Once I realized that I’d written “músk ănd tĕstóstĕròne” in my piece on “Scent and masculinity”, I saw that the double dactyl needed a poetic home.
The poetic constraints on the Double Dactyl form:
… a verse form, also known as “higgledy piggledy,” purportedly invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in 1961, but having a history as a parlor word game earlier in the century. 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, [usually] a proper noun… Note that this name must itself be double-dactylic. There is also a requirement for at least one line of the second stanza [usually the second] to be entirely one double dactyl word, for example “va-le-dic-tor-i-an” … (Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, Jiggery-Pokery, A Compendium of Double Dactyls (New York: Atheneum, 1967))
Here’s my stab:
Buggery muggery,
Musk and testosterone,
Masculine scents make a
Great-smelling mate;Axillar pleasures plus
Cruxiodiferous
Signals send messages
Out to your date.
(Axillar is a variant of the more common axillary ‘of the armpit’. Cruxiodiferous is invented, but should be transparent as ‘crotch-scented’. On crotch and crux, see here.)
May 25, 2011 at 5:07 pm |
Re “cruxiodiferous,” I’m sure you know odiferous is a shortened version (though not quite a haplology) of ODORiferous. So you could delet that (awkward) i in “cruxi” and just make the word (and line) “cruxodoriferous.”
May 25, 2011 at 5:14 pm |
Accepted as a friendly amendment, with thanks. Cruxoderiferous is just as unattested as cruxiodiferous, but it smells better.
May 26, 2011 at 2:39 am |
I think that higgledy-piggledys are more entertaining than limericks, on the whole. When I realised that “Catherine Middleton” would fit quite nicely, I wrote:
Higgledy-Piggledy
Catherine Middleton
Commoner-born, will be
Duchess, then Queen.
Wedding Day streets feature
Impassibility;
Hoi polloi cheer and
Republicans keen.
I seem to remember that New York Magazine used to occasionally feature higgledy-piggledys in its weekly quiz.
May 27, 2011 at 9:37 am |
Definitely more entertaining than limericks, because more challenging (without being impossibly difficult).
May 27, 2011 at 9:36 am |
Back in April, on Language Log, we had the doubly-dactylic poet Saskia Hamilton, a possible subject for verse
.
May 30, 2011 at 9:45 am |
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