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Do You Too, Write Clerihew?

Carolyn Cordon
2 min readJun 8, 2023

Today, Thursday, is the day I head into a nearby town, and teach Creative Writing to women at a group in Gawler, South Australia. I do this as a volunteer and while I know society these days seems to think a thing is worthless if you don’t pay money for it, I disagree — volunteers are priceless gems that make good things happen, often.

Another kind of Gem … Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

Anyway, on with the subject of today’s proposed lesson. This is a vastly scaled back version and if you want to know more about it, then you can find a great deal more about it online.

So what even is a Clerihew? It is a nifty little poem, written about somebody famous, and it is supposed to be funny, by making fun of that famous person in some way.

When I wrote ‘little’ poem, it’s the truth — a Clerihew is just four lines, the first two lines both rhyming with each other, and then the next two lines rhyming with each other, with a different rhyme to the first two lines. I hope that’s clear. To make it more obvious, I’ll put a new poem just below this paragraph. I’ve written the poem today especially to bring more clarity to my explanation about the rhyme and lines and so on:

A chap named Clerihew
Had an idea I’m sharing with you

Create a poetic form and call it your own name,
Cringeworthy perhaps, but it’ll bring you fame!

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Carolyn Cordon
Carolyn Cordon

Written by Carolyn Cordon

Writer & Presenter — Poetry, prose, blogging, editor Mallala Crossroad Chronicle. Words are my tools, I use them well!

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