Bad Poetry

My girlfriend is an editor (or reviewer, I'm not sure what the title really is) for our school literary magazine, Crosscurrents, and so yesterday we got in a discussion about what people value in poetry and how they judge it. And there are a lot of things that people don't like in poems. Lack of punctuation, not spell checking, to many images, too few images, images that don't make sense, images that aren't deep enough, semicolons, capitals in weird places, periods in weird places (sorry cummings), and I could go on and on. So I wrote a bad poem. An interesting thing about attempting to write bad poetry is that if you succeed you've done your job, and if you fail, well then you have written a good poem. Win, win really. I don't know why but it what I felt I should write. It isn't that clever and it is really messy and ugly. I kind of like it. The last lines tickle me because those wavy red lines they put under misspelled words now just seem so angry looking, and the idea came to me while purposely misspelling a word and having my editor (I use OpenOffice cause I am cheap) continuously auto correct my spelling. I could turn off auto correct, but I have chosen to live in ignorance of how to really use my programs. So basically it was a self inspiring poem as well as a poem inspired by a fellow class mate who loathed (I can think of the word they used, but it was much better than loathe) for poetry that is so casual that it addresses the reader and the fact that it acknowledges that it is a poem, which I must agree is fairly obnoxious.

Also I am displeased somewhat with Blogger, it has given one of my lines a restriction in length, "to discover..." "...looked at" is supposed be one long 28 syllable line. So I am looking at ways to redesign my blogs look and feel(do blogs feel?) so that I can accommodate some of my longer lines. I played around with the HTML for about an hour today before giving up. There was a time in my life where this task would have been fairly easy, but alas I have given up coding and scripting for poetry and prose.

 
bad Poem

I am here writing this poet, and you
already hate it I am addressing
the reader. And I am going to screw
even trying to write a good poem.
I will break da rules dat tell me what I
ned to do But I am no master at
this game I am simply along for the
prolixity from my verbosity
my Everest never ending along these
slope I am climbing I ce AX in han.d
becuse I am at my wits end trying
to discover why a work of so call art is judged by such arbitrary terms that is isn't really looked at.
And so I break rules unknownly, and I
I ceep my mis-ellings God knows my text
editors hates them more than you ever
could;

Copyright 2007 William Curb