A Limerick Poem Rant

Today, we share with you a limerick poem rant. The stimulus for this set was "open mike" night at Molly's Virtual Pub. After listening to some dreadful free verse, lines which its author regurgitated onto the page with nary a thought to rhythm, cadence, or structure, lines never shaped by the thoughtful "rewrite" so dear to the poet, lines produced in mere minutes by an author who deems them too perfect for even a passing tweak, our Molly is moved to comment using a limerick poem verse form.

A limerick poem is one which has a very strict structure, and is the very antipodes of what is passed off for poetry by dabblers in free verse. To work within a limerick poem form requires discipline and attention to meter, rhythm, inflection, and rhyme. Here at the Pub, we have noted this appalling lack of workmanship once or twice before, as the spirit moved us, and today, we present a complete essay of our thoughts, one which, though short, expresses our wishes that the aspiring "free verse poet" do an apprenticeship in a more structure poetic form before pouring his brains upon a page.

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A Limerick Poem Rant

Words are meant for playing with
According to my lights
Each syllable should choose its place
In what the poet writes.

Feel within the bones the proper
cadence of the foot
The iamb or the dactyl lends
A structure to the root

.

There is no room for waste in poems
They must be spare and tight
And not one breath depart from form
- According to my light.

Relinquishing a metered pace.
- The “modern poet’s” curse.-
The dilettante abandons form
By dubbing it “free verse.”

The vomitus of sentiment
They spill upon the page
Is what the dilettantes produce
Without the measure’s gauge.

Before eschewing structure and
Abandoning the rhyme
Work within the framework
And respect the metered time.

Then, once you ken the structure of
A poem precisely terse
By all means, break with discipline
And dabble in “free verse.”

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Ah, our Molly feels much better now. We wonder, has she been, perhaps, too harsh?

Should you wish to rant as well, we invite you to try your hand at building a limerick poem yourself, and feel free to rewrite as much as you like - it's what writers do best.

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For those in the mood for another rant?

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