We suspect the joke is in the very first panel, that the poet not only had a poem accepted but that he was paid for it, and paid in advance.  Hilarious!  From Judge's Library, 1895.

Insomnia turns us into ghosts.  From Poems by B. D., 1880.

"Are you fond of poetry?"  From Andy's Adventures on Noah's Ark by Douglas Zabriskie Doty, 1902.

From Strange Prayers for Strange Times.

Pine/rhyme.  If a near-rhyme falls in a pine forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make an assonance of itself?  Needles of Pine: Lines Without Rhyme by Charles Wellington Stone, 1886.

Typographical violets displace rivulets, and there's shining for shimmering.  A correction from Improvement Era, 1906.

From "How the Fight Started" in Grip, 1891.

"The Japanese poet" by Ethel Plummer for Cartoons Magazine, 1917.

Here's what a mermaid's curse feels like, in case you were wondering.  From A Legend of Mona by E. S. Craven, 1825.

An entire chapter of type symbols, from Judy, Or The London Serio-Comic Journal, 1869.

From the dark depths of the human soul.  From Jugend, 1896.

"Etc. etc."  From Unexplored Syria by Richard Francis Burton, 1872.

You've heard of a "murder" of crows, but what do you call a collection of unfinished poems?  An "outrage."  The caption reads, "He hit the unfinished poems on the table a blow with his fist."  From Pearson's, 1898.  For some rather extraordinary tips of instantly transforming any piece of literature, see Machinarium Verbosus: A Curiosity Cabinet of Gadgets To Transform Any Book & Reader, To Be Sure.

"One of their poets."  From This Simian World by Clarence Day, 1920.

You've seen Johan Deckmann's Smart Ways to Use Poetry in a Street Fight.  Though only the book's cover has survived, we speculated that (if the physicists are right about multiple universes) there's some world in which the book's pages exist.  Through the powers of several arcane tools at our disposal, we were able to purloin five fragments.  We present them here, exclusively.  The first is an advertisement from the book's front matter, for a Lord Byron-branded boxing glove "used in every important poetic convention."  (The ad notes that "unprotected figures" are "protected by hyperbole.")  The second fragment instructs on how to deal with "a cowardly poet of society" by throwing him on his face.  The third recommends grabbing the "pencil-hand" and using an enjambment to incapacitate any "poetaster" who has whipped out a synecdoche.  The fourth involves using a powerful blank verse to leave someone curled in a ball, or an epigram to slash a bone in two.  The final fragment addresses how difficult it is for an idle rhymer to train and offers a tip for the writing desk.  (The book was, of course, second-hand, and the red markings on the pages are as we found them.)