asinine spotlight on:
Houghton Piker

He wears his wife's kimono and his own pajama bottoms when he opens the door. A cigarette holder rests in his mouth. ''Trying to break the habit,'' he explains. As you walk down a short hallway to the tune of his flip-flops, he adds that he is sweaty from an intense morning bout of foot wrestling. In his modest living room is a large, dramatic couch, an upright piano, a trendy array of candles, and a bowl of glass fruits and vegetables. The first thing he says when you sit down is ''Don't mention the glass fruits and veggies.''

I am used to seeing Houghton Piker at editorial meetings. He often sips at bourbon and wears his seersucker jacket — if not his pants. Today, a Sunday morning in February, I caught him in the morning, and he seemed sleepy and more than a little bored. He is gray at the temples, with a placid face that breaks easily into laughter.

As part of a new series of profiles of asinine poets, I am interviewing the asininepoetry.com founder in his natural environment — his elaborate home in Carroll Gardens. A private man, Piker has agreed to the interview as long as I do not mention his recently deceased hamster.—Richard Cairo

AP: Good morning, Mr. Piker. Are you ready to talk, to spill the beans?
HP: You're not going to ask about my hamster, are you?
AP: Your Alabanian hamster meant a lot to you?
HP: Siberian, and yes.
AP: I thought Georgian. Or Czech.
HP: What are you, Homeland Security? His accent was clearly Siberian. We'll move on now.
AP: Let's talk about the Web site. We can talk about the Web site, right?
HP: Of course, young man. And I'll get more lucid as my coffee does its work.
AP: Few people know that you founded the asinine poetry Web site in the late '90s.
HP: The fewer the better. Yes, the world was busy with dot-coms and President Clinton's getting hoovered, so I decided it was a perfect time for a literary endeavor. You see now why these pajamas are not silk.
AP: Did you come up with the concept of ''asinine poetry''?
HP: Well, I think many people have called their own poetry ''asinine'' over the years. I was one of the first to do it on purpose. But you bring up a good point. There has been asinine poetry for years. Ovid, Homer, Nipsey Russell. All the greats have produced asinine poetry. Even that Bill Shakespeare. Take a look at ''Sonnet XVIII.'' It's just an elaborate pun.
AP: Is that ''Shall I compare thee to a summer's day''?
HP: Yes, yes, it's so obvious. Ooh, there, the coffee's working.
AP: How did you get involved with the asinine poetry movement? Was it in a Greenwich Village coffee house, or at a poetry reading?
HP: To be quite honest, Phillip Lee and I were doing temp work to make ends meet at some corporation in midtown. We had six college degrees between us and odd, unformed careers. Lee had been a ballerina dancer for a while, and I had designed jet engines, but neither one of us could find a comfortable niche. One day, we were hovering by the copier, each waiting for the other to leave so we could make copies of our zines. Well, we both fessed up and soon became fast friends. He introduced me to the core asinine group at the time, he and Arthur Radley and Richie Narvaez and that Jackal fellow and He Who Shall Not Be Named. We spent hours watching bad movies and drinking beer and every once in a while one of us would recite a ditty he'd written on a cocktail napkin.
AP: That evolved into the popular asinine chapbook series that so captivated such important critics as Linus Pauling and Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
HP: Well, a chapbook is just another kind of zine, and a Web site is just a zine with moving parts.
AP: The Web site has been up for several years now. You put up about three to four new poems every week.
HP: To be fair, it's R. Narvaez who does the HTML whatsits to put the poems up. Catty Marlboro, Narvaez, and yourself, Mr. Cairo, approve all the incoming poems. Not just any poem is allowed on the site, despite notions to the contrary. We get quite a lot of submissions and we reject about two-thirds of them. My job is to overlook the whole McGoo. My contribution is more as a mentor and all-around sponge.
AP: Well, I was going to say, of the poems that go up, what percentage of them do you think are successful?
HP: By ''successful,'' you mean?
AP: I suppose I mean funny.
HP: Are they supposed to be funny? Do they seem funny to you?
AP: Actually, yes.
HP: How wonderful for you then. Honestly, to answer your question, I would say one out of every six poems is funny.
AP: Is that all?
HP: Scratch that. Does it sound nicer to say one out of three? My therapist says I should be nice this year. Last year he told me to be difficult. To get it out of my system, you understand? I suppose next year I shall have to be jovial.
AP: Just one out of three?
HP: Yes. That is not bad at all, you understand. Of course, we are aiming for two out of three, like Meatloaf.
AP: Wouldn't you want three out of three?
HP: That would be like wishing for wings or invisibility. But, I confess, we do harbor secret hopes.
AP: One more question. The picture of you on the site, of the clown …
HP: The first childhood toy I beheaded. It is near and dear to me. Now, if you'll excuse me. The coffee is definitely working. Time for you to go.