Today or tomorrow I'll be uploading to Kindle Direct yet another volume of doggerel (Fearsome Mania), most of it posted previously on my blog Daily Doggerel (and/or on Facebook). I'll let you know when it's available for purchase ($2.99--the lowest Amazon allows for such things).
Here's the Foreword to the volume ...
Foreword
And now … yet another volume of doggerel, almost all
of which has appeared on my blog, Daily Doggerel (http://dailydoggerels.blogspot.com/),
and/or on Facebook, where I have many friends who find it quite easy to pretend
that they’ve read these pieces. A great thing about Facebook—the slick ease
with which you can lie by liking.
I had a couple
of themes for Fearsome Mania: (1)
poems about the words we have for all our many mania (e.g., bibliomania—a madness for books), (2)
poems about the words we have for all the fears
we have (e.g., bibliophobia—a fear of
books!). Actually, I don’t have a poem for bibliophobia, a grievous oversight
that I will one day have to correct.
Might as well
be right now:
His fear of books is so complete
That when he saw one, he would Tweet:
“This book is making me perspire—
It’s time to toss it in the fire!”
(By the way,
his Tweet is considerably below Twitter’s 140-character maximum. And we’ll not
comment on his thoughtless notion of tossing the book in a fire when he’s already perspiring.)
You will be
grateful to learn that I wrote far
fewer poems for -mania and -phobia words than there are -mania and -phobia words. Based on the vast number of them, we can only
conclude that we are one wacko, scared species. We can also conclude that we
seem to insist on having a word for everything—an
insistence, in this case, that I found very pleasant, for I didn’t have to
scratch around for ideas for doggerel. I found some depressingly long lists on
the Internet.
Appended to
these two major sections of Fearsome
Mania is a section I’m calling “Wolferel.” Doggerel, as you know, is
so-called “light verse” (i.e., most of it sucks—but it can be amusing); wolferel
(a word I am now offering for sale to the Oxford
English Dictionary and others) is doggerel with pretensions. They are
related critters, wolves and dogs, and wolferel is related to doggerel—just a
little more serious, maybe even deadly.
Wolferel attempts to enter the Kingdom of Poetry but doesn’t quite make it. (It
howls just outside the gates.) Just as a dog can look like a wolf (but isn’t),
a wolf can look like a Warg (but isn’t).[1]
Anyway, I
enjoyed writing these pieces. I usually do them right after lunch over in the
local coffee shop, the Open Door Coffee Co. (Hudson, Ohio), which is where I
slouch in an easy chair (unless some Evil One has stolen my place), boot up my iPad, consult my list of words, and see what
bounds into the room—a dog, a wolf, a skunk. I tried to eliminate most of the
skunks from this collection, but who knows? Some of them can look quite canine,
especially when you want them to.
— Daniel Dyer, March 15, 2016
[1] For
those of you unacquainted with Wargs, they are giant (evil) wolves created by J.
R. R. Tolkien. Here’s a link to more. http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Wargs
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