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Please, Lord, Make Me a Famous Poet or at Least Less Fat

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Next time you want entertainment, forget the movies and TV. Get thee to a bookstore or Amazon. Skip past the so-called humor books, and go directly to the...gasp...poetry section. Don't be afraid. You may have a difficult time finding it, but once there, the name Dean Blehert will be prominently displayed on the bindings of several unique and hilarious books. Pick any one(s) you want, but be certain to include his latest in your trove. "Please, Lord,et.al." is not only a poet's primer, but very tasty brain candy for those who simply like to laugh. But please have a care: Blehert's books can be addicting, with no known antidote! Consider yourself warned!!!

If you've been out of school for a while you might be a little rusty on all the literary references that populate this book. Chock full o' parodies, Dean Blehert has more than a way with words -- he has a way with other people's words.

An entire chapter of Please Lord is devoted to how famous poets -- living and dead -- would write "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." These writers include Sylvia Plath, Lyn Lifshin, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Blake.

Tongue-in-cheek, the book intersperses Blehert's own poetry with instructive "how-to" advice-poems on such topics as "how poetry is done" and "How To Be A Prestigious Mainstream Twentieth-Century Academic Poet." For example, in the chapter on the first subject, Blehert writes:

You can make any sentence poetical
by mentioning blood or bone.
For example, instead of "Yesterday
I went to the store," say "Yesterday
I went to the blood and bone store."
Instead of "The moon rose," say
"The blood moon rose" or "A bone
of moon rose" or, best, "A bone
of blood moon rose."

There is so much in this book, it will take many many readings to catch just half of its humor. Brush up on your "dead white male" poets if you want to get the rest of it.

Fireworks, Roman candles, fizzgigs...they're always going off in Dean Blehert's mind, all the time. When you pick up a copy of Please, Lord, Make Me a Famous Poet or At Least Less Fat, you get 402 pages of peerless wit and erudition. Blehert knows just about everything there is to know about poetry in the English language, and nearly all of his knowledge is displayed in this book, in his characteristic melange of parody, punning and reasoned discourse. Some people may dismiss Blehert as a show-off, or as merely clever. But most, I think, will respond to his expansive good humor, and to the book's undercurrent of serious, even moral, commentary on what poetry should be and do.

Picked up "Please, Lord..." and am reading fervently. I think I'm learning more about literature by laughing at it than I did in those vacuuous, slumber-inducing lectures in college. So I am appreciative of the fresh look at this thing called poetry which ranks up there with ice cream in my list of favorite things in the world.

Having encountered Mr. Blehert's writings serveral times past in smaller scale situations, I was not sure what to expect from this extensive and even "Fat" compendium of his labors. So I looked inside....THEN I started laughing. Still laughing, I read more....and more..... and then I began to be REALLY impressed. Mr. Blehert has done ALL his homework, and even iinvented lots of extra-credit assignments. A Doctorate of Letters ultimately inevitable, once a few scholastics with a combination of humor and intelligence get to know this most Wonderfully and Creatively written thesis on "Everything you wanted to know about Poetry...... I hope that it becomes a standard text, a sort of very intelligent sweet and sour sauce to go with a survey of historical poetry, a masterful display of chameleon Style facility. Read it and laugh! Read it and be impressed! Buy it and Read it.

Somewhere inside America's suburban landscape lies the most influential literary salon in the country. It might just be at the Barnes & Noble superstore in Reston. . . .[Blehert] renders the poetry consumable -- and the modern-day salon crowd loves it.

Students will find this an excellent introduction to poetry: witty yet including practical observations on poetic form and intention which may aid in a later appreciation of the medium.

Skillful, irreverent and long-overdue recasting of the poetic product. Blehert is for wordsmiths who like having fun. Like Willard Espy, this former Cornell professor of English likes to dust off the stodgy stuff now and then and play. Play, hell. He parties! His satire and parody ex-plode like popcorn, and the wit involved makes the cerebrum smile.