The expression of poetry in shorthand form has always managed to garner a measure of popularity with the general reading public – especially in comic vein and done well. The shortness of the poetic form makes its more accessible when you line it up against the more self-consciously serious stuff…formal, academic poetry with its proclivity towards the denser, often seemingly impenetrable forms of expression. Variety is the watch-word with informal poetic forms, be it the contemporary verse of ‘Shrink Lit’ and modern haiku poems, or the older verse genres such as the epigram, the limerick, nonsense verse and the clerihew.
The essence of the poetic epigram was aptly captured by (Samuel Taylor) Coleridge, “a dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul”.
Example:
“Little strokes / Fell great oaks”
(Benjamin Franklin)
The limerick’s Irish genesis can be traced back to the 18th century and the Maigue Poets of County Limerick. Structurally, the limerick uses a stanza of five lines with a strict rhyme scheme of AA-BB-A. It embodies the spirit of nonsense verse and the modern variant sometimes tends to use obscene themes for humorous intent. Limericks have also been a vehicle for popular children’s nursery rhymes – eg, Old Mother Hubbard, Little Miss Muffet, Hickory Dickory Dock, Jack-and-Jill, etc. etc.
The best-known serial exponent of the limerick was Edward Lear who popularised it in A Book of Nonsense in the mid 19th century (although he himself did not use the term ‘limerick’). Lear’s limericks contain an inherently circular logic to them….a typical, absurdly inane example of his limericks is:
There was a Young Person of Smyrna
Whose grandmother threatened to burn her.
But she seized on the cat,
And said “Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna.”
The clerihew has also been a popular verse-style with its emphasis on simplicity of form and use of whimsical themes. It’s inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, began penning verses using the eponymous device as a schoolboy. One of Bentley’s most celebrated clerihews goes:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I’m going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I’m designing St. Paul’s.”
As demonstrated, a clerihew is a form of light verse usually consisting of two couplets (four lines), with lines of uneven length and irregular metre, the first line usually containing the name of a famous or well-known person [www.dictionary.com]. It employs a specific rhyme scheme, AA-BB, and it’s intent is humorous or possibly gently chiding. Less charitably the clerihew has elsewhere been described as “rhyming doggerel”.
Another of Bentley’s playful clerihews has fun with the author of the brace of universally popular Victorian classic books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass:
Lewis Carroll
Bought sumptuous apparel
And built an enormous palace
Out of the profits of Alice.
Of Ivanhoe author Sir Walter Scott, Bentley wrote:
I believe it was admitted by Scott
That some of his novels were rot.
How different was he from Lytton
Who admired everything he had written!
And of colonial novelist H Rider Haggard:
Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Was completely staggered
When his bride-to-be
Announced, “I AM SHE!”
Later, Bentley’s own son, Nicholas, had a go at the clerihew:
Cecil B. de Mille,
Rather against his will,
Was persuaded to leave Moses
Out of “The War of the Roses.”
Over the decades a number of famous writers have turned their hand to composing clerihews including GK Chesterton and WH Auden. Auden’s interest was engaged sufficiently to publish a collection of clerihews in a book called Academic Graffiti – a couple of his best efforts are:
Henry Adams
Was mortally afraid of Madams:
In a disorderly house
He sat quiet as a mouse.
⌖⌖⌖
Louis Pasteur,
So his colleagues aver,
Lived on excellent terms
With most of his germs.
Footnote: the clerihew, despite (or very possibly because of) its juvenile shallowness and nonsensical nature, has had an ongoing relevance as a teaching tool in engaging primary schoolchildren in the art of poetry-writing.
The Haiku Society of America defines the haiku as “a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition”. In English it’s structure consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively (17 syllables in all).
The modern haiku has struck a cord in America more than anywhere else, though a great many of the experimenters in this form have tended to not adhere to the established 17 syllable/three line criteria. Outstanding US poets and writers who have dabbled in the haiku include illuminati like Robert Frost, ee cumings, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright and Wallace Stevens, and a swag of the leading 50s and 60s beat poets including those Beat Generation icons Kerouac and Ginsburg.
In its modern, western incarnation, the haiku has had no greater recent proponent of the genre than David M Bader. The NYC attorney turned haiku humorist, had the Western Canon of literature firmly in his sights in a book first published in the mid-2000s as Haiku U: From Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables.
Bader’s slim, little volume churns out one condensed gem after another as he scythes through the literacy classics of the ages with irreverent fun. Moby Dick, American fiction’s time-honoured allegorical classic of the ultimate fight to the death between man and cetacean, is given a topical environmental twist by Bader:
Vengeance! Black blood! Aye!
Doubloons to him that harpoons
the Greenpeace dinghy.
Homer’s ancient classic poem equivalent of the modern “road movie”, the Odyssey (all 24 books of it) is hilariously condensed into the form of an unfavourable weather bureau forecast:
Aegean forecast –
storms, chance of one-eyed giants,
delays expected.
In similar style, Bader takes the reductive handle to Jane Austen’s seminal novel of early 19th century English manners Pride and Prejudice, stripping the stellar text back to reinvent it in the form of a newspaper classified ad:
Single white lass seeks
landed gent for marriage, whist.
No parsons, thank you.
Bader’s take on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is a triumph of ubër-alliteration. With a clever play-on-words he economically ‘nails’ the odious persona of Humbert Humbert in 17 syllables:
Lecherous linguist –
he lays low and is laid low
after laying Lo.
Bader also produced an earlier book [Haikus for Jews: For You, a Little Wisdom] in which he set down examples of distinctively Jewish Haiku – characterised in the main by recourse to a self-deprecating and at times a downbeat, cynical brand of humour.
Five thousand years a
wandering people – then we
found the cabanas.
“Through the Red Sea
costs extra.” Israeli movers
overcharge Moses.
Jewish triathlon —
gin rummy, then contract bridge,
followed by a nap.
⫷⫸⫷⫸⫷⫸
In the early 1970s one of the pioneering manifestations of this light-hearted form of imitation was an American book called Shrink Lits: Seventy of the world’s towering classics cut down to size, by Maurice Sagoff. This work took on the task of economising many of the best known classics of fiction such as Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare and The Hobbit. The gruesome and brutal Old English epic poem Beowulf is rendered thus:
I seem to recall that Anthony Burgess in the Eighties published a list of the best (ie, “AB’s best”) Anglophone novels written since 1939. ‘Clockwork’ Burg provides an appraisal of each selection infused with his characteristic English snobbery and acerbity….the works are by authors of a certain homogeneous nature – a collection not surprisingly top-heavily British and overwhelmingly masculine.
The book comes in a handy, appropriately reduced size, 148mm x 90mm – just right for slipping through recession-shaped holes in coat pockets, losing on the bus, etc. Each verse is decorated with charming illustrations by that effervescent trans-cis Pacific cartoonist, Victoria Roberts. Victoria is really good at giving the countenances of her creations that look of crumbled anxiety, perturbed faces conveying a sense of harassed humanity in the onslaught of a perplexing post-technological age. Not only that, she is extra good at drawing kangaroos and dogs!
