DAILY DOGGEREL Now on Kindle!

I done did it again--published on Kindle Direct Publishing--for the tenth time (here's a link to my author page on Amazon).  I've assembled some of the Daily Doggerels I publish each day (duh) on my Facebook page.  And here's the little intro I provided with the collection--oh, and I dedicated the book to my Facebook friends!

(Link to the book on Amazon.)

Foreword

doggerel or dogrel  (ˈdɒɡərəl, ˈdɒɡrəl)
— n
1.	a. comic verse, usually irregular in measure
	b. ( as modifier ): a doggerel rhythm
2.	nonsense; drivel

— from dictionary.com

I had no idea things would go this far.  A book of doggerel?  The thought did not cross my mind back in May 2012 when—for a reason I can’t really identify—I decided to start writing a “daily doggerel” to post on Facebook.  (Actually, I initially called it “daily quatrain” but soon learned I needed more than four lines.  So I changed it.)  It seemed as if it would be fun to do for a while—maybe a few weeks, a couple of months?  But it wasn’t long before I was writing silly verse (and some—not so silly) every night before I went to bed, then posting it on Facebook early the next morning.

My FB friends seemed to enjoy the lines (they always earned some likes and comments), but still I had no plans for a wider publication.  Then—recently—I began to wonder about all of the poems.  I had dutifully pasted them into my journal each day, but putting them all together, dividing them into categories, eliminating repetitious ones (and ones that were in some sort of dreadful category below doggerel)—this all took a lot of work.  There were hundreds of them.

But by the end I’d established eighteen categories, and within each category I arranged the poems chronologically.  Some have titles; some don’t.  There are a few that needed a little note or two of explanation, so I provided that on the pages in question.

Even a quick glance will show that most of them—by far—are in traditional ballad form (a form perfected by Emily Dickinson, who would shudder in alarm were she to read these): four-line stanzas, rhyming a-b-c-b, with four iambic beats in the first and third lines, three iambs in the second and fourth.

But there are some others here, too, scattered about, including two silly ones—“Ohio Alphabetical” and “Oklahoma Alphabetical”—which proceed, letter by letter, A through Z, listing towns in those states (two states where I lived virtually all of my life); I tried to make just about every other word in each line start with the same initial letter as the town involved.  And added a sing-songy rhythm—and even some rhyming in places where I was bright enough to figure out how to do it.

Anyway, if this goes all right (if some people actually download some copies), I’ll do an additional volume each six months or so.

I want to thank my wife, Joyce Dyer, who always laughs and has encouraged me in every way in our forty-three years of marriage.  Without her?  Nothing.  With her?  Everything.