I seem to be better at telling stories than anything else in my poetry, everything else seems a bit too forced, whereas telling stories comes a naturally. I don’t really have the inclination to write long things like novels or even short stories, so instead I am going to work with what many pompous people refer to as ‘doggerel.’
Since modern poetry is not really appreciated by Society At Large, I want to write things that are easily accessible by those folk. In order to accomplish this I have decided to start with so-called ‘children’s literature.’ More precisely fables, or fractured fables in my case. I sort of have Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes in mind, but I want to make up my own stories instead of retelling fairy tales.
Thus, I have come up with the Castle-town Idea.
I was at a graduate poetry reading the last semester and the poet who read seemed proud of her interpretations and meditations of some obscure Russian, something I was not interested in at all, and found quite boring. However, at the end, somewhat abashedly, she presented us with the delightlyfully Terrible Tale of Nigel Nasty. Something she referred to as doggerel. It was great. She seemed a much better storyteller than a poet.
So in this vein, each week I am going to present a character sketch of an inhabitant of Castle-town, or the outline of a section of town in the form of rhyming doggerel. I have decided to get away from attempting to write and instead work on providing brief moments of amusement, even if the amusement is not due to the story, but instead through the audacity of the method of storytelling.
Without further ado, I give you the first installment of Castle-town: Miz Grumblewort.