Very Bad Poetry (2 page)

A compulsion to write verse, and a happy delusion regarding talent—that is the beginning of a very bad poet. Very bad poets are perpetrators of a unique and fascinating type of writing. Unlike the plainly bad or the merely mediocre, very bad poetry is powerful stuff. Like great literature, it moves us emotionally, but, of course, it often does so in ways the writer never intended: usually we laugh.

This is no simple task. “Literary is a work very difficult to do,” wrote very bad poet Julia Moore in the preface to
A Few Choice Words to the Public.
And she is absolutely correct. To continue her point, very good literary is a work very difficult to do—and so is very bad literary.

Writing very bad poetry requires talent—inverse talent, to be sure, but talent nonetheless. It also helps to have a
wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, a bullheaded inclination to stuff too many syllables or words into a line or a phrase, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence.

Some poets are granted these qualities by the Muse only temporarily—and then they go on to write good poems. Others are blessed, if that is the word, for their entire career.

So what is a very bad poem? Usually it is testimony to a poet’s well-honed sense of the anticlimactic. A poet must be immeasurably moved by some grandiose emotion or event—say, a horrific catastrophe—commit it to paper, then veer from the sublime to the pedestrian at precisely the right—which is to say, the wrong—moment. One minute the poet is describing the sinking of a ferry, the next mentioning how much the fare was.

Often it is a matter of using inappropriate words. The poet, eager to keep up a rhyme or meter, shoves in the only word that will do—and, of course, it is the wrong word. (“Fear not, grand eagle, the bay of the beagle” comes to mind.) Or the ever-optimistic poet seems to think that he or she can slip in a word that
almost
rhymes, thus creating exciting and certainly unique not-quite-rhymes such as
Havana
and
manner, pygmies
and
enigmas, mud
and
God.

And typically very bad poetry bears the weight of overenthusiastic use of literary devices—alliteration, footnotes, and most commonly, bad metaphors—not to mention bizarre, if excited, imagery, as in the following, by Amanda McKittrick Ros, a bad novelist turned worse poet. (Should the reader wonder, this is a somewhat
different
description of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.)

But ultimately a very bad poem is more than one that violates literary conventions, poetic meter, and grammatical rules. It contains an element of art—that certain something that marks the poem as a masterpiece. As with great art, we can’t exactly define a very bad poem except to say we know one when we see one.

And so we are blessed with poems such as “The Spleen,” “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese,” “A Pindaricque on the Grunting of a Hog,” and “An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy.” For, as the very bad poet James McIntyre noted, all poets, good and bad,

This book celebrates these chugging poets.

N
ot the most compelling personality (a brief biographical entry in a literary encyclopedia includes the following descriptive words: peculiar, melancholic, argumentative, inherent indolence, almost pathological shyness, coarseness, irreverence, bitter, misanthropic, lover of luxury and pomp, querulous), John Armstrong was a Scottish physician who wrote a famous didactic poem on preserving health.

Despite his rather fearsome reputation, a favored few found him “sweet-tempered and whimsical,” although those reading “The Art of Preserving Health” might find
bilious
more appropriate.

Book II—Diet

I
n Alfred Austin’s monumental
The Human Tragedy,
his heroine, Urania, poses what for the poem is a rather quick question:

Such is
The Human Tragedy,
which the prolix poet viewed as his magnum opus and over which he labored for many years, through four editions. Although his work was largely ignored by the critics and the public, Austin remained unconcerned, quite convinced of his own Byronic literary genius, which also extended to the writing of plays and an autobiography. According to the latter, his first book bore the wonderful title
Randolph, A Tale of Polish Grief
and sold seventeen copies. Largely because the conservative government wanted a safe, conservative poet, Austin became England’s poet laureate.

Supposedly pompous, egotistical, and certainly verbose and prone to using obscure words and phrases, the poet was also known for his breast fixation, which is much in evidence in his poetry. Breasts appear in often unexpected ways or places, often doing unexpected things, such as ploughing the brine or opening doors. A notable specimen of breasts on a platter occurs in Florence.

The following excerpt, from the same extremely long poem, is a fulmination against what Austin apparently considered a scourge of mankind—the padded bra.

XI

XII

N
othing is known of T. Baker, reports D. B. Wyndham Lewis, who rediscovered the poet’s work, “except the fact that he was inexhaustibly impressed by the powers of steam”—so much so that Baker wrote a two-hundred-page poem on the steam engine.

Canto IV

L
ittle is known of Samuel Bently except that he penned the following poem on the death of the Reverend Dean, whose demise one author calls “one of the least moving in literature.”

A
n American poet with a penchant for the melancholy, Mrs. Marion Albina Bigelow was a regular contributor to several periodical columns, turning out poems with bleak titles such as “Two Smothered Children.” Of the nearly three hundred poems she wrote, a large number were elegies, often crammed with clinical descriptions of a dying person’s last minutes, as in these lines from her poem “Ellen”:

Bigelow’s depressing outlook (attributed to all her brothers dying from consumption) apparently found an appreciative audience. In fact, the editor of her book of collected poems,
Songs of the St. Lawrence,
found fit to proudly state that “the author is wholly incapable of levity and the reader will find nothing of it in any of her productions.”