Teaching Poetry Writing

Teaching Poetry Writing

From time to time while teaching poetry writing, Kathleen feels the urge to climb upon her soapbox and extol the wonders of limerick poetry. Today is such a day. Let us hope she does not get a nosebleed from the rarefied air of high culture. It is rare that she is so serious. Shall we listen?

Limerick Pedagogy

A cursory examination of definitions for meter (or, as they say across The Pond, "metre") on the Internet reveals a great deal of variation in how poems are dissected; there is wiggle room. These samples demonstrate how they sound in my ear when I write them. Here is an easy one:

You remember I taught you to ride,
That pretty pink bike? I'll confide
I'll miss those sweet days
That memory stays
In my heart, my sweet daughter, my pride.

Sounds like:

Line one is perfect, straightforward anapest (Da Da DUH) with iamb in the first foot of lines two and three (sounds like Da DUH) variation for "That pret" and again, in line four "That mem" but "standard" is so boring, is it not?

Should you limit yourself to the mammal,
Get a big one and let the thing trammel
Through field, flower-bed
When your neighbor sees red
You'll be walking a mile for your camel.

Sounds like:

The vertical lines indicate the end of a "foot" which simply means the number of syllables in a unit. The "a" in brackets is "understood" It doesn't actually appear in the limerick. Each of these feet is in anapest and sounds like: Da Da DUH Note that lines 1, 2, and 5 have what I call a "remainder." These are unstressed and are often referred to as "feminine" rhymes to contrast them to "masculine." This is best illustrated by example:

Little John would pout
If deprived of stout

"Stout" and "Pout" are "masculine" rhymes with the stress on the final (and only) syllable.

Compare to:

We go willy-nilly
To see silly-Billy

"Willy-nilly" and "silly-Billy" are feminine rhymes with the stress on the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable.

Our American Cousin was quite
Well underway at Ford that night
Booth had bad reaction
To Lincoln's planned action
To let the blacks vote as their right.

Sounds like:

Lines 2, 3, 4, and 5, first foot, are iambs which sound like: "Da DUH." All the rest are anapest.

I'm bored out of my gourd, and it's nice
That my mother just gave me the price
To take in a movie
With you, one that's "groovy"
What's that mean? Still, a flick's good advice.

Sounds like:

In line 5, I took the liberty of shifting the emphasis to the word "that" by bolding it in the original. This effectively breaks the rhythm, requiring a full stop which emphasizes the question asked. The anapest then picks up again with the word "still." I call taking such liberties with the limerick form a "tweak." However, this is NOT the only way the meter could be parsed. For example:

To | take in a | movie With | you, one that's | "groovy"

In which the "to" is unstressed and the first full foot in this line is the "molosses" DUH DUH DUH. The second foot "movie with" is a "tribrach" Da Da Da. The third foot is molossus again and the last foot is also a tribrach though some might argue that it is a dibrach.

By now I have written about 600 limericks between those in the two books ( Literati Limericks , and contributions to A Pocketbook of Limericks), and this website, Here-Be-Limerick-Poems.com, and after a while, the urge to do more "wordplay," and to expand technique strikes (a common poets' affliction--see e.e.cummings' grasshopper). One such technique is the device of "enjambment," which is contrasted with "end-stopping." It is pleasing to throw one in from time to time, like this:

You're adult now, and want to have fun.
(this line demonstrates an "end-stop"
The years have flown by, twenty-one
(this line "runs over" deliberately into the next one)
Is a milestone, but note
That your judgment's inchoate,
Remember you're still underdone.

Notice that between lines 2 and 3, the reader is practically forced to take in the next full phrase, such that the line is read as "twenty-one is a milestone" which is to say, it flows over to the next line seamlessly. How cool is that?

Or, again, in this excerpt about enjambment from Literati Limericks:

And if it won't fit there's enjambment.
A perfectly proper ornament.
A line can spill over
A word that's leftover
From previous lines as an accent.

*Note, just for fun, I bent the pronunciation of the word, "or na ment." This must be done sparingly, of course, but from time to time, like Byron's "hen-pecked-you-all" one simply must.

The very best limericks read like a plain, simple prose sentence, as I have previously commented:

The meter of limerick poem
Hearkens back to the Zen of a koan.
If it's good, then your pittance
Will read like a sentence-
Concise, but with wit overtone.

More enjambment:

Madrigals were a secular kind
of singing. The Renaissance mind
adored it. The flow
for the word "smile," "riso,"
sped the music up just to remind ["you" understood].

If you are teaching poetry writing and looking for a good text resource consider Literati Limericks. Also, please note that we are planning a limerick contest to take place sometime in 2008 for insouciant limericists, ones that will not make our mithers blush. Check back periodically for details at Here-Be-Limerick-Poems.com and feel free to contact us if you are teaching poetry writing with your comments.

Please do not forget to attribute to Jeannette Ramirez as author unless otherwise noted. Webmasters, thank you for linking. For the poem count at Here Be Limerick Poems visit our home page.