How bad can it be before it can no longer be called poetry? I know y’all are fierce poetry advocates, so here’s an article on a poem, once highly praised, now considered the worst ever written. If that’s not enough bathroom reading for you, here’s a promising book: Very Bad Poetry.
Category Archives: Poetry
Today, Francis Turner Palgrave, Born 1824
Another poet’s birthday today. This time we have Francis Turner Palgrave, born in 1824. A friend of Tennyson and teacher of poor children, he may not have written much to remember today. Here’s the start of his poem, “Pro Mortuis.”
What should a man desire to leave?
A flawless work; a noble life:
Some music harmoniz’d from strife,
Some finish’d thing, ere the slack hands at eve
Drop, should be his to leave.
He’s rhyming of life with strife has become so popular, every beginning poet or songwriter does it at least a hundred times, calling for more English words ending in ife. (wife, knife, endrife, trife, shife, and other useful words.) Here are some of his other poems.
T.S. Eliot
Here’s to T.S. Eliot, born on this date in 1888.
Eliot is said to have said, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” I suspect most of us don’t really know what poetry is. The right words in the right order sound like poetry to us to the extend we can hear them.
Poems for Every Situation
No, really–every situation, such as “Ten Poems to Read When You Get Stuffed in Your Locker.”
“Feeble may be the scanty phrase”
Poet, shall this be all thy word?
Blow on us with a bolder breeze,
Until we rise, as having heard
The sob, the song of far-off seas.
By Henry Cuyler Bunner
Knockout, a New Literary Mag
Coming this October, a poetry magazine called Knockout. Co-founding Editor Brett Ortler says “we’re donating half the money we get from our first issue to Sudanese relief organizations. Our lineup for #1’s pretty good — it’s all poetry, and it includes a number of former US Poets Laureate, National Book Award winners, in addition to unpublished writers.”
3 School Girls
THREE school-girls pass this way each day:
Two of them go in the fluttery way
Of girls, with all that girlhood buys;
But one goes with a dream in her eyes . . . (from a poem by Hazel Hall)
Lately, I worry about nurturing the dreams in my little girls. I seem so naturally harsh and distant. I don’t want to be, but it’s like swimming against the current to change.
From “This Morning,” by Charles Simic
I’m just sitting here mulling over
What to do this dark, overcast day?
It was a night of the radio turned down low,
Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams.
I woke up lovesick and confused.
I thought I heard Estella in the garden singing
And some bird answering her,
But it was the rain. . . .
Taken from “This Morning,” by Charles Simic
Together in the Dark
They sit together on the porch, the dark almost fallen, the house behind them dark. . . .
Perfect Poetry
The Guardian is seeking nominations for great lines of poetry.