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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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

Tuesday Video: Allen Ginsberg

Here's a performance from 1995 of Allen Ginsberg reading "The Ballad of the Skeletons" while Paul McCartney noodles along on his guitar.

Zero and her Origin

Jeremy Bornstein's Zero and her Origin is a poem inspired by the cracking of the HD-DVD encryption key. (All you need to know for poetic purposes is that it's a sequence of 32 numbers and letters.)

Zero, the number said to be discovered
Nine times by ancient magicians, was
Found again by a mysterious order of
Nine modern alchemists, who built
One machine after another, until finally
One exploded with fascinating results.
(...)

Which just goes to show that poetry can be written about anything at all.

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Tuesday Video: Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski's "Dinosauria, We" from the biopic Bukowski: Born into This.

The poem was published in The Last Night of the Earth Poems in 1992.

Tuesday Video: Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman reading "Instructions" from his collection Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders.

The Plan is to blog a video each Tuesday of an author reading his or her own work. The Plan is to also get Neil Gaiman out of the way early on so we can discover other new (or old) poets that are currently hidden by the mighty short-story-lyric-script-poem-novel-comic-writing shadow of Gaiman.

So what do you think of "Instructions"? Do we really need a set of guidelines for fairy-tale lands? Don't we know all this intuitively? Personally, I think it could be funnier, but I think that of most things.