Sunday, December 14, 2008

Five Limericks

The subject is the last word or phrase. It's not quite the synthesis desired, but they were fun to write.

A super-computer became bored
It searched through the internet horde
It found Einstein's lost son
in a server and won
An Exceptional Collector Award.

Self named albums have long been around
They help rock bands establish their sound
The lists from the sixties
of albums all pick these
because of The Velvet Underground.

Kilimanjaro is a marquee
It helps landscape exposition, you see?
A photographer knows,
So preeminence goes
To Hatsutarō Horiuchi.

Oxyanion Aluminate
Tetrahydroxyborate Nitrate
Cyanate Hydroxide
Plumbate Superoxide
Carbonite Manganate Bisulfite

Mario had a size crescendo
eating a mushroom (innuendo?)
He ate buildings going
onto other things, growing
larger until he ate Nintendo.

1 comment:

Barbara Lorraine said...

Structured poetry!!! What joy, I love limericks. Don't worry about structural disconnect; I think they work well together as playful vignettes.

The fourth, about Carbonite Manganate Bisulfite, is probably my favorite of the five. It has a story, and that story is about compounds, and it's self-explanatory: the words are beautiful simply by being words that roll of the tongue in complex fashions, and by representing complex periodic combinations. They are connected by dint of being compounds, and they don't need anything else but syllables and themselves. my only nitpick, is that you try for an exact rhyme for the -ite in bisulfite rather than the slant rhyming using -ate endings, just because that particular stanza relies solely on rhythm and rhyme, with no focus on imagery or dialogue (which would give you leeway for slant rhyme, because then the rhyming isn't one of the most important parts of the stanza). Since you ARE using a structured poem style (the limerick), you'll want to stick to the structure as often as possible, unless you're specifically trying to manipulate/undermine the structure. Does that make sense??

Everything else is lovely. Tongue-in-cheek, hilarious, golden. I'd just tighten the rhyming scheme in places so it held more to the rhythm of a limerick (I'm a structure Nazi, just ask my Verse Writing classmates from Vassar!). You can do this with rewording, adding certain types of punctuation, etc.

But seriously Orvis, I love this. I would read a whole goddamn poem that was nothing but chemical compounds, if it was beautiful.