- Ice Cube Press
The clerihew is a four-line poem with an AABB rhyme scheme that always begins with the subject’s name. The subject is always a famous person. It was first invented by the English crime writer Edward Clerihew Bentley, who felt that limericks had become too dirty and that young people needed a more wholesome form in which to write deliberately bad poetry with the most ridiculous rhymes possible. As you might imagine, the clerihew quickly became just as a degraded. Since Bentley died more than 50 years ago, the form has fallen into a state of neglect . . . until now.
Before she began work, Anderson-Miller didn’t know who some of the characters were, but she enjoyed looking them up—even if Ingram’s poems were not strictly historically accurate. As the illustrator, Anderson-Miller felt a greater responsibility to Ingram than to strict facts. Her favorite poems to illustrate were Rebecca West (“Rebecca West/Became obsessed/With the nether smells/Of H.G. Wells”; the drawing shows Wells in his tighty-whiteys) and Alice B. Toklas (“Alice B. Toklas/Went smokeless,/A little hash/Under her mustache”; she drew a marijuana leaf beneath a nose).
