Senior year of college, we had to write sonnets for my poetry class. I read my sonnet and professor asked, “you don’t get meter, do you?”
I was a little embarrassed, but he was kind of right. I
was told it’s just instinctual, it’s how you speak, some of it is the exact rhythm
of a beating heart. Nonetheless, all the “da da da da da das” of people
sounding out the rhythm just blurred together for me.
Fast forward two years, I had to write a poem in meter
for my graduate school class this semester, and my stomach dropped. I had to
write a limerick, specifically. The class is called “Edward Gorey and
Nonsense”, so, appropriately, the way to write a limerick makes less sense to
me than pure nonsense poetry on the sense to nonsense scale.
While Dr. Thomas kept throwing out limericks through
Twitter like he was spitting out sunflower seeds, I was still stuck on starting
the first line.
Why is the hardest part of this class about nonsense
the one poem with strict rules and guidelines to follow?
First, what’s a limerick?
A limerick is an often humorous, short poem
popularized by Edward Lear. It is made up of five lines with a strict rhyme
scheme of AABBA. The third and fourth lines are often shorter than the other
three. Limericks are typically in anapestic meter, meaning it has two
unstressed syllables for every stressed syllable.
You may have heard of the phrase, “There once was as
man from Nantucket”. This is the opening line of many limericks (and jokes) and
is in anapestic meter.
The earliest published version of this popularized poem appeared
in 1902 in the Princeton
Tiger written by Prof.
Dayton Voorhees: (Life)
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
I was quite delighted by this poem with the playing of
rhymes and the song-like nature of the poem.
I quite enjoyed the rhymes especially, as I am sure is
the reason many people are drawn to limericks.
After lots of reading and watching videos, I hoped I
was ready. I was able to come up with two limericks for the assignment. Here’s
one:
There was once a girl
hailed from Ann Arbor
Who searched high and low
for just one harbor
She found the lakes and
rivers a plenty.
Boats and bones and
skulls fill up the jetty
As she throws one more,
this time a barber?
So I perhaps obviously styled this after the traditional limerick of
“there once was a man from…” I have heard “a man from Peru/Nantucket” poem/joke
many times when I was growing up, even in cartoons (I distinctly remember it
from a Spongebob episode).
I tried to put this poem in anapestic pentameter, and to what I understand,
I think I succeeded, but it sounds a little off.
I’m doing my best to try to understand meter, but I am still not quite
there yet.
Roethke’s Some Remarks on Rhythm commented on many limericks having
“the rhythms of children” (Roethke, 65), so I tried to make the poem sound
musical and playful, not just in the rhyming, but hopefully in a little bit of
the rhythm.
Since the class focuses partially on Edward Gorey, I flipped through some
of his works to get inspired. I love the dark nature of his works and really
wanted to capture that and the atmosphere of many contemporaries who draw
inspiration from him.
I was inspired by the River Styx from Greek mythology. I also was inspired
by the idea from Asimov and Ciardi’s Limericks – Too Gross: or Two Dozen
Dirty Dozen Stanzas of contrasting a rhythmic limerick to create darker or
raunchier ideas behind the poetry. The girl in the poem is going on a search
for a harbor, which seems all nice and fun, perhaps evoking a young girl having
fun in the summer, and then you learn she is getting rid of a body. To me that
seems a little bit Gorey (or gory-yes bad joke), and creepy as it sounds I kind
of like the storyline. I also did ten syllables per line (pentameter) of
possibly anapests.
Here’s the second limerick I wrote:
Let’s go to Kalamazoo, to
visit
The world’s largest shoe.
A child once quipped
It looks better from much
farther away.
It smells like some poo,
she said in quite disdain.
And all they can say is
“oh no, oh shit”.
I’m going to be honest. I have no idea what meter this
is in, if it is even in any meter. I don’t think it is, the first line
definitely is not. I again was struggling with meter, but I was playing a lot
with sounds and rhyming externally as well as internally. This poem is
obviously quite a bit goofier than the other poem which makes it fun to me. I
played with enjambment quite a bit in this poem and just with “storyline” I
guess in general. I also wanted it to be a bit more nonsensical even though I
didn’t quite achieve that to the point which I hoped.
I felt like for this one I was really channeling my
inner goofiness and laughing at poop jokes and with a touch of a nonsensical
storyline to follow.
I noticed a big part of my struggle in both of these
poems was starting, and trying to get over an anxiety I have of it being
“right” or good or “perfect” or not “stupid”.
Am I now suddenly skilled at limericks? Not really. But
honestly, the hardest part of writing these was starting. I obsessively worried
about being in meter, if it sounded stupid, if my lines were too short or too
long, and I was just self-conscious.
I can be a very self-conscious writer. I question myself;
I agonize over sentences or words until it all just sends me in a spiral.
Through it all though, the biggest barrier to writing
a limerick was myself. It got easier when I simply just wrote a limerick and
tried my best. I didn’t think about others reading it, or it being posted on
our class blog until I posted my submission for class.
We can sit and stare at blank pages for hours, but
when it all comes down to it, it’s all just words and what we make of them. I
hope to return to limericks in the future in the hopes of getting to understand
the genre more.
-SS
Citations:
Asimov, Isaac, and John Ciardi. Limericks: Too Gross.
W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.
Isham, Mrs. William B. Life, 1903,
books.google.com/books?id=p80aAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA274#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Roethke, Theodore. “Some Remarks on Rhythm.” Poetry, vol. 97, no. 1, 1960, pp. 63–74.
