limerick, cinquain, verse, versifier, haiku, belly-up

Latin poet Horace was a celebrity in his era, "halfway between Bob Dylan and Seamus Heaney". He died on this day in 8 BC, but his writings and aphorisms still furnish us with answers

Horace: lessons from a Latin versifier

Satirist and poet Horace died on November 27th, 8 BC

ECON.ST

The Week That Was, In Verse From a hedge fund manager's bad (poker) bet, to a lobbyist in ostrich leather cowboy boots, to a private equity Philly team, a poetic look at the week's top news stories.

July 15, 2011, 4:49 pmHedge Funds

The Week That Was, In Verse

By KEVIN ROOSE

Ethan Miller/Getty Images, Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times, Matt Slocum/Associated Press and Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News Clockwise from top left: David Einhorn, Steve Bartlett, Ben Wallace and Jamie Dimon.

A poetic look at the top news stories of the week:
David Einhorn’s Poker Loss, a haiku
Greenlight’s card shark chief
Busts like a cheap umbrella
Next stop: homelessness?
Apollo’s Josh Harris Buys The Sixers, a limerick
A big private equity king
Took Philly’s team under his wing
A big playoff rout
Would help him block out
His belly-up Linens-n-Things
Wall Street’s Lobbyist, a cinquain
Bartlett
Starts Finance U.
Tells Congress, “I’m not here
to tell you how to legislate.”
O RLY?

Ode to Bank Earnings Season
Sing, o muse, of EPS and such
Each quarter when the big banks pay their calls
A balance sheet can obfuscate so much
And CFOs can spin tales oh so tall.
But journalists with early-morning shifts
Sit waiting in their cubicles, alert
Until the press release drops from on high
O joy! O glorious day! The spirit lifts!
They happily dig up the earnings dirt,
Then think about what life’s become, and cry.




Weird, adj.: a dictionary in limerick form
Toronto Star - Ontario, Canada
Bill Taylor
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

The limerick is poetry, terse,
Oft-rendered not better but worse
By rhymesters ham-fisted,
Their anapests twisted,
Whose doggerel is not worth a curse.

limerick
A light humorous, nonsensical, or bawdy verse of five anapestic lines usually with the rhyme scheme aabba.
limerick [limm‐ĕ‐rik], an English verse form consisting of five anapaestic lines rhyming aabba, the third and fourth lines having two stresses and the others three. Early examples, notably those of Edward Lear in his Book of Nonsense (1846), use the same rhyming word at the end of the first and last lines, but most modern limericks avoid such repetition. The limerick is almost always a self‐contained, humorous poem, and usually plays on rhymes involving the names of people or places. First found in the 1820s, it was popularized by Lear, and soon became a favourite form for the witty obscenities of anonymous versifiers. The following is one of the less offensive examples of the coarse limerick tradition:
There was a young fellow named Menzies
Whose kissing sent girls into frenzies;
 But a virgin one night 
Crossed her legs in a fright
And fractured his bi‐focal lenses.

versifier

noun ver·si·fi·er \ˈvər-sə-ˌfī(-ə)r\

:  one that versifies; especially :  a writer of light or inferior verse

lim・er・ick

━━ n. リメリック ((五行戯詩)).

belly-up	(adjective) Financially ruined.
Synonyms:	bankrupt
Usage:	The struggling grocery store was forced to lay off several employees to avoid going belly-up.