"We both have shiny happy fits of rage"

[larryhammer]

It's been a while since I reviewed a collection of bad verse -- for which, my apologies, as I know so many of you are eager to learn about this stuff.* Today's volume is Teen Angst: A Celebration of REALLY Bad Poetry edited by Sara Bynoe. The first words that come to mind, trying to describe it, is "authentically bad." There's a quality to the badness here different from, say, the stuff in The Stuffed Owl -- professional (as it were) bad poetry has a certain kind of polish that makes it of a piece all the way through. There's more variety on display in the amateur verse here. For example, one thing that strikes me is how many poems aren't actively bad (while still not being, yanno, good) until one reaches the totally flubbed ending -- halfway-competent until a dismount made of fail. It's like the difference between a Bulwer-Lytton contest entry and the slush pile.

Not all of it, of course -- there's a lot that is made of fail throughout, with vague statements, banal phrases, tendentious thoughts, and wretched meter and awkward syntax both reaching to make the hackneyed rhyme. (I am bemused by the poems without punctuation that capitalize each line.)

Naturally, I love this stuff. It may not reach the, er, depths of Pegasus Descending, but it's a worthy addition to anyone's bad poetry shelf -- with bonus getting-in-touch-with-your-inner-teenager moments. By way of illustration of that, it's organized into thematic sections like "I Will Never Love Again Poems," "No One Understands My Pain Poems," "Life Sucks and I Want To Die Poems," "Fight the Power Poems," and (my favorite) "Odes to Famous People That Felt Your Pain Like Kurt Cobain." Yeah, these are teenagers.

In case you are worried about mockery, all entries were submitted by the poets, years later -- usually a decade or so later. They mock themselves in their introductions, so you can mock without guilt.


* If only so you can avoid it.

---L.

Comments

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

(I am bemused by the poems without punctuation that capitalize each line.)

Hmm, do you suppose that has anything to do with MS Word's auto-replace feature?

[larryhammer]

Considering that there's others that don't capitalize lines (both with and without punctuation), I get the impression it's a deliberate choice.

---L.