Too Much To Dream

The other day in the Corner they ran a snippet of a poem from the anti-war poets, which expressed the hope that the Columbia astronauts died very painful deaths.

In response to that, I wrote an anti-poet poem. It was intended to be a bad poem mocking bad poetry, and poets who, having abandoned rhyme and meter, beauty and imagery and metaphor, finally decided to abandon any sort of intellectual effort at all.

However, upon re-reading, I decided that it was actually too good a poem for my purposes. Not that it was good, mind you, just too good for the task at hand. In fact, much better than the poem I was mocking (if it sounds like bragging, you must consider the other poem).

It's a sad day for poetry when I (who suck at it) can write a deliberately bad poem and have it better than "real" poems by "real" poets.

This might be more to your readers' liking.

Hey, "Horatio," you think you're really cute, don't you? Keep it up, sweetheart, and I'll ban you. I've run out of what little patience I ever had for "cute" commenters. If you don't like what you read on this blog, stay the hell away.

Andrea, not long ago, I was compelled by circumstances to sit through a recitation of the most God-awful crap that ever masqueraded as poetry -- the sort of rhymeless, meterless, structureless cloud of unlinked images, whining, and execrable syntax that's more or less standard among the poetry-glitterati these days, I'm afraid. After he'd finished reading his "poem," the "poet" asked the audience for comments. So I made one:

"Why does that qualify as poetry? What sets it apart from prose?"

Note that this was in no way a condemnatory statement. Yet it brought the house down. Stravinski would have been so pleased!

Some of the unrhymed stuff is good, and has a rhythm of its own, but the "poems" I am seeing from the anti-war people are all textbook examples of everything we were taught to avoid in Creative Writing 1: hackneyed imagery, clichés, sweeping generalities, abstract concepts. I had to write some poems too for that class. I am by no means a poet, but when I write better poems than the ones these people came up with... I feel kind of embarrassed for them.