Doggerel is…

• a poem that you wrote to a one-night stand…maybe in a 2 AM whiskey-and-Oxycontin haze
• the first paragraph of that novel you never seem to finish, even though you know it would be a bestseller
• the  snatch of dialogue that you think, “Wouldn’t that be a great scene in a movie?”
• your holiday-letters-in-verse that inspire the less cheerful to write one themselves, if only they could come up with rhymes for “divorce”, “sex offender registry”, “pyramid scheme”, or “police brutality”
• bawdy limericks that don’t necessarily rely on the word “Nantucket”
• the inside of a greeting card that you’d definitely buy…if it existed
• any prose that includes the phrase: “He smelled of booze, stale cigarette smoke, cheap cologne, and regret.”
• a clever reworking of a song lyric…or maybe those are the lyrics you mistakenly heard?
• a blurb of fake news
• a passage from an angst-ridden journal entry

Doggerel is any writing that is bad, tragic, unfortunate, clumsy, clunky, daring, self-conscious, shameless, shameful, ridiculous, truthy, hilarious, writerly, shittily magnificent, unsung, calamitous, inconsequential, playful, inchoate, aspirational, earnest, reckless, delusional, cheeky, stinky, and rich. Doggerel doesn’t seek a destination nor does it pursue acclaim or praise. It is writing.

Let us write. Daily. May we find simple pleasure in both the frailty and bounty of words.