Invalid characterset or character set not supported Limericks, why not





Limericks, why not
April 17, 2009

I seem inanely attracted to the things. It's the one form of writing that's almost impossible to take seriously. You can rattle off something and you're relatively pleased with it. There's a formula, you recognize the output for what it is, and if you're lucky you get a weird rhyme or a short story. Then you hope you can be succinct in other things.

And for me limericks help sort out dead wood in writing--I have a lot to get in, and a few words, so I better make it count. I'm sure I've written a lot of bad ones but I'm glad I take the time to. You can say you wrote something satisfactory, yet at the same time you're left feeling you really can and should do better.

They've been an invaluable catalyst over my increased writing-note production the last few months, and apparently I'm not the only one that enjoys them. The guy at xkcd established LimerickDB which has some shining examples of the genre. If looking for prime examples, I might sort by approval score, though. Some people use meter more conducive to helping you feel less worried about your own poetry. If you know what I mean...and I think you do.

Anyway, here's one I wrote today. It's outdated and shallow even by limerick standards, but so what. I did a lot of real writing after.

A hopeful young sports fan named Chubbs
Stood by his choice. "I like the Cubs."
They're uniform's neat
Their park can't be beat
So what if their players are scrubs?

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sashanan sashanan - April 17, 2009 (09:35 PM)
One of my favorite producers of limericks is the now departed John O'Mill (pseudonym for Jan van der Meulen). John O'Mill was originally an English teacher, and the kind of mistakes his students made (often directly transposing Dutch expressions on something sounded English-like) inspired him to write poetry - including limericks - based on those mistakes. As such it takes a grasp of both Dutch and English to appreciate the majority of his work, but I've always been a huge fan of it.

For limericks, I tend to like it when something out of the norm is done with them anyway. One of John O'Mill's fully Dutch limericks was a "crypto rhyme", where none of the lines actually rhymed, until you replaced the word at the end of lines 2-5 with a synonym that did.

And I've always enjoyed making up Nantucket limericks which turn out suspiciously innocent.

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