July 04, 2008
I'm a patriot and didn't even know it
I know it's a holiday weekend and so the Internet is closed, but if you'd like to amuse yourself nonetheless, you might like to visit Miss Conduct's column over at boston.com and enter her clerihew contest. What's a clerihew, you ask? Well, it's a short poem about a famous person written in no meter to speak of, with the rhyme scheme AABB, named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line of the poem is the famous person's name or mostly the famous person's name. Here's my entry in the contest, which may serve as a helpful example:
William S. Burroughs
Had a brow filled with wrinkles and furrows
(Which were probably exacerbated, of course,
By his addiction to horse).
And here's an autobiographical one:
Francis Heaney
Doesn't like olives, not even in a martini,
So you will not find it jaw-droppin', odd,
Or otherwise strange that he also hates tapenade.
(Thanks to Miss Conduct for helping provide content to my parched blog.)
Posted by Francis at 09:33 AMJoan Vollmer
Now rests in a hole. Mur-
Der might be the reason she's no longer live and well.
Nobody could Tell.
Funny, I just posted one to my blog. I cheated, though, in terms of the placement of the subject's name:
In response to the detail
Now flowing across my friends page, RSS aggregator, and "News Alert!" e-mail
About the death of former Senator Jesse Helms
My grief underwhelms
Michelle Obama
Was called Barack's "baby mama"
On that cable news channel—what?—Fox.
I'll bet the Obamas wanted to thwack the network employees' buttocks.
There once was a blogger named Orange,
Wait, this doesn't work.
Posted by: Matt Gaffney at July 4, 2008 04:52 PMKostia, also known as Elaine
Also hates olives (her friends find this insane).
Two more tidbits about her are that she's sometimes called Lainey,
And that through all these years of puzzles she always thought it was pronounced "Heaney."
Yahweh
Tells us to avoid homosexual sex and lead our lives in what is by and large a blah way.
This rule is right there in the Bible, so don't shoot the messenger
Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
(not submitted to the contest because of the "political" content, even though it's not the epitome of topicality. Sure does fits the "no discernible meter" requirement.)
Posted by: Jangler at July 7, 2008 08:11 PMHm...rereading my comment, it almost looks like I'm trying to defend Dr. Laura's views, which was not the case. I guess just imagine the poem as being read in an extremely sarcastic tone.
Posted by: Jangler at July 7, 2008 08:34 PMI think the "blah way" gets across the sarcastic tone. Also, that seems non-political enough to submit to the contest.
Posted by: Francis at July 7, 2008 09:23 PMHmm, OK, worth a shot. Now I have two submissions --my first one still hasn't showed up on the site, though I did reach the page saying that the fact that I reached said page means that the comment was received. I'm sure it'll pop up eventually. See you in very very soon!!!
Posted by: Jangler at July 7, 2008 10:36 PMThe awful thing about Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Is how quickly one tires
Of his reliance on cheekbones , for instance-
Or the dramatic gaze into the middle distance.
For some putrid reason I can't get that hateful cabbage Rhys-Meyers out of my head.
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