I have very good news to report. The latest poetic rage: the Fliss-Flossian Limerick has arrived! This is the official announcement, made on my Facebook page and via Twitter…

As everyone knows, or should know, I am the inventor of the Less Heroic Couplet and the Less Heroic Limerick.

Rules and examples can be found here:

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Michael%20R.%20Burch%20Less%20Heroic%20Couplets.htm

For those with harried schedules and/or short attention spans, most likely the latter, suffice it to say the Less Heroic Couplet is a nonce nonsense poetic form in which laziness, cowardice, failure to do one's duty or bathe, etc., are at long last given their dues. Tercets are allowed because the middle line of the tercet forms two couplets: L1/L2 and L2/L3.

Allowing tercets (since I get to make the rules but really don't care for them) allowed me to create the Less Heroic Limerick, which ends with a tercet: AAbbB, with L3/L4 being shorter, as in a more normal (albeit a far more ordinary and thus less exceptional) limerick. The last line may be elongated for a devious reason disclosed herein.

The above was not the end of my creative madness, for which I will no doubt be celebrated when future generations finally catch on, in their usually laggard fashion where poets are concerned...

A variation of the Less Heroic Limerick can be created by "cheating." Just graft a word or two onto the tail end of a normal-but-far-less-extraordinary limerick. Interestingly, this nonce nonsense form can look back to the original limericks of Edward Lear, as in the example below, since Lear repeated one of his rhyming words.

Ding Dong ...
by Michael R. Burch

for Fliss

An impertinent bit of sunlight
defeated a goddess, NIGHT.
Hooray!, cried the clover,
Her reign is over!
But she certainly gave us a fright, we clover!

I call this variation the Leering Learian Less Heroic Limerick. And because the first such limerick was written for and dedicated to F. F. Teague, the "Fliss" of my poem, and because no other poet to my knowledge has come as close to Mr. Lear as Fliss has, I will also dub the new form the Fliss-Flossian Limerick.

Please note that the last line of the example still contains a rhyme with L1/L2, in this case "fright," but also rhymes with the line above it: over/clover. This is not a requirement of the form, but having two rhymes earns an extra gold star and the title of "Master Ding-Dong-er."

And thus I have very cleverly immortalized myself by adding just two words to the end of an existing limerick!

When can I expect my truckload of laurels to arrive?