My only New Year’s resolution is to write more poetry. Real poetry, with meter and rhyme and structure. Not that bullshit free verse poetry. I will experiment with various poetic forms. I want to do sonnet, haiku, ghazal, sestina. I want to be well-versed in this most useless of arts.
I was inspired by an article called “Poetry Stand” in The American Scholar, in which the author discusses how he lead a group of teenaged poets to set up a poetry stand (“like a country lemonade stand, except that people would be coming for poems.”) This required the students to learn all sorts of poetic forms to prepare for the types of poems that they might be asked to write. Lo and behold, one man asked for a villanelle about monkeys (“It seemed to me he was trying to stump them by requesting an intricate and difficult form on an inconsequential topic”) and the teenaged poet instantly obliged. This humbled and inspired me.
I’m starting off with an easy one: Limericks. Wikipedia defines a limerick as “a five-line poem with a strict form. Limericks are frequently witty or humorous, and sometimes obscene with humorous intent. A limerick has five lines, with three metrical feet in the first, second and fifth lines and two metrical feet in the third and fourth lines. The rhyme scheme is usually AABBA.” So here is my limerick.
There is a nice young man from France
Who enjoys wine, football, and dance.
And if you say please,
He’ll put down the cheese,
And oblige to take off his pants.
