Bal­tasar de Alcázar (1530−1606) is one of the few poets of his day who con­sis­tently allowed him­self to be funny. He is sometimes called the “gas­tro­nomic poet” because he often wrote about food and drink. Here is my trans­la­tion of his most famous poem, “Tres Cosas” (Three Things). The trans­la­tion was orig­i­nally pub­lished in the Rain­town Review and later reprinted in Per Contra. It is also my honor to present to you a second translation of the same poem, this one

There's a light verse form known as the double-dactyl, and strict adherence to the form requires that one of the lines consist of a single word that is a double dactyl. It can be quite a challenge to come up with a word to use in that line, so a list of qualifying words often comes in handy. I put together such a list and posted it on Medium to help out my fellow light versifiers, and it's been a steady traffic draw over the last couple of years. I recently heard from Kenn

I came across this nursery rhyme recently while reading the The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes to my son. It's a lot of fun to read out loud, with all those "dilly dilly dilly dilly" lines. For some reason, I had never read it before. Maybe it's the kind of nursery rhyme that many publishers leave out of modern collections because it's not quite warm and fuzzy enough, so most of the time my nursery rhyme diet had been limited to Mary and her lamb, and the darkest event

I came across this nursery rhyme recently while reading the The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes to my son. It's a lot of fun to read out loud, with all those "dilly dilly dilly dilly" lines. For some reason, I had never read it before. Maybe it's the kind of nursery rhyme that many publishers leave out of modern collections because it's not quite warm and fuzzy enough, so most of the time my nursery rhyme diet had been limited to Mary and her lamb, and the darkest event I

Here's a children's poem of mine that appeared in the online magazine, Bumbershoot, which was brilliantly edited by Kate Bernadette Benedict. The magazine no longer publishes new issues, but all the old issues remain online and are truly worth your while to visit. You can see this poem as published in Bumbershoot by clicking here, and then start clicking around to read lots of other wonderful poems for children and others. I’M IGSE­RI­OUS If “igno­ble” means “not noble,”

FUN If fun were not fun you can bet I for one would rather have no fun at all, for fun once begun till the moment it's done means that you should be having a ball. It simply won't do if the fun is not true or the fun is unfun and annoying. Understand? Let's review. It's not fun to pursue unfun fun that you are not enjoying.

It may strike you as strange, but it's true: when you breathe, you breathe out CO2, and so it may be that some plant or some tree made a leaf from what came out of you.