Ralph La Rosa recently reminded me of this thread by reposting his compilation of Emily Dickinson tailgaters (see
post #60 above).
I realize that the thread has been dead for eleven years, but it might be good to resurrect it just to add a little historical context for future scholars. Heh.
At the time that this thread was initiated, only moderators were allowed to post challenges to Eratosphere's time-wasting/writer's-block-beating FunExcise Board (now called Drills & Amusements, and focused mainly on competitions with monetary prizes). Moderators often had better things to do than think up ways to amuse the proletariat, so members would suggest challenges to moderators for reposting. To keep them from pestering the moderators with such fluff, members were eventually given the authority to initiate threads themselves.
I had seen Robert Mezey's "More Tailgaters" in
Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse (Special Double Issue, Nos. 40-41, Spring-Summer 2003) a few months previously, and thought exploring that form might be a fun challenge for Eratosphereans, so I suggested it to Alicia. I used Mezey's title for the form.
I didn't know the origin of that name until years later. In
a 2011 discussion of the form published on Lewis Turco's blog--in which several Eratosphereans participated--Robert Mezey mentioned "the pageful of them in my Collected Poems, which I called 'Tailgaters'—a name invented by Miller Williams. (William Cole published a bunch of his, calling them 'Uncoupled Couplets,' but I prefer 'tailgaters')." Mezey later added to that conversation, "Phyllis McGinley was writing tailgaters some 40 or 50 years ago — I can still recall one:
When I have fears that I may cease to be, / I have another drink, or two, or three."
In post #4 of this thread, Mario Pita refers to
Richard Armour's 1966 Punctured Poems: Famous First and Infamous Second Lines, containing what is obviously the same form.
An article of dubious provenance (post-1975) salutes Armour, but also states, "Actually, this concept has been around awhile, and has been independently discovered by many people," before authors Mary J. Youngquist and Harry W. Hazard present some of their own.
Several tailgaters from this thread were published in Kate Bernadette Benedict's
Bumbershoot Issue 1 (Winter 2006), grouped as "
Tailgaters Mixer," "
A Beer and a Bard," "
Tailgaters Picnic," and "
PG-13."
In 2012, Bob Schechter later suggested the form as a Washington Post Style Invitational (challenge posed
here, results
here). One contribution there pretty much sums up the essence of the form:
Quote:
Who will believe my verse, in time to come,
Was used for something so completely dumb? (William Shakespeare / Brian Allgar)
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Rogerbob, might you be persuaded to post a compilation of all the contributions to this thread that you deleted for publication? I'd enjoy seeing them gathered in one spot.