If your life is lacking laughs, or if you'd simply like to be enlightened with a little bit of comedy, there's a special poetry event in Lansing that's sure to activate all the funny bones in your body.
Tonight, the Creole Gallery, 1218 Turner St. in Lansing, will be hosting an evening filled with humorous fiction and prose titled "The Amusing Muse #10," which is aimed at splitting the sides of anyone and everyone in the community.
"It introduces people to poetry in a nonthreatening way," Dick Thomas, the event's coordinator and emcee, said. "It shows them that poetry readings aren't stiff formal things that people think they are."
Thomas said if people listen, learn and enjoy the event, it will help break down stereotypes that are often associated with poetry readings.
"People will hopefully overcome any kind of reluctance they have to come to a poetry reading and discover that poetry can be fun as well as very serious," he said.
The event will feature local authors Jay Featherstone, Leonora Smith, Maria Bruno, Anita Skeen, Robert Rentschler and Karrie Waarala.
Maria Bruno, who has read at the event in the past and will be reading from her novel "Duck and Cover" this year, said the evening will be filled with lots of humor and good cheer.
"It's a very enjoyable evening," Bruno said. "People see firsthand that poetry is an active, contemporary art form."
Leonora Smith, another author and also the associate professor for the MSU department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures, said poetry and stand-up comedy are two different types of comedy, even though the difference is slight.
"My poetry, and the work of the other readers, is not written only or even primarily to amuse," Smith said. "Poets generally write to engage with material, ideas or images about which they care deeply but in the same way that humor pops up in daily life - often when we least expect it - and the situation or the language in a poem sometimes takes an unexpected, ironic or oddly funny turn.
"As the saying goes, sometimes all you can do is laugh."
Ruelaine Stokes, a faculty member with the MSU English Language Center and the Old Town poetry series coordinator, said the poetry series is also an outlet for aspiring writers.
Stokes said the series includes an open-mic session to permit emerging writers to test out their work on stage.
The poetry event was created 10 years ago by Thomas, who has been a poet for nearly 40 years, when he found himself writing humorous poetry.
From then on, he figured if MSU had a poetry festival every year, it would be fun to create a program with comical prose, especially for people who were a little afraid of poetry readings.
Thomas then ventured out to find writers who would want to participate in the event.
"I got the notion to get different readers," Thomas said. "Most of them didn't do funny stuff normally, but I discovered that quite a few writers do have humorous prose and poetry."
Thomas said the writing community in the surrounding area is so large that he will never run out of people to choose to read.
"I get to know people because I'm part of the writing community here," Thomas said. "I ask them if they have funny poems, they say they have a few, then I ask them if they want to read aloud."
