Ten bad poems for every good one.

Kathleen Flenniken says, "ten bad poems for every good one."

Sounds right.

Sh!tty poetry month!

I'm almost embarassed to admit it, but Chizine, in honor of April being national poetry month, is holding "sh!tty poetry month" on their Chiaroscuro: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words page, and have invited all the poets they know to send them the poems that they're too embarrassed to publish.  They just posted the final week (at least, I hope it's the final week!), and OMG, some of these are pretty awful.  Makes you feel pretty good, to see how awful other peoples' poems can get.
So, you want to see awful poetry, check out:

• Introduction: April is Sh!tty poetry month
• Sh!tty poetry, week 1
• Sh!tty poetry, week 2 
• Sh!tty poetry, week 3
• Sh!tty poetry, week 4 

I'm even more embarassed to admit I have a poem (it's in week 3)... but not as embarrassed as I'm going to be if I  discover somebody ever read it.

• Check their Facebook page

Rammstein VS Cookie Monster

Wonder where all the readers went? Virtually everywhere in the world people tend to be more educated than their parents. This is no longer true in the United States. A report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower educational attainment than their parents.
full cartoon here


History of the Scienceers - The First New York City Science Fiction Club, 1929


"Gustave Flaubert. . . said, 'I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well-heated room, with the books one loves and the leisure one wants.'"

After much mulling and culling, we've come up with our list of the twenty best books of the decade. The list is weighted towards science fiction, but does have healthy doses of fantasy and horror.

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009:

San Fran Chronicle 2009 Best of Science Fiction Books and Poetry Books

Best of Crime B&N LA TIMES

Best of 2009 from Salon and The Millions

Worst of the Decade list
Analyses of works by Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and DH Lawrence showed these "unique word" charts are specific to each author.


What is it about poetry that brings out the worst in people?


"It was already clear that his own special study would be the physics of light, and he was naturally drawn to the poem of that name, and learned its last dozen lines by heart."

"The great work of 'saving nations and people'": In his Irish Human Rights Commission lecture, Seamus Heaney pairs human rights workers and poets in bringing "to light violations and injustices done to human beings by others."

Cookie Monster sings with Rammstein




Love Winter Too

Dear Earth take in this fairy breath. Let it
seep into the mischievous crannies, the
rooks and rocks. What is behind the lily,
the foregone conclusion? If we look
at the interstices, the common lines be-
tween sheets of rain. I wanted to write in-
to your heart but the chambers are closed. What
freedom in the rain when memory is for
sale? What response to give a fairy? We
manage, nonetheless, a raucous cheer
with the Daily Show, a tempestuous
cloud of letters. Even with pomegran-
ate molasses to soften the duck: we
cannot change, the most we can do is see.

They dance the serrated edges of the leaves, the milky surface of the pond.
--by Sarah Riggs

Theory: Mash-up

How to Write a Great Novel

From writing in the bathroom (Junot Díaz) to dressing in character (Nicholson Baker), 11 top authors share their methods for getting the story on the page.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703740004574513463106012106.html


A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families




Far Away (Oedipus Rex)

Stravinsky... And then somebody asks about Calcutta’s writers.
And Oedipus Rex again. Before the new phases of the moon
begin and you will fall in my veiny
hands again.

Grzegorz Wróblewski


"Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him under any circumstance to take part in chain-poems..."


Is there any good in saying everything? ~ Bashō

A poet in the Peace Corps in Mozambique

50 Years of Naked Lunch:

Panel bares all at ‘Naked Lunch’ conference

The Obakemono Project, a guide to Japanese folk monsters.

What to wear to sell a book

Citizen and Poet:

Ferlinghetti on the beginnings of his political consciousness


"Look, a poem either sends you a bill or writes you a check." David Kirby on Amy Gerstler • The New York Times



Ancient Music

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm.
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.

Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.

Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

- Ezra Pound

Wiig Reads Somers

Tweet Poem (Auto poetry, part 3)

I'm not sure why
I'm so fascinated by auto-poetry generation.* It's not really "poetry" in any real sense, but perhaps the raw material of which poetry is made. It can be a Rorschach test, a stream of babble that we put together to give us look into our own minds, or it can be a kick to the commonplace consciousness, putting together images and thoughts in weird combinations, stimulating sparks of thought. I was amazed, for example, how both Jim Stanley and Shelley Chernin took the same "beatnik ramble" and put it together into different, but both quite insightful, poems

So, check out the "longest poem in the world": Romanian student Andrei Gheorghe wrote a 'bot that grabs the real-time twitter feed, selects out posts that rhyme, and aggregates these into a continuous feed, with about 4000 verses added every day.
OK, frankly, it doesn't really make much sense:

I bought the wine and gushers. You bought the broken heart.

Ready for the summer to end and fall to start.

Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise:

why do the bad girls get the good guys and the good girls get the bad guys

It's all false love and affection

and my lil pony collection

No, not really "poetry" in any real sense, but like a lot of auto poetry, it can be weirdly hypnotic. The tweet poem is a window into the collective consciousness, a look at an instantaneous zeitgeist which is equal parts quotidian and philosophical, romantic and mundane and cynical.
And every now and then there'll be a good line.

I used to have a handle on life. And then it broke.

Desperately trying to cut down on the booze and smoke.

(thanks to slashdot for the link)
-----
*Maybe because I'm too lazy to actually write poems.

The Policeman's Beard (Auto poetry, part 2)

After writing about auto generators of poetry last week, my thinking drifted over to the book The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, first published a quarter of a century ago, back in that ancient era of 1984 (in computer terms, that is like the bronze age). This is a book, half text and half poetry, the first book to be "written" by a computer program, "Racter". It doesn't actually make sense-- of course, half of the fun is the fact that it doesn't really make sense-- but Racter sometimes comes up with text of strange, sometimes hallucinogenic intensity:

Racter writes:
A hot and torrid bloom which fans wise flames and begs to be redeemed by forces black and strong will now oppose my naked will and force me into regions of despair.

Often Racter writes with the simple diction of a Dick and Jane primer:

Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. This is interesting.

I like that. "They have love but they also have typewriters." He should have stopped right there.

("He"? Why am I calling a computer program "he"???)

Various people discuss Racter's text. Tiff comments that it's questionable as to what extent Racter "wrote the entire book itself without the influence of a human helper, which is of course a good point-- if nothing else, the task of chosing what to put in the book makes a big difference. Lance Barton reminisces about it as a "a bizarre novelty". Which, of course, is what it is.

More amusingly, in Atari archives, Bill Chamberlain (who co-wrote the program) gets Racter to write about itself. Racter shows strange insight:

"...My own dreaming is daintily incited by the delight of these conflicts. A monograph or periodical on my fantasizing is understood by a physicist. A cosmologist can sing a conversation with a computing-device; I understand that. But a doctor or obstetrician? No! So I cleverly will cry to myself. Craftily, inevitably I am pondering about me. There are neutrons and quarks and protons in me. They assist me in fantasizing and dreaming."

I can say no more about myself-- there are quarks and neutrons and protons in me.

The book itself is available as a pdf.

Auto poetry

Writing poetry is hard!

[1] Fortunately, in this ever-changing world in which we live in [2], computers can do it for you!

If you want to kickstart a poem and don't know what you want to write about, check out "the original poets online random line generator". Or try this line generator.

Prefer your poetry rhymed? Once you have that first line, Pangloss will write a quatrain for you with his Rhyme generator. Check out this baby-- I just wrote it:

testing the rhyme generator
the blue babboon eats lemons on a daily basis
Gleam the wisdom of our ancestors...
Reality is a staircase leading nowhere.

Well, maybe that one isn't quite ready to send to Poetry-- needs a bit of polish, but there's something there I can work with.

If rhyme doesn't do it for you, and you'd like something a little more freeform, Pangloss's site will put together a beatnik ramble for you. Or if you want a bit more edge, let it write based on Howl.

If that rambles too much, why not borrow some lines from earlier (public domain) poems? Angie McKlaig's poem generator will help you do that. Or poem of quotes

Of course, I'm not really suggesting that you start using the computer-soup as a method of writing serious poetry. While you sometimes do get something amusing, at best it's more in the line of poetry so bad it's good, not anything that comes within a country mile of what you'd think about calling good. It's more like Vogon poetry [3], really. But how about as a source of inspiration?

"Language-is-a-virus's" [4] site will generate a poem for you, too. And if you want to see the nuts and bolts of poem generation ("interjection, abstract noun!/ the concrete noun transitive verbs like an adjective concrete noun."), Thinkzone's poem generator shows you that it's little more than Mad-libs (You can even, if you like, change the pattern, and add or subtract from the list of words.)

Try it out-- let me know what you find!

And if you get something good, post it here.

I can only end by telling you "Beneath the surface of discord the poets speak."

Whatever that means.


Footnotes:
[1] cf. Teen-talk Barbie, 1994
[2] Paul McCartney has claimed that the line he wrote was "in this ever-changing world in which we're living"... but it doesn't sound like it to me. He should learn to enunciate!

[3] "Vogon poetry is widely accepted as the third-worst poetry in the universe." -- Douglas Adams

[4] "Language is a virus from outer space." --William S. Burroughs

Bad Poetry 2: the great Wergle Flomp

Continuing the discussion of bad poetry...

There is, of course, poetry that's so bad that it's good.. and then there's poetry that's even worse than that. That's where Wergle Flomp comes in.

The origin of Wergle Flomp is recounted by David Taub It has to do with the website poetry.com-- formerly known as the National Library of Poetry. (If you want to know about National Library of Poetry, Dave Barry explains all.) Turns out, what they do is to have an open poetry contest to which people are solicited to send poems... and then everybody who sends in a poem gets "selected" as a semifinalist to be in their anthology... a copy of which they can buy for only fifty dollars. Along with plaques, and other memorabilia. At, say five thousand "selected" poets, fifty dollars per poet-- that's a nice chunk of cash. There are exposes here and there.

But back to Flomp. What David Taub wondered was, just how bad can a poem be, and still get that letter "In celebration of the unique talent that you have displayed..." How bad can it be? He tried worse and worse poetry. Like, Stephen AbutLOL's "Wots a pome," featuring the immortal lines:

Very serious stuff is pomes
you can write them in your homes.

and which got that letter ... your poem was selected for publication, and as a contest semi-finalist, on the basis of your unique talent and artistic vision."

Even the pseudonym "Wergle Flomp", writing a poem that made no sense whatsover, got the letter.

So in the spirit of the great Wergle Flomp ("flobble bobble blop/yim yam widdley woooo/oshtenpopple gurby"), the Wergle Flomp poetry contest was inaugurated. The rules of the contest are simple: what's the absolutely worst possible poem that can be submitted to the poetry.com contest-- or the international library of poetry or any similar contest? It's a contest for poetry that's not just bad, but excruciatingly bad

A really good--by which I mean, really bad--Wergle Flomp poem is earnest and so so tone deaf as to be embarassing.

I'm happy to point out, by the way, that Cleveland features in the first stanza of the winning Wergle Flomp poem from 2008, Benjamin Taylor Lally's "FIRST EDITION, 2008":

1.
O, I also enjoy singing about America
When I am in the shower
O song—O awesome song,
O the mouth-song that comes out of my mouth,
Like food when I don't feel good.
O-hi-O, Cleveland is your capitol.
O, how this pen fits in my hand,
Like a magic microphone or something.
When I write, the words just plop out of it,
Out of me,
Me the poet.
I am a poet.

Hey, we're famous. Or something.

So, if you really want to see some bad poetry-- check it out.

Speaking of bad poetry...

Former GOP Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee writes:


Fancy Nancy

Here's a story about a lady named Nancy
A ruthless politician, but dressed very fancy
Very ambitious, she got herself elected Speaker
But as for keeping secrets, she proved quite a "leaker."

She flies on government planes coast to coast
And doesn't mind that our economy is toast
She makes the Air Force squire her in their military jets
There's room for her family, her staff, and even her pets.

Until now, she annoyed us, but her gaffes were mostly funny;
Even though it was painful to watch her waste our tax money.
But now her wacky comments are no laughing matter;
She's either unwilling to tell the truth, or she's mad as a hatter!

She sat in briefings and knew about enhanced interrogation;
But claims she wasn't there, and can't give an explanation.
She disparages the CIA and says they are a bunch of liars;
Even the press aren't buying it and they're stoking their fires.

I think Speaker Pelosi has done too much speaking;
And instead of her trashing our intelligence officials, it's her nose that needs tweaking.
If forced to believe whether the CIA and her colleagues in Congress are lying;
Or it's Speaker Pelosi whose credibility and career is dying.

I believe in the integrity of the men and women who sacrifice to keep us safe;
Not the woman who has been caught flat-footed, lying to our face.
I say it here and I say it rather clear-
It's time for Nancy Pelosi to resign and get out of here.

Bad Poetry

We like to discuss good poetry. But that's only a small part of the poetry world-- maybe it's time to talk about bad poetry! Heck, even searching the term "bad poetry" on google gives 218,000 hits! (only slightly fewer than the 246,000 hits for "good poetry".)


The BBC has a page of guidelines (with some examples) on how to write bad poetry, about.com has a bad poetry seminar, and Elizabeth Barrette has a page on how to recognize it, and there are plenty of pages on the web that give you bad poetry on the web-- in fact, there's even a site http://www.verybadpoetry.com/!

Bad poetry-- celebrate it? Eradicate it? Laugh at the awkwardness of it? Weep at the lost opportunities? Curse at the minutes (hours) that you wasted reading it, time that you'll never ever get back? Or, maybe, just blush in embarrassment-- yeah, maybe the real problem with bad poetry is that awkward shock of recognition. Maybe too much bad poetry is just a little too close to something you wrote when I was a teenager ...or the stuff I wrote last week.