Today I made my Creative Nonfiction students do it doggerel-style, but first I had to define for them the word "doggerel." None of them knew what it was. Kind of tragic, that. Apparently they didn't spend their lives so far scribbling limericks and other light verse characterized by loose or irregular measure--or if they did, they didn't know what to call it.
We've been looking at lyrical prose that employs some of the tools of poetry (rhythm, sound repetition, compression) while remaining prosaic (in the best sense of the word). How difficult would it be to translate "Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village, though" into prose? The problem with familiar verse is that even if we move whole phrases and revise words, we'll still here that rhythm pattern in our minds and look for it in the prose.
So I made them write their own poetry--or doggerel. It didn't have to be any good as long as it was done within ten minutes. Then students traded papers and each student had to translate a classmate's light verse into prose, maintaining a sense of poetry without resorting to formal scansion or rhyme.
It wasn't easy. Once the rhythm pattern of a limerick infects your mind, it's hard to make that doggerel play dead. But in the end they came up with some really interesting bits of writing as well as a new respect for the possibilities of poetic tools within prose.
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