That's fine. You can say that and no one will criticize you. However: Keep out of the wet and don't go on the shout, For the sickness gets in as the liquor dies out, Crum-, crum-, crumples the soldier . . . I have had three "experts" tell me that the above is doggerel. We can agree to disagree. But absolutely no one is going to lambast you for assuming the majority position that Williams is a goddamn genius.When the cholera comes -- as it will past a doubt --
An' it crumples the young British soldier.
I've a always liked Ogden Nash poems: There is something about a martini Ere the dining and dancing begin And to tell you the truth It's not the vermouth I think that perhaps it's the gin I used to recite that, when I was a bartender, to my customers that ordered a martini. Tips increase when you you recite poetry. Pretty sure poetry snobs would turn their nose up at that one.
That's... a limerick. Limericks are held in such low regard that they'll teach you how to make them in 3rd grade but by fifth, when they ask for "poetry" they'll accept a fucking haiku (without paying any attention to the meter or kireji) but they'll refuse to accept a limerick. When I had to hand in poetry I'd do sonnets. Teachers were so impressed that I could handle ABBA ABBA CDE CDE that you could write straight fucking nonsense and they'd take it. Of course they'd take straight fucking nonsense as free verse too But not limericks
Limericks are wonderful. Because they're so easy and ubiquitous, a good limerick is actually high art.
We had some really wonderful sections on light verse in a few of my courses at the program. In particular, for our "80 works" course (a generative, fast-forward through the forms class) we were assigned several different forms of light verse, and the output was all regarded as seriously as for the other projects. Now, that's a grad workshop, not AP Lit in high school, which is where the stick first gets firmly planted, but I'm happy to report that quite a few academics, at least on the creative side, are taking light verse seriously enough to keep thinking about it after they stop laughing. I think the Clerihew was my favorite of the light verse forms, personally. Here's a fun one: There's no disputin' that Grigori Rasputin had more will to power than Schopenhauer. (by Dean W. Zimmerman)