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comment by kleinbl00

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





thenewgreen  ·  2478 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Limericks are wonderful. Because they're so easy and ubiquitous, a good limerick is actually high art.

kleinbl00  ·  2478 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I agree.

But neither of us teach English.

cW  ·  2470 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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)