ZooWeird--a doggerel collection, soon available

A few moments ago, I uploaded to KindleDirect my latest collection of doggerel 'n' such. This one comprises about 100 "poems" about weird animals, a series that ran on my Daily Doggerel blog from December 1, 2016-February 28, 2017.

Below is the Foreword to the volume, which will appear on Amazon.com in a few hours.

Foreword

I’m not sure where I got the idea of this collection. It just “arrived,” I guess, as did the topics for the other collections I’ve written and uploaded to Kindle Direct. I’m not sure whether to be happy or sad about it. It just is, you know? One day a thought is there; months later a collection of silly verse has arrived. An unexpected pregnancy and birth.

I do know this: Once I decided to accept this idea-from-who-knows-where—this idea about writing poems about weird animals—I knew I needed to find a list of strange creatures. And fast. Having such a help close at  hand would save me lots of time Googling—and would save me from being like the lost motorist who staggers around a vast parking lot searching for his car that he left he-can’t-remember-where.

And in my list hunt, I was amazingly fortunate to find this site— http://www.strangeanimals.info/p/z-animal-list.html—which provided not only a varied and fascinating list but all sorts of other information, including photographs and video. As you read through these “poems,” I urge you to visit the site and see pictures, learn lots more about the critters I temporarily captured in these lines.

The pieces originally appeared in my blog—Daily Doggerel (http://dailydoggerels.blogspot.com/)—where I try to keep up a routine of daily postings (usually succeed—not always); each day I also posted the blog link on Facebook for my “friends” to ignore. (I’ll be kinder: Quite a few people actually read them—and some even commented! But, for the sake of space, we’ll not get into the positive-to-negative ratio.)

So … there are about ninety “weird-animal” poems here (a three-months’ supply). As is the case in my previous books of this ilk (see my author page on Amazon.com), I also have included a section called “Desultory Doggerel,” occasional pieces about my quotidian pursuits and observations. These pieces also originally appeared on Facebook.

The third section is called “Wolferel,” a term I coined a few volumes  ago, a term that applies to lines that I think are a bit ahead of “doggerel” on the road to PoetryLand but are not quite there yet. As I’ve said before, the Gatekeepers at PoetryLand are a fussy lot—not to be disrespected, disdained, bored, or otherwise annoyed. Maybe one or two of my offerings will tempt a border guard or somehow slip unnoticed through the gates (or perhaps the breakthrough might occur during a shift change? a nap? a moment of inattention?), but I’ll not know until I find that the authorities have discovered the lines—illegal aliens!—and deported them.

Or not.

April 3, 2017