RSS Feeds What’s an old-fashioned limerick company doing in the high-tech capital of Silicon Valley?
Well, like most crazy stories, lawyers were involved. Actually just one lawyer. When Artie’s girlfriend took a job practicing law in San Francisco, he packed up his apartment near Boston and followed her West. He traded orange leaves for orange trees, blizzards for earthquakes, and “wicked†for “hella.†Life was good.
Except for one thing: no limericks! You see, New England is famous for its small micro-poetries, some of which have been in the same family for generations. On sunny spring weekends, Bostonians love to drive out to “poem country†to sample their favorite local writers’ workshops. Each region has its own varietals: the I-495 Beltway is justly famous for anapests, the Berkshires emphasize double-consonant rhymes, and Rhode Island does poems about your mom.
When Artie moved to San Francisco, he missed the limericks the most. Oakland has a Dirty Haiku scene and SOMA has some world-renown Tweets, but no limericks! Unemployed and homesick, Artie spent the last of his money on an old copy of Acrobat Distiller he found on eBay. After a few weeks of drafting, kerning, and font subset embedding, he invited some of his new West Coast friends to sample his verse.
Well, the rest is history. His first batch of eBooks sold out in a week. His girlfriend knows a lot of Amherst graduates and word spread that some crazy Yankee was making genuine, New-England-style limericks right here in the California sunshine. Poetry slams from San Jose up to Seattle now stock Artie’s concoctions. He’s even getting online orders from his old haunts in Boston.
You can get handcrafted limericks in Silicon Valley, all thanks to Bicycle Comics!
A tasting flight of four limericks in honor of the 2011 National Poetry Slam