Introduction
In July of 2000, I spent a very brief but happy period editing a weekly zine called Doggerel. The thing was sent out via email, a technique of publishing that enjoyed a brief vogue before blogs took over, and at one the undertaking point had some 1,400-plus subscribers, which seemed a lot to me then, but nowadays seems rather meager (after all, I am in the possession of a ventriloquist dummy who has managed to make himself a grand total of 1,800 MySpace friends). Nonetheless, I had a little digital poetry newsletter, it had a little audience, and regularly received letters and submissions, and that suited me. After all, I was publishing the most degraded nonsense I could write or find, and the fact that anybody at all was willing to read it rather delighted me.
Doggerel (later to be called Doggerel Weekly) specialized in the fringes of poetry, as its name suggests. I printed bawdy songs, limericks, rhymed threats, tombstone epitaphs, toasts, and essays concerning the worst poets in history. I was doing this just prior to the dot-com bust, and was hoping, rather naively, to make a little of that Internet scratch that seemed to be rushing into small start ups like a raging cataract. Several months after I began the project, I had not made a penny from it, and my life had gotten a little busy, and my interests had moved on to new projects. My output of the zine had dropped to considerably less than weekly, and so I quietly packed it in. I have always regretted doing so. Several years later, I spent a longer amount of time working on a similar project, this time as a blog called Bawd, which exists now as one of the many skeletons of abandoned Web pages that currently litter the Internet. (Several of the essays from Bawd are republished to the lower right, under the category "SEVERAL ESSAYS ON BAD POETRY"). I do this both for the sake of posterity, and also because I rather like many of the poems and essays I published, and might as well make them available again.
I warn you, though -- some of the material found within is exceptionally mean-spirited and vile-tempered, filled with grotesque imagery and abominable abuses of meter. If you have a taste at all for fine literature, this may not be the place for you. Go back to Proust, or Blake, or Byron, or whoever comforts your palate with profound thoughts and fine technique. You won't find a lick of that here.
Doggerel (later to be called Doggerel Weekly) specialized in the fringes of poetry, as its name suggests. I printed bawdy songs, limericks, rhymed threats, tombstone epitaphs, toasts, and essays concerning the worst poets in history. I was doing this just prior to the dot-com bust, and was hoping, rather naively, to make a little of that Internet scratch that seemed to be rushing into small start ups like a raging cataract. Several months after I began the project, I had not made a penny from it, and my life had gotten a little busy, and my interests had moved on to new projects. My output of the zine had dropped to considerably less than weekly, and so I quietly packed it in. I have always regretted doing so. Several years later, I spent a longer amount of time working on a similar project, this time as a blog called Bawd, which exists now as one of the many skeletons of abandoned Web pages that currently litter the Internet. (Several of the essays from Bawd are republished to the lower right, under the category "SEVERAL ESSAYS ON BAD POETRY"). I do this both for the sake of posterity, and also because I rather like many of the poems and essays I published, and might as well make them available again.
I warn you, though -- some of the material found within is exceptionally mean-spirited and vile-tempered, filled with grotesque imagery and abominable abuses of meter. If you have a taste at all for fine literature, this may not be the place for you. Go back to Proust, or Blake, or Byron, or whoever comforts your palate with profound thoughts and fine technique. You won't find a lick of that here.
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