How to write a limerick

some good obscene fun

Hello friends,

This month, I have been luxuriating in the cool beauty of the Pacific Northwest—and shooting off some hot little Notes:

Turns out everybody loves a limerick! And they say poetry is dead.

Others started getting in on the fun. Which is great—“A” for effort, definitely—but adherence to the form’s basic tenets was inconsistent. So I thought I’d do a little primer here in the hope of raising everyone’s limerick game and attracting new, confident entrants.

Rhyme scheme

It’s fixed. Just memorize it: AABBA. So, while I appreciate this sentiment—

—the last line needs to rhyme with “Substack” and “tack.” Lines three and four could be normalized, too.

Here’s how we might improve it:

There is a young lady on Substack
Whose wit is as sharp as a thumbtack.
She dissects and reflects
The BS she detects
From a guy who lacks limerick knack.

You’ll see I changed more than the end rhymes here. Which brings us to the bigger issue people seemed to have—

Meter

Metrical consistency is what gives limericks their jaunty bounce.

I admittedly tend to rely more on my ear than explicit foot-counting, and there is some tolerance for syllabic variability provided three are stressed in the “A” lines and two in the “B”s—but “to evacuate like bowels filled with fibre” does not fall within it.

If you want to go deep on anapests, by all means do, but I don’t think it necessary to write good limericks for fun on the internet. Reading a few tried-and-true ones aloud to yourself to get a feel for the beat may well up your game faster.

Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense is how I developed mine, but I can’t find my copy. So let’s consider the limerick world’s most famous man, he of Nantucket. Here is the quintessential version by Dayton Voorhees (I’ll leave you to look up its dirty derivatives):

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

Count the syllables and you’ll find a perfect 9-9-6-6-9 (with 3-3-2-2-3 stressed), but it’s okay to have 8 or 10 or even 11 for the “A” lines and 5 or 7 for the “B” lines, provided you maintain meter.

Here’s a good one Trevor Cribben Merrill chimed in with that uses a couple of 8-syllable “A” lines:

And another by The Upgrade | Anne Marie that has some syllabic variability in both the “A”s and “B”s:

The stressed syllables are still 3-3-2-2-3 in both cases. So how might we improve the original entry above?

His notes gained him many subscribers
They loved him for witty one-liners
But on publishing prose
His subscribers, they chose
To dash with the flakiest diners.

Much bouncier. Notice I also changed the third line—it wasn’t strictly wrong in the original version, but making it work would require some unnatURal emPHASis (“but when HE published PROSE” not “but WHEN he PUBlished PROSE”) that the rephrase eliminates.

Last lines

This is where things tend to fall apart, huh? A traditional solution is to simply end the first and last lines with the same (or nearly same) word, like in the Nantucket model. Lear does this all the time, too; very old school approach.

Something like—

There is a young lady on Substack
Whose wit is as sharp as a thumbtack.
She dissects and reflects
The BS she detects.
That scrutable lady on Substack.

—or—

His notes gained him many subscribers
They loved him for witty one-liners
But on publishing prose
The chart no longer rose—
And subscribers became unsubscribers.

—works fine. Far better than fancier attempts that break form and leave you at the mercy of Lillian Wang Selonick.

Humor & obscenity

The limerick’s rhyme scheme and meter are not fussy academic rules enforced for their own sake, but an inherent support to droll content. The form makes the content funny. Its sing-song levity sands down the edges of taboo and rudeness, allowing you to say true things in good humor that you probably wouldn’t otherwise.

It’s a bit like how the South Park guys can get away with more in a cartoon than they could in live action. Limericks are poetic cartoons. They give a structural, tonal lightness to whatever they contain.

A few tips

The last line is the trickiest to land, so I like to work backwards. I’ll generally have a good sense of what line five’s end rhyme word will be before I’ve written the first two. Likewise with the “B”-lines—I like to settle on the rhyming words first, or at least have a couple of options, then figure out how to get to them.

Remember meter is sacrosanct, but words are pliable:

“Persisty” is obviously not a word—and way better than “persist” here. Provided you don’t obscure meaning, tweaking words to fit rhyme and meter can expand your viable options and even add signature charm.

Once you have a draft, read it aloud! If counting syllables/feet while you do so makes sense to you, great. If not and you want to go all-ear, consider reading an established poem or two before and after yours for comparison.

Every time you change something, read it aloud again.

And most importantly, have fun. There is really no other reason to do this. Limerick-writing is the pinnacle of quite uselessness.

And with that you have all of my tricks
To start banging out hot limericks.
Here’s to your successes
In syllable stresses—
May they garner you all of the clicks!

Thanks for reading,

ANJ

PS—I haven’t seen Nolan’s Odyssey yet, but have been enjoying Homer’s internet (this could make a good limerick if someone wants to try). General to the topic: Anna Gát and I will be doing an Interintellect salon on literary adaptation kthis September 24—RSVP.