Coffee Klatch

Several years ago, I received a book for Christmas entitled Very Bad Poetry. From the introduction of the book:

A compulsion to write verse, and a happy delusion regarding tallent–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.

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, shove 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 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.”

Some FANTASTIC stuff here!! It makes me want to take up poetry, because, while I have absolutely NO illusions of myself being a quality poet, I think it just might be possible that I could compete with some of these. Of course, they wrote their works from the perspective of a “serious poet,” and I would never dream of doing that myself. So maybe it’s not the same thing.

Anyway, I would like to share one poem from this book. It was written by Lillian E. Curtis back in the 1870s. It’s a great example of bad rhymes, cliches, squeezing in more words to try to get a rhyming word in there, an attempt at a moral, very irregular meter, and inspiration from a vegetable.

The Potato
What on this wide earth,
   That is made, or does by nature grow,
Is more homely, yet more beautiful,
   Than the useful Potato?

What would this world full of people do,
   Rich and poor, high and low,
Were it not for this little-thought-of
   But very necessary Potato?

True ’tis homely to look on,
   Nothing pretty in even its blow,
But it will bear acquaintance,
   This useful Potato.

For when it is cooked and opened,
   It’s so white and mellow,
You forget it ever was homely,
   This useful Potato.

On the whole it is a very plain plant,
   Makes no conspicuous show.
But the internal appearance is lovely,
   Of the unostentatious Potato.

The useful and the beautiful
   Are not far apart we know.
And thus the beautiful are glad to have,
   The homely looking Potato.

On the land, or on the sea,
   Wherever we may go,
We are always glad to welcome
   The homely Potato.

A practical and moral lesson
   This may plainly show,
That though homely, our heart can be
   Like that of the homely Potato.