Egad--I love that the titles rhyme, and indeed do make a poem or what could be one, but. Oh mercy, what doom and gloom! I'll see if I can find anything on him...

Edit: Google gives a lot of sites! Here's a quote from one of them:
And at the time he was working in a genre all of his own, the field saw him as one of us, so much so that he was nominated for the Hugo Award four times, for the Nebula Award seven times and for the Philip K. Dick Award as well. He received the Hugo Award in 1973 for his short story "Eurema's Dam," and later on, when he was no longer writing, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990. During the end of his life, small press publishers championed him, and for that we must all be grateful.

He never wrote on anything but a manual typewriter, and he never learned to drive, but still, he drove us to see new visions of science fiction and fantasy. Speaking of his own work, he said that the life of a writer was like "dropping rose petals down the Grand Canyon and listening for the landing."

And a "devotional" site:
Reading a Lafferty story is a full body experience. After a few sentences your brain goes into hyperactivity, your belly is aching from laughter and you might need to reach for the aspirin jar soon, because like all good drugs his stories tend to leave you with a headache.

I'll have to look up his works next time I'm at the library--apparently they're not all gloom and doom. Thanks!