Light Verse and Doggerel
 

Where, if anywhere, would you draw a line between light verse and doggerel?

I write light verse. Others write doggerel.

Getting beyond that, I guess it's no different than attempting to quantify the difference between serious poetry and doggerel. It's a matter of skilled and/or clever use of language, unique application of images, using the various poet's tools in a unique way rather than throwing out a clatter of cliches. I could go on and on, but either you recognize it or you don't, and there is obviously a large area where people will disagree, but by and large accomplished poets know the difference. I sometimes see "doggerel" used here (not too often - it's not a nice thing to say) and in every case except one (when it was used to describe one of my poems) I agreed.

But if there are specifics - rather than "feel" - for drawing the line between light verse and doggerel, I'd be interested in hearing them. To me, "doggerel" is essentially a synonym for "crappy" - but "crappy" in a simplistic, cliched way, rather than an overwritten and opaque way.

The term "doggerel" can also be applied to verse that's not intended to be light. There's lots of serious doggerel out there.

Many dictionaries seem to think doggerel means that the meter is clumsy or irregular, but I don't think that's how most of us use the term. We generally use it, I think, to mean verse that is very badly written. The flaws can be meter, rhythm, contorted syntax, unclever forced rhymes, or any combination of the foregoing. I agree with Catherine that doggerel can be intended to be serious, though I think to be doggerel and not just a bad poem the flaws have to produce at least an unintentional comedic effect, i.e., it needs to be so bad that it's almost comical.

One of my friends (not a poet, as such, though she can and does churn out a good poem from time to time) always refers to poems that rhyme, and are funny, as doggerel. To her they're not ''proper poetry''.

We've had countless discussions on this and I object to her reasoning. Light verse or humorous poems are not automatically doggerel, though many are, I won't deny, but so are many serious poems.

To me, doggerel means it's crap, similar to Michael's comment. Yep, if it makes you cringe, for any reason, it's most likely doggerel.

. . . Or, as I've tried to promote in the past, there is poetry - and there is poo-etry!

Jayne

To open a can of worms, where does that place, for example, Ogden Nash?

That's easy, I think, and maybe helps us find a definition of doggerel that includes the idea that the poet doesn't really know what he is doing, and there's little evidence of craft or skill. Ogden Nash, when he flouts meter and invents words to create a rhyme, is clearly doing so consciously and as a technique he knows how to deploy in an expert manner. If we ever had the sense that his lines resulted from ignorance or an inability to count beats, or that his rhymes resulted from a tin ear, we wouldn't enjoy him at all.

Nash strove to be "a good bad poet" as he called himself. He's the poetic equivalent of John Waters or Jeff Koons, who also used kitsch and camp for higher purposes. In other words, Nash is not doggerel.

The Best Doggerel of All Time
A Brief History of Doggerel and Nonsense Verse

compiled by Michael R. Burch

http://www.thehypertexts.com/The%20B...All%20Time.htm

There are several Ogden Nash poems here.

By the way, the first limerick on the page, about relativity, is not by Anonymous, but by Arthur Henry Reginald Buller. Here’s the version that appeared in Punch (according to Wikipedia and Quote Investigator):

There was a young lady named Bright,

Whose speed was far faster than light;

***She started one day

***In a relative way,

And returned on the previous night.

—A. H. Reginald Buller in Punch (Dec. 19, 1923)

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/19/lady-bright/

Thanks for the insights and links. I am gratified to know that others think about this.

Richard Kostelanatz includes Nash in his A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes and starts the entry with "Surprise."

Bob summed it up well.
Deliberate fooling around, that's clever, is funny whereas ignorance is not.

Ogden Nash makes you laugh. Doggerel makes you cringe. Simple.

Below is some advise I received shortly after I arrived at Erato in 2003, from some sage whose Identity I have long forgotten. The bad thing about it was that it didn't like my piece. The good thing about it was that it defined what a good piece should include. I have used this as a checklist for my pieces, ever since. Some might say this unknown master is responsible for all my success, and who am I to say different.

Sorry, Bugsy, but to me this one is trivial greeting card stuff of the Not-Ready-or-Deserving-of-the-Deep-End category. It's the kind of ditty that gives rhymed, metrical verse a bad name - the stuff free-versers point to when they dis' our efforts. There's been a plethora of this on Metrical, and it bothers me to see it migrating to the Deep End without something being said.
There's nothing awful about it, but neither is there anything very good. It's not particularly funny, the language is ordinary, you have an archaic rhyme-driven phrase in L6, and the meter falls apart in the final line just when you need a strong ending.
Compare this to the sophisticated rhymes and language and verbal counter-point of Lo's Monkey Girl (which you apparently felt required too much effort to read to function as Light Verse). In my opinionated opinion there is a level of craft and - and wit - in Monkey Girl that make it truly poetry, not just a rhymed ditty - and that’s what I feel is missing in your work.
*****************
[I dunno who he wrote this to – may or may not have been me]

To me, the difference between doggerel and poetry is the application of craft - wordplay, turns on language, creation of new words, puns, clever alliteration, strange and unexpected rhymes, introduction of unusual words, etc. And if you can also cross-cut that humor with additional layers of meaning or possible perception - irony, tragedy, uncertainty, political meanings - then you're cooking! I don't see any of this in your work. You appear to concentrate on simple cartoon situations and very simple rhymes (usually, only on the even lines, and too often depending on a name to help force a rhyme) and - as I indicated earlier - I don't think that's enough.

I totally agree with Michael Cantor. Either you recognise it or you don't.

I suspect the question is most often asked, and avidly discussed, -- though obviously not here! -- by those who have not read enough good light verse to be confident enough to decide whether or not they are writing doggerel, or who may need to be told, gently, that they are!

Down the road I did go,
Walking in the fresh white snow.

This is the couplet I used to quote, when I taught Creative Writing, as the perfect example of how not to write poetry.

Now that is doggerel, yet many people write stuff like that and don't realise how bad it is.

Jayne

And I use this one:

"No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass."

Invariably someone will recognise it, whereupon the Ohs and Yes, buts flutter down like cherry blossom. And then discussion begins.

No one's mentioned end-stopped lines, which I see as a major feature of doggerel. The use of run-on lines is normally required to make good verse.

Duncan

About 1964, In junior high, we studied Longfellow's Evangeline in some depth. I can remember about 2 lines of it now. But a bit of verse in a pal's "skin" magazine, which went;

She rode her bike down cobbled street,
A bouncy ride on tender seat;
And as she passed, I heard her say,
"The last damned time I go this way.",

I will probably still remember when I am on my deathbed.

Some doggerel has a certain tendency to be memorable, despite its lack of poetic grace.

Chaucer's tale of Sir Tophas was interrupted by the host, who derided it as doggerel, not worth a turd. Chaucer was mocking the bad verse of his day, but I think he was also enjoying himself as he wrote it. So, doggerel has a long history.

Is there a similar situation in free verse, or novels, or other arts , for that matter? That is, where a word like "doggerel" is used to describe a certain degree of badness?
Or, is it simply called bad.

That poem is not doggerel, Douglas. Far from it.

All clerihews are doggerel. It is part of the point.

Excellent thread, and you've all summed up many of the things that--to my mind--separate the poetry from the pooetry. (Great phrase, Jayne!) Off the top of my head, the only things I would add are...
1-Doggerel typically lacks the element of surprise, which is crucial not just to good light verse, but to humor in general. (Surprise can take many forms, from word choice to rhyme to unexpected points of view... and of course an unpredictable ending usually helps.)
2-Doggerel tends to be padded for the sake of meter and rhyme.
3-To me, end-stopped lines aren't necessarily a deal breaker; it depends on how they work in the poem as a whole.