POETRY AND OTHERWISE

posted by James Reel

    Today's Tucson Weekly also carries a nice review by Jarret Keene of a volume of poetry by my friend Pamela Portwood, each poem inspired by a historical figure with epilepsy. While Pamela was doing research for a poem on Edward Lear, master of the limerick, she got into limerick mode and challenged me and her husband to write one using the difficult rhyme "asthma." Here's what I came up with:

A young saxophonist with asthma
Couldn't breathe in a nightclub's miasma.
He said to his mother,
"I feel like I'll smother.
I should never have gone into jazz, ma."