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Good, bad poetry
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Most poets have written at least one resounding howler. Boom-lay, Boom-lay ...
There’s nothing like a guilty pleasure. As I once again promise myself to finish reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, a novel that has been described as “grimly comic,” I’m reminded of the grimly comic as it exists in poetry. Orwell once described a bad poem as a “graceful monument to the obvious” and a good, bad poem will usually hold my attention till the end and produce a smile. Usually a bad poem overreaches. It’s a well-wrought urn sculpted of cheese. As a good, bad poem attempts the heights of the marvelous it flounders, wavers and lands with a thud, either through a sing-song rhythm that gives the gravity of its message a counterpoint of unintended melodrama, or it makes the assumption that the personal world of the author is of equal importance to the reader, or any number of other wonderful flaws that put it head and shoulders above the attempts of a million other poets. It’s the poem that produces a guffaw that you can’t really forget, because it succinctly summarizes, or describes, rather than enacting. It describes “what I did on my summer vacation” or eulogizes that special someone who has passed from our lives with a uniquely maudlin tone, or it simply falls flat in a particularly amusing way that is unforgettable.
Whatever the transgressions of your favorite bad poem, most poets have one. In the unoriginal and sentimental presence of a truly great bad poem, the reader is awestruck by a feeling of calm. When bludgeoned by cliché, unsuccessful rhyme, sentimentality, and trite turns of phrase, most readers somehow know instinctually that a suspension of disbelief isn’t what’s called for. The worst poems want our firstborn. They take a year off our life. They drag us into a dark hallway and reveal an even darker secret that we will never shake. The worst poems haunt our being until we come to terms with the fact that through sheer luck or a most clever sense of irony the poet has struck a major vein of literary pyrite. The worst poems are immortal and we are not. Of course, describing a poem as merely good or bad is absurd. There are too many gradations between these two arbitrary categories to make these types of distinctions really work, but the bad poems remain. They exist for a reason, I think. It might be that their example defines what we aren’t and by serving that purpose we become more certain of what we are. Unless, of course, the author intended to write a bad poem. In that case, we become aware of the hooks, pulleys, strings that make it work and it’s just really not the same. The truly good "bad" poem is written completely unintentionally. Reading “Gunga Din” by Kipling for example
'E lifted up my 'ead,
An' 'e plugged me where I bled,
An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water—green;
It was crawlin' an' it stunk,
But of all the drinks I've drunk,
I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.
or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge
Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound :
It flung the blood into my head,
And I fell down in a swound.
are both somewhat similar to listening to a 17-minute song like "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly (to make a rock analogy). These are the kinds of poems that build in faux intensity but ultimately lead nowhere. Telltale signs: The monumental marathon of patience to get through it and then the "huh" feeling that follows. But both of these poems do seem to have some certain quality that keeps them from the realm of the truly horrific. Coleridge’s use of a word like “swound” and Kipling’s dim-witted misrepresentations of bravery in cartoonish Cockney slang are memorable, but the truly great, bad poem goes beyond the vulgar, the banal, the sentimental, and the quasi-patriotic presents us with another world entirely.
The truly great bad poem is so bad that the reader half suspects that some subtle sarcasm might be afoot. Poems written by the Scottish poet William McGonagall, for example, qualify as some of the truly worst ever written in the English language, but his poems also have an unintentional comic genius that is also completely disarming. Some would place Wordsworth (and some Auden, who said "poetry makes nothing happen," just don't say that to Lawrence Ferlinghetti) in the territory of the lame, or mention Chicago poet Vachel Lindsay's "boom-lays" as a prime example of bad poetry, but these poets wrote with a skill that often sabotaged what might have otherwise been successful careers—as writers of truly great bad poetry.
James McIntyre (dubbed the “Chaucer of Cheese”), however, gets my vote as worst poet of all time. His infatuation with cheese caused him to write many poems in honor of his favorite dairy product. These poems (or “glees” as he called them, I guess because it rhymes with cheese) are ludicrous and yet somehow completely unforgettable.
The poet fantasizes about monster and mammoth cheeses to the extent that the reader begins to question the sincerity of the poet, but by reading on, it is discovered that McIntyre was entirely serious. I grew to admire him even more after I learned that he was published in some of the major newspapers of the time as comic relief but never allowed the fact that his entire audience was publicly laughing in his face to stop him from writing yet another shlocky epic about his favorite stinky topic.
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