By Ashley Lister
My friends call me Ash
I don’t have much cash
I write about writing
And about sex scenes that can prove positively exciting
As I may have mentioned before, I enjoy poetry exercises because I believe they help all of us with our writing:
- Poetry is a wonderful way to warm up the writing muscles before starting any writing project.
- Poetry gets the writer to focus on the strengths and merits of individual words in ways that aren’t usually considered with regular fiction writing.
- Poetry can be a lot of fun.To that end, I thought we could look at one of my favourite pieces of fun poetry this month: the clerihew.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Say his name gently
He pioneered this verse form
Though critics say there could not be a worse form
The clerihew is a type of verse invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Traditionally, the clerihew is a four-line poem made up of two rhyming couplets (aabb). The metre of the clerihew is intentionally, and often ridiculously, irregular. The purpose of the clerihew is to offer a satiric, absurd or whimsical biography of a character.
The Marquis de Sade
Liked his punishment hard
He was an aristocrat – first class
And he liked spanking servant girls on the ass
In the comments box below please feel free to write your own four-line clerihew introducing yourself or introducing one of the characters from your fiction.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
spent his childhood on a hassock
travelled Europe in third class seating
but subsequently divorced his wife when she wouldn't beat him.
Rachel Green:
The poetry queen.
She writes with style
And produces verse that does beguile.
😉
Ash
Bad poetry? I can do that!
My name is Lisabet
My goal's to make you wet
With tales of sweet lust
That leave Fifty Shades languishing in the literary dust.
Well stated Lisabet
And you do make readers wet
Unlike those Fifty Shades books I've read
Which left my libido feeling dead.