LIMERICKS WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED By John M Johansen
LIMERICKS WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED By John M Johansen
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I really don’t know quite how all this happened. But to an audio-visually oriented and in some ways dyslexic architect, the outpouring of these verses was a sensation unnatural and unfamiliar to my nature. Within a few weeks, as oddly, the production stopped.
While I decided to live out this malaise in silence, I came upon The Penguin Book of Limericks, a collection, indeed, of 800 verses. Among the authors included were Dante, Rossetti, Lear, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas and other literati. I no longer found myself strangely alone and different, but rather sane and in noteworthy company.
Illustrations, as often as not, displace in the reader’s imagination images, which might have been more vivid. However, it amused me, reverting to my more native faculties of visualization, to offer mine. If for no other more than our psychic well-being, we all should try to write our own Limericks. And we may be encouraged by what appear to be a great many individual efforts by people in all fields of endeavor quite well outside the literary professions. May these Limericks be then an exhortation to you to try your hand. And if some of these verses don’t draw a hearty laugh, then I hope here and there, a smile.
- John M. Johansen
The range and oddity of the subject matter I was inclined to indulge in was far more outrageous in the authors I read. Doubts I had harbored about my perversity faded away. The bawdy Limerick, the Limerick of social satire, fantasy, innocence and even autobiography, were all there. Although I would not have my readers believe that most of my Limericks are autobiographical, some of them, I admit, are. Several others admittedly draw from humorous stories, or use a line, which may be familiar; but I learned also that many Limerick writers have respectfully drawn from others.