This book, The Doggerelist Still: And Other Humorous Poems, follows my first book, The Doggerelist, (available here) with another short collection of poems.
Sadly, I am not qualified to write any book of poetry since my New Collegiate Dictionary says a poet is “a creative artist of great imaginative and expressive gifts and special sensitivity to his medium.” Alas, my great imaginative and expressive gifts have yet to develop. And I hardly have any sensitivity to my medium: my medium is neither rare nor well done. Little has changed, and certainly nothing for the better, since that first book. I continue to write doggerel; hence the title, The Doggerelist Still.
Doggerel is non-literary poetry, often considered bad poetry by those who judge such things. My dictionary doesn’t specifically define “doggerelist.” However, it defines “doggerel verse” as “loosely styled and irregular in measure esp. for burlesque or comic effect; also: marked by triviality or inferior worth.”
Doggerel includes a wide range of verse, everything from nursery rhymes and cowboy poetry to rude limericks. Much of it was written to be humorous. Many well-known authors used doggerel, including Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer and Robert Frost, when they wanted to introduce comedy. Ernest Thayer, who wrote Casey at the Bat, said his poem was doggerel. And some writers produced little but doggerel. Ogden Nash is perhaps the best known of those and is referred to as the “Shakespeare of Doggerel.”
