Tuesday Video: Kurt Schwitters

Primiti Too Taa from Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (Original Sonata) is an early example of sound poetry.

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Tuesday Video: Edward Gorey

A neat animation of The Tuning Fork by Edward Gorey, read by Dan Powell and produced by Sara Hasz.

Introduction to Poetry

INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


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Tuesday Video: Cookie Monster

Here are some Very Good Rhymes.

Why are limericks funny?

Limericks are a common poetic form, so common that many poets won't acknowledge them as poetry at all. Snobs.

The form of a limerick is a rhyming triplet divided by a rhyming couplet in the form a a b b a. The first second and third lines are three metrical feet and lines three and four are two metrical feet. A foot being three syllables, so 9, 9, 6, 6, and 9 syllables of which lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme and lines 2 and 3 rhyme.

Confused? Me too. Here's even more than you need to know about the construction of limericks.

Time for an example.

A certain young man, it was noted,
Went about in the heat thickly-coated;
He said, 'You may scoff,
But I shan't take it off;
Underneath I am horribly bloated.'

- Edward Gorey, The Listing Attic in Amphigorey

As with so many things, I can find no definitive origin for limericks. Nor can I find any real reason why they're almost always funny. Or trying to be funny.

Some sources suggest that they are indeed named for Limerick, Ireland, after what sounds like a cheap advertising slogan, "Come all the way up to Limerick?" Or by soldiers returning to same from France in the 1700s.

The bawdy nature of many limericks is blamed on sailors and bar patrons and people who like to rhyme "Nantucket".

The popularity of limericks as a classsroom exercise was begun by Edward Lear with the publication of A Book of Nonsense (1845). The form of his poems does not follow that of modern limericks with the final rhyme being one from the first two lines, often the place name.

There was an Old Person of Ewell,
Who chiefly subsisted on gruel;
But to make it more nice
He inserted some mice,
Which refreshed that Old Person of Ewell.

Limerick (poetry) at Wikipedia

Edward Lear Home Page