.

But what’s in between? I obviously can’t just not write, and wait around hoping something pushes me over the top. Writing is a part of my soul. If I stop, it hurts.

And I don’t want to write a crappy novel, wildly unoriginal and dull.

The In Between

So I’ve contemplated in-between projects. Things to fulfill my need to write as I get closer all the time to tackling the big task. There’s a lot more to come, but this current project has scratched an itch for a little while.

And that’s how we got here.

Why did I write a book of poetry?

It makes no sense. I don’t even like poetry. I would love to appreciate poetry, but sadly my brain just doesn’t comprehend it. I can appreciate the sounds, but the words tend to mean nothing to me.

I know it’s not really a rule… but generally speaking, people who hate poetry don’t write books of poems.

The Mighty Limerick

But limericks are different. They’re quick. They’re easy. They’re simple to understand. And they’re often biting and witty and fun. I can’t handle a page of metaphors about clouds and flowers and candles. I’ll fall apart trying to grasp what any of it means. But a five-line quick burst of silly, mindless humor? That has my name written all over it!

So I came up with a plan for how I could write and compile a book of fun limericks… and just about nothing went as planned.

My ultimate vision was a family project. I’d write hundreds of limericks. Every day I would write a few more about whatever topic I could think of. I’d have fun with it. Just poke around at the silly things that go on in my mind. Hopefully make myself laugh a little bit.

The next hope was my many artistic family members would help me narrow the list from however many I wrote to a mere fifty or so of the best and funniest of the batch, and then would choose ones to illustrate.

But it turns out in the end… they couldn’t be less interested.

Preposterous Poetry: A Lonely Project

So Preposterous Poetry became a very lonely little project for me. But it’s OK. I work well by myself. I just sat and wrote hundreds of these little limericks, and then went through them all repeatedly until my favorite 53 were staring at me. These are hard processes for people. How do you create something and throw it in the trash? Yes, of course, it was more like picking the most delicious looking apples. No one ever leaves the grocery store feeling guilt for the ones they didn’t choose.

But they didn’t make those apples.

I left behind my creations. And that stings just a little bit. But I made it through the process, and after a lot of shockingly hard work, I had the outline of book #5.

But I still couldn’t figure out how I was going to illustrate fifty poems. First of all, that’s a whole lot of work. Second, it’s not exactly something I consider myself good at. Yes, I’ve dabbled in art during my few years on this crazy planet. But I’m good at what I’m good at… and not so good at the rest of things. And creating some hysterical drawings that anyone would actually want to look at is a bit beyond my bread and butter.

In walks Dall-E and the wonderful world of Artificial Intelligence.

Dall-E and I Worked Together

Like so many of us out there, I’m a bit of an AI skeptic. I know it’s producing miraculous things. And I’m also well aware that we’re left with two choices at the moment: Embrace the technology and emerge in the near future at the forefront of the movement, or ignore things for as long as possible, only to find yourself playing catchup when these skills are required of you.

Reluctantly, I choose the former.

Reluctantly, but also with excitement. Because when the task is done well, the results can be amazing.

No, Dall-E is by no means perfect (a review to come!). And it can be quite restrictive. But the results speak for themselves, and I’m very happy with most of the images created for Preposterous Poetry (and all of the ones in this blog post).

And here we are.

Preposterous Poetry is not a deep, moving, powerful book. Truth is, that’s hardly what most of us need right now. It’s silly. It’s fun. It’s lighthearted. The goal is to make you laugh. And smile.

If you do, the world is a better place. I’m here to bring the tiniest little light into a world overflowing with darkness.

Enjoy!