Dave Wood

I figure that most 21^st century hotshots occasionally indulge in the off-color limerick. But not my Beautiful Wife, who was brought up in a rather rigid Lutheran household. When we began dating, I confessed to her that I was a limerick devotee and shared with her the tamest limerick I could dredge up. (“There was a young lass from Oak Knoll/ Who wore a costume quite droll/ Then attending a ball/ dressed in nothing at all/ she backed in as a Parker House roll.”) Not too risque, right? WRONG!

One year later we were happily married and B.W. threw me a birthday ball, attended by several friends of diverse moral shades. After dinner, Ruth presented me with my present, a book edited by rapscallion Norman Douglas who advised readers that the only limerick worthy of publication must be unspeakably filthy. The title of his book was “Limericks.”

My cousin John grabbed the slender tome and began to read aloud the filthiest limericks with which I had no acquaintance. One limerick was about aberrant sexual preferences to King Louis the XVI for what “accounted for the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile.” A hush fell over rapscallions and Augsburg colleagues alike. Cousin John paid no heed to the assembly’s quietude and read on prefacing his orations with “Hey wait and listen to this one! It’s lulu!’

Which brings me to another less vulgar poetic form, which was introduced to more civilized readers by eminent poets, Jon Hollander and Anthony Hecht, who popularized a poetic form called the double dactyl. A dactyl is a three-part metrical foot, with emphasis on the first foot.  String two of these feet and you have the first line of your poem.

HIGGLETY PIGGLETY/ NIC’LAUS COPERNICUS/

LOOKED AT THE UNIVERSE /SPOKE TO THE THRONG/

‘’GIVE UP YOUR PTOLEMY/RISE UP AND FOLLOW ME,

HELIOCENTRIALLY/PTOLEMY’S WRONG!’

Complicated?  You betcha!

Here’s a simpler one:

HIGGLETY PIGGLETY / PRESIDENT JEFFERSON/ GAVE UP THE GHOST ON THE Fourth of JULY.

SO DID JOHN ADAMS, WHICH/

SHOWS THAT SUCH PATRIOTS/

PROPAGANDISTICALLY

KNEW HOW TO DIE.

I was a bachelor back then and had lots of time hanging around with other adjunct profs with nothing to do but sit in a saloon and come up with those blasted bold face words, like Heliogabalus the most corrupt Roman emperor or even  

Franklin D. Roosevelt/ High over Jutland

High over Jutland/ flew in from the east.

“Well” quipped a minister

Plenipotentiary

“SOMETHING in Groton is

Denmark at least!”

Believe me this exercise is worth the trouble when it comes to strait-laced girlfriends and it also polishes your historical and vocabulary skills. It’ll even polish your bartender’s badinage—as long as he knows FDR attended Groton Academy and the minister was Winston Churchill. I’ll admit that’s a problem, so I’ll end with a slightly lewd but very famous limerick, hoping it will slip by my editor, who is usually referred to as B.W.

The famous poetic wit Dorothy Parker (“Candy is Dandy/But liquor is quicker”) frequently attended parties thrown by publisher William Randolph Hearst at his magnificent estate San Simeon where he lived with his mistress, the actress Marion Davieson. On one visit Parker wrote this poem and tacked it on the bedroom door of Davieson, a devout Roman Catholic:

“Upon my honor/ I saw a Madonna/

Upright in a niche

/ Atop of the door/ Of a prominent whore/

Of a prominent sonofa_______.””

(You may now fill in the blank.  Hint: it’s a 5-letter word that begins with “b.”) 

One New York newspaper surmised it was written by Parker who denied it saying, “I would NEVER rhyme ‘honor’ with ‘Madonna.’”

As Kurt Vonnegut would say “So it goes.”