A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend about bad poetry. Now let me establish right away that I am not the greatest poet to ever walk the land. I'm much more comfortable with prose, both in execution and scholarship. I'm not the best prose stylist in the world either, but all this is beside the point. My friend and I concurred that bad poetry is indeed a repugnant thing to encounter, especially in a place such as a coffee shop poetry reading (I refuse to call it a slam). In this kind of setting, where listeners sit in rapt and starstruck wonder as turtlenecked waifs in black berets or English caps read their hackneyed verse with the sort of epic cadence and over-emphasized meter that is typically reserved for an inspired reading of Beowulf, I feel a little uncomfortable, as if my failure to be impressed borders on artisitic heresy.
But to celebrate bad poets everywhere, I wanted to share some particularly malodorous examples of tortured verse from early Colonial American history. Enjoy.
Rise Oedipus, and, if thou canst, unfold
What means Charybdis underneath the mold,
When Scylla solitary on the ground
(Sitting in form of Niobe) was found,
Till Amhphitrites darling did acquaint
Grim Neptune with the tenor of her plaint,
And caused him send forth Triton with the sound
Of trumpet loud, at which the seas were found
So full of protean forms that the bold shore
Presented Scylla a new paramour...
And so on -- Thomas Morton (America's first bad poet)
And, my favorite couple of lines from bad poet and Puritan minister, Edward Taylor:
In this sad state, God's tender bowels run
Out streams of grace; and He to end all strife
When I imagine God's grace flowing down, somehow it doesn't bring thoughts of diarrhea to mind, but maybe that's just me.
No comments:
Post a Comment