Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet: My Life as a Doggerelist

I've always really enjoyed Trillin's work. While I haven't read any of his food books (for which he is widely... known? published?), I developed a taste for his memoirs and reportage (of which the most recent that I've seen is "The Color of Blood" and "Capital Fellows" -- in issues of The New Yorker from the past months) and thoroughly enjoyed his novel, Tepper Isn't Going Out.

I never was one for his "Deadline Poet" schtick, and I don't think it's just because of my own pretensions as a poet. I don't, for that matter, think my pretensions have much to do with it. It just... Well, I didn't think his "doggerel" (his word; I'd probably use, in my pretension, "light verse") was all that funny.

But I was at a poetry reading with a friend, was looking for something light, saw Trillin's Deadline Poet sitting by the elbow of the arm that held the hand which held my head as I half paid attention and half reflected on the pretensions of these other poets, and thought: what the hell, I like his stories.

Ugh. Nothing.

It's not just the (Trillin-tagged) gray, bland quality of the Bush I years (around which most of the book and Trillin's doggerel revolves) but there's just nothing to it all. The core -- the verse -- never much appealed to me but I suppose I expected or hoped the stories around it all to redeem. John Sununu? C. Boyden Gray? Early Clinton (Bill)?

I don't know, maybe I've become too earnest. But it left me cold. At least it's finished. And on we go.

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