Poem of the Month - February 2010

After writing my last post requesting bad poems, I am naturally a little nervous  about posting my own poetry in case it should, like a rabid dog, come back to bite me. But poems have to be fearless if they are to be anything at all, so I will proceed.

Keats said 'Let a poem come easily, or let it not come at all'. Ishmael Reed said 'Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination' So what is it - easy or hard?  Sometimes I find it easy - words fly from my imagination onto the keyboard and lines, whole stanzas appearing before me before I have brought them to consciousness. These poems usually speak to me and tell me something I didn't know before, and I usually like them. Sure, I might tweak them a bit to make them more elegant, but these are the robes of decency that surround and make more palatable the intense child of my inner workings.

At other times, I sit with an idea for a long time, it doesn't want to take shape, I will it into being. I might even do some research, as in the poem of the month for February. These poems may be more skilled and 'clever', I am proud of them but I find it more difficult to think of them as truly mine, rather I am a conduit for a wider conscience.

So here is one after the words of Reed, rather than Keats - one that was researched, brought about by the will to be seen as a serious poet rather than a natural one. I am surprised that I wrote it nearly seven years ago.

Branded Ethics

White-coated laboratory men,
determined not to be fobbed off
by human complexity,
or the female domain
labour to reproduce.

Fathers of parthenogenesis
herald the new virgin birth,
learning, from the lower species,
the art of immaculate conception.
No longer a passing fad;
now it’s master-minded.

A head of plucked baby teeth
produce a trillion identical twins.
Deaf, mute, blind, short-lived
but, it’s a beginning.

Even answering the Big Questions
is within the reach of the men from Stemron.
They have endowed their babies with souls.
Elohim’s disciples claim their baby clones
are proof of life in the somewhere else.

In Milan, multiple sclerotic mice show promise,
And the future’s bright for gay couples.
Soon we will know if Elvis lives,
The future for the Tassie tiger,
Who will own the first army of elite warriors,
Where the first Clone Olympics will be held
and if we really did descend from aliens.

May 2003

The world's worst poetry

I wonder what Keats et.al. would have done if it were possible to blog in the early nineteenth century. One thing I am pretty sure of, we would have had a whole lot more bad poetry to wade through to get to the gold. It is just so easy for anyone to enter whatever garbage pops into his or her head at any given moment.

This one was sent to me a while back, I don't know its origin, but it made me wonder if there was a website somewhere dedicated to bad poetry:

I had a puppy once - it died the next day
It made me feel a peculiar way

I had a puppy once, so happy and free
I saw it and  it followed me

My puppy was beautiful, I really loved him
So good and kind

Nothing good can exist, good just doesn't fit
The universe's law, I strangled it.

Given that judges around the world constantly debate as to what is good poetry, I wonder how we can so easily determine what is bad poetry. Obviously poetry doesn't have to rhyme or follow any of the conventional standards, otherwise many poems would not have been awarded prizes.

So apart from being thoughtless, is it simply that bad poetry that makes you feel bad, or feel nothing at all - soul-less? I think poetry does have to have a soul, a universal conscience of sorts. It also has to have a certain cleverness about it, or as my mum was wont to say, 'a good way with words'. My mum loved hymns, and her definition of a good one was the power of its words. She didn't much mind what the words were describing, or what the message was, as long as the message was strong. I remember feeling a kind of anger for days when she used the words 'how lovely' to describe the young Nazi's song from Cabaret - 'Tomorrow belongs to me', an emotion I could night quite place. I now identify this as a lack of universal conscience - truly, the music is very powerful and the words engaging, which given its pastoral setting and smiling faces makes it all the more grotesque.

I am sure 'Onward Christian Soldiers' and 'Auld Lang Syne' can likewise be viewed as grotesque by some, so obviously all poetry is subjective to an extent. So who are the arbiters of taste when it comes to deciding what is good and what is not? If anybody knows, please tell me.  I know that my poetry has never been met with any standing ovations, perhaps this means I am a bad poet, or that I am not driven sufficiently by my conscience. I do believe I am clever with words, but comparing myself to others, perhaps not quite clever enough.

Anyway, as good poetry is apparently so hard to agree on, let's build up a repository of bad poetry and see if we can't use these to decide which elements we want to avoid. Post your findings here and continue this conversation, in the interests of preserving what is good.