Daily Doggerel, Vol. 7

Today, I have published the FINAL VOLUME of the Daily Doggerel series: Volume VII--Final Barks. It's available now on Kindle Direct--though you do not need a Kindle to read it. All you need is the Kindle app for your smart phone or tablet--and $2.99 to purchase from Kindle. I've removed the worst of the bad from the volume (not too hard to identify!). Link to Amazon.

Here's the Foreword from the little book:

Foreword

doggerel or dogrel  (daw-ger-uhl, dog-er-]

adjective

1. a. comic or burlesque, and usually loose or irregular in measure.

    b. rude; crude; poor.

noun

2. doggerel verse.

— from dictionary.com

Well, all good things must come to an end—all bad things, too. And so with this, the seventh volume of Daily Doggerel, I end this sad series, bowing to the powers of pride and of reputation, reputation, reputation! (Can you hear poor Michael Cassio, from Othello, crying in agreement from his fictional grave? “I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial” (2.3).)

Bestial. Of, pertaining to, or having the form of a beast. Perhaps a dog? (See cover.)

I began Daily Doggerel as a feature for (against?) my Facebook friends back in May 2012. I initially called it “Daily Quatrain,” but soon found that four lines were insufficient to contain my incompetence, an extensive, borderless domain. So—every day—poems spilled from me like spoiled milk? Dropped from me like rotten fruit?  Flaked from me like …? You get the idea.

Soon I was posting three different varieties (all evident in the contents of this and its sibling volumes): the Daily Doggerel (mongrel parent of the others); a couplet (usually—though sometimes longer) derived from the word-of-the-day on my tear-off calendar; another couplet, always in iambic pentameter, in a series that summarized Shakespeare’s plays.

That last one isn’t clear, is it? Basically, I slowly worked my way through the Bard’s plays, taking a month or so to complete each one, confining plot developments to a single couplet each day.

Still not clear? Well, go to that section and read at your own peril.

So, why am I terminating this series? “Putting down” the dog(gerel), as it were?

I’m manifestly not out of ideas; hell, I never had too many of those to begin with! And I’m still sending an occasional puppy-erel bounding into Facebook’s living room when the mood strikes, which we all hope will not be too often.

No, it all has to do with what poet Andrew Marvell wrote more than 300 years ago:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near ….

Of course, the speaker in that poem was trying to seduce his GF (saying, to be blunt: We won’t live forever, so let’s do it—right now!), but I’ve always liked that time’s wingèd chariot image.

And now I believe I can hear the rush of the wind over its wings—for real. And as my energy wanes, and as I begin to scan the sky for glimpses of the chariot, I wrap for you a final gift of Doggerel. And dare you to unwrap it.

Daniel Dyer

October 31, 2014