Let's talk about the clerihew, which is one of my favorite kinds of poems.
We'll talk about how you can write a clerihew and then some features to
watch out for. So I've written a ton of clerihews over the years -- sort of a
hobby of mine -- and they're fairly easy to write, at least on the surface. But the
real trick is to make a clerihew witty and clever, and good enough that somebody
might actually find it funny. So what is a clerihew? Well, first of all it was
invented not too long ago. It was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
So it's named after his middle name, and he first
invented this when he was about 16. That would have been around 1891. He was
in a science class and he was really bored and he decided to write a poem. He
published his first volume of clerihews in 1905, and then they became
quickly quite popular. I think these days they have sort of diminished in
popularity again, but occasionally occasionally you'll see publications run
let's say a clerihew competition. And I'm really hopeful that maybe over time
people will rediscover the clerihew and start writing them again. In terms of
the age appropriate level of a clerihew, I think it's probably
best to write clerihews when you're in high school, let's say, as opposed to elementary
school. Or if you are writing them in elementary school then you may be better
off writing them about family members, let's say, or people you know rather than
necessarily historical figures. Now the main two features of a clerihew are that
they're always about somebody -- usually somebody famous,
and that person is typically named at the end of the first line. So you can
have a few words before the name but usually we start fairly quickly with the
name. Then we have a rhyme scheme that goes AABB and that's really
the nuts and bolts of clerihews. That's really all there is to it. Then it's up
to you to try to make make it witty or funny.
The lines can be as long as you want them to be, so that's no trouble. The
other thing is that there's no set rhythm, although you may still want to
think about rhythm because if it's really awkward it's not gonna flow
off the tongue. And a clerihew can be biographical, so it can be historical and
true, but it can also be completely made-up and nonsensical. So it's up to
you, and I think there's sort of a great sense of leeway in how much you can
concoct about historical people. Now, if you do make up some historical detail
that did not necessarily happen, it does have to fit the character. In
other words, a totally random detail about a historical person is not going
to make people laugh. It has to sort of bring out who this person is. So in our
first example then (and all of these are ones that I've written) ...
we have Rosa Parks, who is famous for sitting in her seat on the
bus and [for] being part of the civil rights movement. She refused to give
up her seat and she was protesting segregation. So this sort of talks about
her maybe being in elementary school and getting high marks for staying in her
seat, and then that's in a sense ironic because eventually she would not
get high marks for doing so. The next one is about a painter named named
Piet Mondrian. He was a famous Dutch painter -- very abstract kind of art -- so
this one goes, "Piet Mondrian / Was not a ladies' man ...
... He got on their nerves / Since he couldn't draw
curves." A lot of these you can see are a little bit more for adults as well.
They often have some sexual jokes in them. I've tried not to have too many of
those in the examples here, but that is often a feature of the clerihew. The
next one here suggests something that you can focus on as well, and that's unusual
rhymes. So this one goes, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus / or Nero to
the rest of us / Needed room for his new home / So he
burned down most of Rome. You can see that "Germanicus" is really hard to rhyme
with and so we've tried to sort of rhyme something with it.
That seems a bit awkward but actually that's a feature of the
clerihew, that we're looking often for interesting and unusual rhymes. So don't
go for the most obvious thing. The next one is another sort of minor variation,
because this one has two people's names in the clerihew. And this one has a sort
of contrast. Notice also that we didn't finish our first line with the name, but
we have switched it around. You are in other words occasionally allowed to
break the rules, but you have to be very careful when you do that and it should
be for a good purpose, or it should actually make the clerihew better and
not worse. This one then reads, "Chamberlain waived the sign / For peace in
our time, / But Churchill muttered, / 'What the devil! / You're a sissy, Neville!'" And the last
two lines show another feature, which is that often there are quoted words in a
clerihew -- so dialogue, people saying things. And they can be
made-up things again, but people's speech is often meant to characterize
what they are like. So try to include a quotation or something that somebody
says and that makes it quite funny often. And then we'll finish with one last one
here, and this one is just sort of to link back to the limerick form, about
which we had a little video as well. This one goes, "There once was a man named
Edward Lear / [who invented the limerick, which is five lines long] Who lived
with a terrible fear / They would write on his tomb / A clerihew just to save room."
Alright, so try your hand at a clerihew. Hopefully enjoy it and hopefully
other people do too!