Clerihews Are All In Fun

Clerihews Are All In Fun

To the dismay of some, I am sure, a while back I was bitten by the poetry bug.  Lately I've been exploring a reference book on poetry that I ran across.  It's called A Poet's Glossary, by Edward Hirsch (you might remember another work of his--I think-- called Cultural Literacy, he's also a poet of some renown--published eight books of poetry).

But I digress, it is chock full of definitions of poetic terms most of us have never even heard of.  Case in point, there's a poetic form I found in Mr. Hirsch's Glossary called a Clerihew--which was someone's middle name a long time ago...blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, it is right there on page 112, between "classic" and "cliche."  Quoting Mr. Hirsch, "It consists of a skewed quatrain--two rhyming couplets of unequal length that whimsically encapsulate a person's biography..."  (How can you not just love a book full of definitions like this one?)  Usually, the name of the person being sent up appears in the first couplet.  He offers this example

Geoffrey Chaucer
Could hardly have been coarser
But this never harmed the sales
Of his Canterbury Tales 

Below you will find a few of my own attempts--

Young President George W Bush
On rumors of Saddam's weapons, did not sit on his tush
He sent our armies in pursuit, but when all was said and done,
Those who went hunting chemical weapons found exactly none

Margarita Man, Jimmy Buffett
when he sailed off he had to rough it.
It seemed, he failed to pack the supplies
to make a cheeseburger in paradise.

Vladimir Putin
He's a bad man there's no disputin'
But in Crimea nearly everyone loves him s ton
If you believe those voting in the face of a gun.

Try it, it's fun, I swear it.