Last month I think was National Poetry Month. I was trying today to determine what exactly the opposite of poetry would be – it’s not prose, that’s not quite right though in many ways, yeah.
I think I decided that the opposite of poetry was doggerel.

When we were in Monterey for Left Coast back 2004, our friend Dick Lupoff warned us that if we were going to wander around – which we were – to beware the historical doggerel. Well of course then we had to keep an eye out and in wandering the very interesting streets, we did in fact, come across the monument with the Very Bad Poem. Groan-inducingly bad. I would run it here but all efforts to find it have failed. I’m sure I’m strongly affected by remembering as well that the detestable “Thomas Kinkade” is peddling his work there. Kinkade’s “art” is to art as doggerel is to poetry.

So the other day, Stu emailed me to let me know that he was stopping in the U (for university) District after work. For god knows what reason, “Stopping in the U district” offered itself for parody. I don’t know what set me off. I offer abject apologies to Robert Frost and his family, heirs and designs…

STOPPING BY THE U DISTRICT ON A SPRINGY EVENING

Whose bus this is I think I know
His house is in Puyallup though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch the students buying blow

The little Goths must think it queer
To stop without a Starbucks near
Between the bus and comic shop
On Thursday evenings when I stop

They hold their lattes at close range
And ask if there is some spare change
The only other sound’s the beep
Of cell phone ring and ipod peep.

I’m bringing Andi dinner home
No longer should I hither roam
I’m very sorry for this pome
I’m very sorry for this pome


Next week? We’ll offer our annual round table discussion of how much fun it is to sing Emily Dickinson to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”

“Because I could not stop for death it kindly stopped for me!”

and how much fun we had years ago teaching Beth Meacham and Tappan King to sing the above-mentioned “Stopping by Woods” to “Hernando’s Hideaway”

“Whose woods, these are, I think I know…..


and I have promises to keep. Ole!”