|
| |
Queen of the Dancefloor
Ooyakah Booyakah
Dear Queen Elizabeth’s
Ninety third birthday turned
Into a rave
She did the running man
Extraordinarily
Crafting a move from her
Famed royal wave
9 December 2018
I challenged myself to write in the most random form I could find today and came across the double dactyl!
Here’s the PS definition:
A verse form, also known as "higgledy piggledy," invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal. Like a limerick, it has a rigid structure and is usually humorous, but the double dactyl is considerably more rigid and difficult to write. There must be two stanzas, each comprising three lines of dactylic dimeter followed by a line with a dactyl and a single accent. The two stanzas have to rhyme on their last line. The first line of the first stanza is repetitive nonsense. The second line of the first stanza is the subject of the poem, a proper noun (usually someone's name). Note that this name must itself be double-dactylic. There is also a requirement for at least one line of the second stanza to be entirely one double dactyl word, for example "va-le-dic-tor-i-an".
Example
A recent one by Gene Weingarten and Dan Weingarten:
Joe and Marilyn
Higgledy Piggledy
Joseph DiMaggio''
Jolted the ball but was
Jilted in bed.
Marilyn walked, but he
Necro-romantically
Laid her in rose bouquets
When she was dead
(I don’t know if my second line would be classed as cheating!)
Copyright ©
Nina Parmenter
|
|