Posted on 08/08/2002 8:46:51 AM PDT by Gumlegs
Tom Payne reviews The World's Worst Poetry by Stephen Robins
If you seek bad poetry, look around you. There is so much available in cardshops, in newspapers, in advertisements, at Conservative Party conferences, that we should have no need to anthologise the stuff.
One hope might be to discourage people from writing more of it. But Peter Finch, writing in The Writer's Handbook 2002, does that well enough: "Do without shards, lozenges, lambent patina and stippled seagulls. If you work with rhyme, attempt to avoid the obvious."
Stephen Robins would hardly discourage bad poetry, because he claims to love it. His love seems to be for something that's "so bad it's good", and he's after laughs. But poetry of our own age must be too humourless for him. What he collects here predates the age of "lambent patina". Robins is more at home in the age when herds never appear in verse without lowing, and none of his poets lived long after the death of Queen Victoria.
He is an aficionado of tin-eared onomatopoeia. The sound effects in Theophilus Marzials's "A Tragedy" anticipate Edith Sitwell: "On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop, / As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top. / Plop, plop." And Edward Foot thinks trains go "Cranch, cranch, thud, rud, dubber-dub-rub, / Thudder, rubber dub-dub, dub-a-rub-rub-rub."
Robins finds poets obsessed with other surprising themes: James McIntyre wrote unstoppably about cheese; William B Tappan hails the tomato; and Harry Edward Mills sings of frogs in "The Early Frogs". It's like Wordsworth's "Daffodils", only for frogs.
If such an anthology is to have any use, it's to point out that even Homer can nod. The Wordsworth of Intimations of Immortality is sound asleep in "Ellen Irwin, or, the Braes of Kirtle". What a poem. Unfortunately, the last word in it is one of many misprints throughout the book. The poets here are quite bad enough when read as they intended to be read.
Reviewers of anthologies have to point out errors of omission, so here goes: first, why does the world's worst poetry come only from the British Isles, North America and Australia? No room, I suppose, for the Indian prime minister's verse on nuclear disarmament, nor for some of the utter misery to be found in Skating on the Sea, an anthology of Finnish poetry from Bloodaxe.
Robins hasn't thought far outside the box - he is not the first bad-verse anthologist to owe much to The Stuffed Owl (1930), by D B Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee. A snatch from Swinburne's "Dolores" would have been fun - it's a long Roman Catholic flagellation poem, done in a mariachi-band meter. And Robert Frost's "Out, Out - ", about a boy dying after a buzz-saw takes off his hand, is in at least four anthologies I have knocking around (including one of children's verse). Really, it belongs in this one.
A final word should go to Danielle Steel. Her verse can be judged by the prose with which she introduces Love Poems (1972):
"This is a special book about special people... each of their gifts has been precious, each moment treasured, each face, each smile, each victory, each defeat in retrospect all of it is beautiful, because we cared so much."
Anyone who treasures the beauty and gift of language should buy her Love Poems, to stop the book falling into more impressionable hands.
take care of your pearly white teeth
they fill your mouth with content
ignore this advice and beware
you'll probably learn what it meant
roses are red
sugar is sweet
i like the girls
that give me a treat
Perhaps the hardest part of that job, besides just reading the tripe, was writing the critique. Since the company makes its money from people who decide to publish their stuff, I didn't think I could completely reject this guy's stuff. On the other hand, I didn't want a book like this unleashed on the unsuspecting public for fear of the consequences and that my name might somehow come up in association with it. So I had to look for just those few poems which seemed they might have a tiny bit of merit and encourage him to work on these and get them ready, then to make general comments on the rest without being too harsh on his ego.
My pleasure. LOL!
i've danced with some girls who were naughty
they suggestively wiggled their body
i looked on with pleasure
but waited for pressure
i vamoosed when they had to potty
Then I knew --I was really naughty--
as I dreamed on them being squatty
at the potty!
Okay, that may get us both banished. I don't think JimRob is a big fan of toilet jokes! :0)
There once was a chick from Nan....
Are you sure that's wise?
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