Release the doggerels

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse exhorts readers to write philosophical clerihews.

I was unfamiliar with the form, but it’s not complicated. A clerihew is a four-line poem about some person or other with an AABB rhyming pattern. The sort of thing Ogden Nash would have written if he’d been less pithy.1

I contributed a couple, and I shamelessly cut and paste them here.

The Scotsman Thomas Reid
had a commonsensical creed,
a fondness for calico cats,
and questionable taste in hats.

The mustachioed John Dewey
might have gone all kablam and kablooey
if he had not understood inquiry
in a way that avoided such injury.

Continue reading “Release the doggerels”

At the Palais Royale

This is a poem written several years ago, back in May 2011. I came across it while looking through some old files. It resonates just at the moment, when my Facebook feed is flooded with paeans for Prince.

At the Palais Royale

Anyone can use these words in any situation.
These words are in no way special.

You kind of have already been there.
Say yes or no, uninterrupted.
This guy is, but that is not.

Prince is destroying
the minds of our Christian children,
because he was sexually deviant.
You know Superman.
Scooby doo.
That was racy.

My background was askew.
There were always fights,
but the bus driver didn’t care.
One of my first memories.
The craziest shit —
it was stamps, too.
We’d alternate mornings.

I can tell you every top ten soul song from that year.
It’s really not about making the music.

Sade disappoints me
White enough.
Beautiful, it reminded me of a concentration camp.
It reminded me of the moon.