The Joys of Doggerel Verse

     I have been doing lots and lots of purging and reorganizing of late, and it turns out that I have written so much more in the last four years than I realized.  With every box of papers that I open and every notebook I go through, I keep finding more and more bits of stuff.  I really love silly verse, and apparently I have more of it than I remembered.  In addition to creating separate word documents for the more ambitious and lengthy pieces, I also have a growing multi-page document for the small pieces and the scraps of verse that I keep finding.  For instance, this piece was written in March of 2016:

An Ode to IOWA's

O fair and radiant standardized test,
You shine so bright, thou art the best!
We are with your fair presence blest,
As I chill with thee at my state's behest.

 

 

     Can you guess I was working in standardized testing when I wrote this?  There is so much more where this bit of nonsense came from.  One of the more ambitious projects was "Prologue to the Barista's Tale," an argument in verse for my bogus theory that Chaucer was inspired by coffee (despite the obvious historical inaccuracy).
     It's strange, but this silly, nonsense verse is definitely the phase I am in.  I made very few attempts at poetry before college, but after college it seems that silly poetry is the vast majority of what I have written.  I suppose this is in part due to my poetry class.  Growing up, I disliked poetry (but I loved Dr. Seuss...... go figure), and like every child my idea of poetry was limited to either AABB or ABAB -type rhyme schemes.  It was in high school that I began liking poetry other than Dr. Seuss and song lyrics.  Meter were discussed in my high school curriculum, but it wasn't until college that I really began to grasp and to dive more deeply into poetry.  Some of the stuff I wrote was more like free verse, but I've tried my hands at blank verse (I think?), English sonnets, Anglo-Saxon style alliterative verse, acrostics, and lots of haiku.  Limericks are a struggle, but I have learned that I really like iambic tetrameter.  I wonder why.  Maybe Dr. Seuss uses tetrameter-- I should find a copy of Green Eggs and Ham and scan it to see.
     I'm off to type up some of this stuff so I can put all the papers away.  Here's to finding more stuff to share!