Doggerel and poetry

Is this a poem, or is this doggerel?

December 31, 2017

many of us are fortunate enough

to find this eve

one to celebrate

but this year

we are sickened

by the fact that

there's a turd in the punch bowl.

The author, a published poet, offered it as a "poem", and I read it that way, at first. Then, reading it again to two ladies who laughed and laughed, especially delighted, as I was, with the punchline, I came to see it as doggerel, the best kind of doggerel I assured the poet, doggerel having almost as long and distinguised a history as poetry.

The difference between the two has to do with seriousness and expectation. We expect the humorous from doggerel, seriousness from poetry. By serious I mean some language that feels dredged up (Celan: poetry is the natural attention of the soul). This sort of attention must have been long or, if short, a shortness prompted from the length of a prior attention (we can't imagine how long it took WC Williams to write, so much depends upon a red wheel barrow...nor how quickly it must have happened when he wrote it.) Doggerel is much more immediate, the imprint of a conscious conversion from the necessary duration of poetic possibility to the brevity of supra-quick composition, often comedic. Good doggerel must look and feel dashed off; poetry can have that feeling but mustn't look that way.

Another way of looking at the difference: poetry is sometimes doggerel and doggerel is sometimes poetry, though they are not equal arts. I don't know what poetry is exactly but I know doggerel when I see it.

I told the poet, Sam Haskins, I liked his poem though I thought his poem was doggerel, and that my classification was by no means a criticism as doggerel is written by many esteemed authors. While The Britannica defines doggerel as a low, or trivial, form of verse, loosely constructed and often irregular, it also notes that doggerel appears in most literatures and societies as a useful form for comedy and satire. Furthermore, one of the earliest uses of the word is found in the 14th century in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, who applied the term "rym doggerel" to his "Tail of Sir Thopas," a burlesque of the long-winded medieval romance.