Parody

Parody is the imitation of the style of someone else's work or another genre.  It relies on deliberate exaggeration to achieve comic or satirical effect.  Since it is helpful to be familiar with the original in order to appreciate the parody, so I usually footnote the original, for the sake of less-read readers, like myself.

I'm sure that you've seen a few ee cummings or T S Eliot parodies, and many of us have written a parody of Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Have you ever seen Wendy Cope's 'Waste Land Limericks' ? ^{See below.}  And her 'Strugnell's Haiku' ^{<--- a brief snippet of it} parodies many of our own failing attempts at traditional haiku via her invented wannabe, Jason Strugnell.

In 'The Passionate Pupil Declaring Love', a gentle parody by Andrew Fusek Peters on 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' by Christopher Marlowe, he takes the first line of the original, "Come live with me and be my love" (one of the best known in English poetry) and goes in a totally differend direction, as did John Donne more than a century earlier in The Bait

Here's Wendy Cage's parody of Whitman:

Waste Land Limericks
^{by Wendy Cope}

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II

She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!
III

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV

A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.

V

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.