Who knew?

[semperfiona]

I'm a poetry snob. In the car this morning Whad'ya Know was on, and a man was reading poems he'd written about WWII and his mother. The audience seemed to appreciate them, but listening to them was like watching a traffic accident. Forced rhymes and strained to non-existent meter. Excessive repetition of unevocative and overused words like "terrible".

Comments

[curgoth]

It could be worse. You could have a love-sick recently married cow-orker frequently asking for your opinion on his bad, bad love poetry that he's been text-messaging his wife.

[semperfiona]

Ouch! :;cringe::

Of course, I also acknowledge the irony that some of what I've written myself and to which I've subjected my readers may well be just as sucky in its own way.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

*shudder*

[queensheba.livejournal.com]

My boss brought in a small book of poems written by his deceased great-uncle. All of the poems were about the pope, and he thought our coworker who is very interested in the pope would like them.

They were the worst poems we had ever seen, any of us.

They included comparisons of the pope's power to "big elephant feet," and strange attempts at modern styles which included capitalizing every other word and arranging them strangely on the page like "the pope is a man OF and FOR and WITH and BY and OF the PEOPLE of the WORLD."

We didn't know what to say - we didn't want to be rude, but we were literally laughing out loud at the horrible-ness of these poems. Then our boss came downstairs and mentioned offhandedly that he thought they were pretty lousy poems, and did we see any merit in them? We felt much better.