Dog Gone Bow Wow

Repetition of variants as means of construction. Rift on Riffaterre

According to Michael Riffaterre, the poetic text is structured in such a way that it repeats many variants of the same invariant. This invariant is the semantic nucleus of the text, to which Riffaterre eventually gives the name "hypogram". The hypogram, which determines and generates the written poem, is an important index in understanding the poem. We can find the hypogram of a text by bearing in mind the various rules governing its creation: overdetermination, conversion and expansion.

Text Derivation by Johanne Prud’homme and Nelson Guilbert
http://www.signosemio.com/riffaterre/text-derivation.asp

Nicely introduces this dog-themed verse

gaudy, dog-eared doggerel
before you get the gaybies,

before becoming smitten —
bitten by the bitch’s wit

From the concluding lines of Andrew Eastman's “Dog-and-Pony Show” in Contemporary Verse 2 (Vol 38 No 1).

Another bone … the beginning of the “Doggerel” entry from The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th edition)

DOGGEREL (original unknown). Rough, poorly constructed verse, […] Northrop Frye has characterized doggerel as the result of an unfinished creative process […]

And the tail wags …

And so for day 1397
10.10.2010