because we have had a thread with BEST poems i thought we could post pieces we thought were worst.
:)
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because we have had a thread with BEST poems i thought we could post pieces we thought were worst.
:)
One of the worst poems I have ever read was "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. I only mention it because it is famous.
What didn't you like about it? The simpleness of it? Lack of imagery?Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I hate it so much when people think crap like 'The Desiderata' is poetry. But how can you educate these people?
this very one :)Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
it has that feeling of interruptedness.
for me chicken is the meat rather the cockerel/pullet or hen
The Desiderata?Quote:
Originally Posted by Sospira
can you elaborate please.
Well, it made no sense (to me), but the reader is expected to waste time trying to make sense out of it especially since it is famous.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sospira
Also, nothing, rather than so much, depends upon that wheelbarrow or those chickens or the rain.
Also, I kind of like getting my butt kicked for not liking it.
Everyone should write best and bad, however, to evaluate poem is on a reader side, but this doesn't mean who once writes a bad poem forever he is bad.
Conflict and inspiration sometimes are present on a poet mind sometimes not, thus not always the poet is ready to write a poem, but he can write one verse or two verses other who is not well familiar in poetry cannot.
This poem of a well-known English poet William Black doesn't admire me although many people love it because of its very simple words
I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath to find end! to which extent it should be ended? then he was grown in anger to be as a poisoned tree, if we compare it with Shakespearean poems it is nothing
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine -
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
I like the imagery in all of Williams’ poetry. Interpreting/understanding him can be difficult because so much of what he writes is based on or inspired by events or objects in his personal life that the reader would have no way of knowing about, unless he/she was familiar with the background (– one thing that Google is good for!).Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
His inspiration for The Red Wheelbarrow was, in fact, a red wheel barrow in the backyard of an old Negro fisherman whom he knew. Similarly his poem Young Sycamore was based on a photograph called Spring Showers – New York by a friend of his, Alfred Stiegliz. I never could figure out what he meant by the lines
between the wet
pavement and the gutter
I thought it had some sort of symbolic meaning until I saw the photograph, and then I realized that he was just literally describing what was in the photograph (although there still may be some symbolism to it). The influence was bi-directional. Another of William’s friends, Charles Demuth, painted his famous The Figure Five in Gold after being inspired by another Williams’ poem, The Great Figure.
The worst poems I have ever read were ones written by myself. I posted a couple of them on LitNet, and they got the comments they deserved. :smile5: I've pretty much given up poetry now for short stories.
I don't have a single poem in mind, but the type of poem I really hate is the sort of pretentious, free verse drivel that is only produced by people (I think) that are trying too hard to create 'art'. The sort I mean is the sort that would go something like this:
El Notche del cabre!!!!?!
I walked into the moonlit night
And met a woman who was getting her sustenance from binsshe said
'I can taste rainbows when I hold my nose in the air
and point downwards
into abysses
like
Dante's peak,
and with glass bottom chocolates'
i wondered if
(Cui dono lepidum novum libellum)
I had invented timeAnd thought I could see all of creation
at the end of abeer soaked night.
?
Trampoline
dreams
I
me
I
!
in a shopping market I
there was a bang and
(Arma vamque cano)
buscuits.
I like "The Red Wheelbarrow". Why (I wonder) does "so much depend" on it? However, I also like the concept looking not for merely bad poems (they are myriad), but for famous poems one dislikes. I once had an argument with my mother about one of her favorite poems, "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manly Hopkins. Here's the poem:
My side of the argument went something like this:Quote:
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Lay off the "dappled things", Gerard. What's wrong with plain, unvariegated color? Also, why compare the spots on a trout to a technique in painting, if we want to wonder at God's beauty? Shouldn't the comparison be made the other way around? Isn’t the artist’s brush a poor imitation of God’s handiwork?
I love "Spring and Fall", although when I read it as a young boy I had no idea what it meant, and didn't even have the slightest notion what "unleaving" referred to. In fact, I thought that “unleaving” meant “staying”. I liked the sounds, though.
But "Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)" seems to me to be the worst of Hopkins - cloying, cute (who knows how), and worshiping diversity and dappling just because they can be sentimentally admired in alliterative, clever lines.
Hopkins’ talent -- the skill with words, the alliteration -- is wonderful. However, I can't really buy "...For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow..." I suppose one can picture this image, if one tries hard enough, but it is forced. I can't imagine myself looking at the sky and saying, "Hmmm, looks like a brinded cow." Or if I did say that, it would be a bit like seeing "duckies" or "horsies" in the clouds.
I can’t really blame my Mom for liking “Pied Beauty”. She had freckles. But Wallace Stevens once said that, “sentimentality is a failure of feeling.” I like dappled things as much as the next person, but it seems mere sentimentality to glorify the strange over the ordinary, the fickle over the constant, and stippling over a strong, steady stroke of the brush.
I never saw that before, but it's no worse than "The Leaves of Grass", and many people think that's good poetry.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sospira
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gongsu/d..._textonly.html
Then there's William Topaz McGonagall, poet and tragedian of Dundee, has been widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language.
http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/
try:
http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/...river-of-leith
or
http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/...ridge-disaster
The Tay Bridge Disaster may be his most noteworthy. Read it and see why.
It may be apocrypal, but the "back story" I heard about "The Red Wheelbarrow" drew upon Williams's occupation as a pediatrician and that one of his young patients found the scene outside the window of his sickroom to be somethat comforting. I didn't hear the story until decades after I'd first read the poem, but I don't believe knowing the impetus of the piece really affects it one way or the other.
The poems I can't stand are those that are tailor-made for mainstream middle-brow tastes, banal and safe and bland. I also resent poems that are over-rated. Please "Google" critical comments on Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees," as well as this piece on a great Robert Frost poem that is woefully misinterpreted by American educators:
Why High School Teachers Can’t Read Poetry by John Kilgore
http://www.thescreamonline.com/essay...01/poetry.html
I don't know much about Williams' poetry, so I really can't complain about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by 108 fountains
However, as far as imagery goes, I suspect I would get more out of shuffling a tarot deck and interpreting what pops up in a Celtic cross spread than I would in trying to make sense out of the images that are supposed to be in poetry.
Me neither, but you are probably right about there being nothing more to it than what a literal interpretation would offer.Quote:
Originally Posted by 108 fountains
"Pied Beauty" doesn't bother me. I like the sound of it even though I have no clue what a dappled thing or a brinded cow might be, nor do I care to find out. My favorite Hopkin's poem is the one that starts "Margaret, are you grieving?"Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
But "brush"? A poem is made out of words, not paint. It is about sound, not images.
Having said that I don't like many of the limericks that Edward Lear wrote even though they have an acceptable sound to them. I would consider them among the worst, but famous, poems I have ever read. Of course his poem about the owl and pussy cat was brilliant.
I had to look up Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata". I don't recall hearing it before, but it seems like reasonable advice. I agree that Leaves of Grass would put me to sleep faster, but then it is longer.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
I love hating that kind of poetry, but what are you going to do when someone you know offers you something like that hoping that you will be the first person to truly appreciate it?Quote:
Originally Posted by Poetaster
I hate loving that kind of poetry. It's a good question, I honestly don't know. Knowing me, in all my typical Britishness, I'd likely not say I hated it to their face. I don't like what that says about me however.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
108 can you post here to read? thanks.Quote:
Originally Posted by 108 fountains
*yep this reminds of poem made up of punctuation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Poetaster
like this:
....
::::::::
)(*
^%$£
~?????
!!!!!
'
No doubt Hopkins' poems all sound great. My comment about brush strokes referred to Hopkins line "For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim". "Stippling" is a technique in painting in which the painter produces "dappled" (spotted with color or light) things with points or very short slashes of paint. I just thought it strange that Hopkins, who quit writing poetry to become a Jesuit priest, would compare the handiwork of God to that of a human painter, when it seems to me the human painter is trying to imitate the Master.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
"Spring and Fall (to a young child)", which I referenced, is the Hopkins poem that begins "Margaret are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving..." As a child, I liked the sound of the poem so much (it was also one of my mother's favorite poems) that I memorized it, although I was unaware that "goldengrove unleaving" referred to the golden leaves falling from the trees in autumn. For years I thought "unleaving" meant "staying".
Nice article. My high school teachers definitely tried to make me dislike "literary" novels, constantly talking about "moral themes" and such. Teaching is a tough gig, though. If high school kids can identify with the individualistic glory of taking "the road less traveled by", perhaps that will spur them to look more deeply both into the poem and at the diverging roads, and discover that the travelers "Had worn them really about the same."Quote:
Originally Posted by AuntShecky
I don't know what was going through Hopkin's mind when he stopped writing poetry to became a priest. It doesn't make sense to me. But we can discuss theology in another thread.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
What interests me about poetry is that some people think there are "images" in it. All I see in poetry are words and words imply sound and meaning. I don't see any images except by accident when the publisher puts in an illustration by the poem.
I also memorized the poem, but I heard about it first as an undergraduate. I do remember my mother reciting nursery rhymes. I don't think she knew who Hopkins was.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Here's something I didn't like about John Kilgore's article. He wrote: http://www.thescreamonline.com/essay...01/poetry.htmlQuote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
A discovery one makes periodically as a college teacher is that the rare student who declares himself a poetry-lover can be more of a problem than the professed poetry-hater. Both declarations suggest the student has hardly an inkling of the vast range of different things that can be meant by the single term "poetry"; but the poetry-hater at least knows she doesn't know.
Here he is mistaken. The poetry hater does not know she doesn't know. She knows. And she's bored. That's worse than hate.
Considering the unpleasant sounding, deliberately meaningless horse manure I have read as poetry, that nonetheless gets praised as something great, I am tempted to think she shows signs of mental health. That same poetry hater probably loves, loves, loves movies and songs.
That's why I offered "The Red Wheelbarrow" as one of my candidates for the worst poem I have ever read. I have many others.
To each his own, YesNo. However, I will point out that Joseph Conrad wrote, "My task is to make you hear, to make you feel,and, above all, to make you see." I understand your distaste for "Red Wheel Barrow" if you don't like visual poems. That poem is a little like a black and white photograph with a glistening, red wheel barrow, in brilliant color, in the middle of it. Perhaps "so much depends" on the red wheel barrow simply poetically -- there would be no poem without it.
Many poems aren't dependent on visual images, but many are. Alfred Noyes writes in his Highwayman:
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
The reader is transported to the barren, purple heath, looking out over the emptiness at the bright, twisting road, meandering like a swirling ribbon, as the movement of the clouds makes the moon appear to bob up and down like a small ship on a stormy sea. The swirling sounds of the introduction to the poem augment this image.
Think of other famous poems. Take Shelley's Ode to the West Wind
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing....
The simile comparing the leaves to ghosts adds to the sense of mystery and wonder at the West Wind, but it also creates a clear and dramatic visual image of the leaves scampering erratically across the ground, as if they had a mind of their own.
It is true that when Kingsley Amis was asked to give advice to a young novelist, he said, "Never mention clouds." Drama is essentially human -- and visualizing the setting is often peripheral to it.
I'm not sure why Hopkins quit poetry when he became a priest. I think he thought he was too busy to do both. I read a novel called "Exiles" about Hopkins quitting poetry, and then returning to it to write a long poem about some Catholic nuns exiled from Germany by Bismark. They were drowned off the English coast in a ship wreck. Hopkins died young a year or two after returning to poetry. Here's a link to the poem (warning: its long and difficult):http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173668
Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
Wow! You are right. This may be the worst poem (Tay Bridge). Incredible. I can just see him after the last revision, leaning back for a well earned smoke.
Yeah! Tay Bridge is amazing. And he probably thought it was good. I once tried to write a little bad poetry, and try as I did it didn't approach Tay Bridge.Quote:
Originally Posted by desiresjab
I don't see any image in that example. How many trees were there? What sort of clouds were in the sky? Did the road cut across horizontally or was it skewed somewhat? If you had an image, you would know all of this and much more.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
What you have with a poem is more interesting. You have sound and meaning. An illustrator might add an image to the text, but the text itself is composed of words that are represented as sounds. The coding of it in a script is just a storage mechanism.
Or let's take the red wheelbarrow poem that I think is one of the worst poems I have ever read primarily because of the hype around it. If it contained images you would know how many chickens there were. You would know where the wheelbarrow was in the yard or what building it was against. You would know what shade of red it was. Any image would give you this visual information. Since you don't have that information, you don't have an image.
When it comes to visual information a picture is worth far more than a thousand words. And the information is delivered quickly.
I was at a used book store on Saturday. The owner had over 40 different editions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for sale. He told me that he had three times that many at the height of his collecting interest. Overall he estimated that there were a thousand editions of that poem. People would buy the texts not just for the words but also for the images that an artist would add, not the poet.
Pablo Picasso supposedly met an American G.I. who told him he didn't like modern paintings because they were not realistic. To illustrate his point, the GI showed Picasso a photo of his girlfriend. "My," said Picasso, "Is she really so small?"
Of course visual art provides an "image", while the reader of poetry must create his own image, based on the descriptions in the poem. "Ode to the West Wind" describes the skittering leaves, but the details of the terrain through which the leaves flee their imaginary enchanter are missing. In a sense, this makes poetry-reading a more "creative" endeavor than looking at snapshots. The images one "sees" are created from a collaboration of the poet and the reader. The serious reader is REQUIRED to imagine "skies of couple colour as a brinded cow", however unusual the image. Sometimes this works (artistically), sometimes it doesn't. In your case, Red Wheel Barrow didn't help you create a striking image; for a great many sophisticated readers, it does.
I am almost tempted to look up "brinded cow".
There are many readers who visualize better than I do. But I assume any image that is visualized in the reader's mind is in the reader's mind and not in the poem.
It is not just poetry. Words do not form images whether those words are in a poem or a story or even on a map as a place name. Words take time to read. Images are immediate. Words use sound. Images use vision. I am almost tempted to say that words mean something or are about something while an image need not be.
Suppose you looked at a photograph and said, "There are a lot of nice sounds in that picture."
Do you have any other poems that would be good candidates for "the worst poem you have ever read"? I might as well add this one by Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Station_of_the_Metro I am just picking up famous poems that I think are overrated.
It does have a near rhyme between "croud" and "bough" which is the only thing that makes it interesting to me.
Ha! Very good.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
I cant visualise when I read I have never done and never will. I usually go with the sound or the meaning but never the image.Quote:
There are many readers who visualize better than I do. But I assume any image that is visualized in the reader's mind is in the reader's mind and not in the poem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
One word is worth a thousand pictures, if the word is right. If you don't know what "brindled" (not brinded) means, then the idea of a drindle cow doesn't mean much to you, but the expected audience would have known what a brindled cow looked like, so it worked for many people.
Do words "form images"? Of course they do, although the reader must participate in the formation of those images. When we teach children how to speak, we point at a shoe and say, "Shoe". The correlation of the word and the image (as well as the way the shoe feels, etc.) is what causes the word to have meaning.
Here's Pound's poem:
The image painted by the poem is based on comparing the "apparition" of faces in the crowd to petals. The poem is a Hokku (Japanese form), so when I read it I think the apparition of the faces (in other words, the ghostly image of the faces, rather than the actual faces) resemble petals in a Japanese painting, or, perhaps, in a formal Japanese garden. The image is striking because the hustle and bustle of the Metro seems (at first) so different from the quiet formality of a Japanese painting, or silk embroidery, or garden. But the reader is required by the poem to see not the differences, but the similarities. Since the faces are "apparitions", rather than real faces, one can imagine them to look quite a bit like petals in a painting.Quote:
106. In a Station of the Metro
THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
There are other, non-visual qualities to the comparison. Do the apparitions of the faces represent a detachment on the part of the reader (viewer)? Are they somehow unhuman, because of this detachment? Why is the bough wet and black? I don't have the answers, but the image of a subway crowd creating a vision resembling petals is a striking one, and the key quality of the poem.
I think it is fascinating that you and YesNo read in sounds and not in images. For me, when I read prose, it is like watching a movie - I see the moving images, and the only sounds I hear are what is written in the dialogue or described as sound in the xposition. When I read a poem, I create a picture in my mind, which is why I tend to like poems with imagery and not care much for poetry without imagery. I tend to agree with Edcurb that the creation of images is a kind of collaboration between author and reader, and that the art of the author is in choosing the best words to help the reader in the collaboration.Quote:
Originally Posted by cacian
In an earlier post, Ecurb quoted from The Highwayman:
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
To me, each line conjured up a vivid image, and I found it hard to believe that you and YesNo don't see them, too. I guess it just goes to show that people's brains work in different ways. I've always been interested in the human brain and probably should have studied psychology. I have heard of people who can look at a sheet of music and actually hear the sounds. I can't do that, but I do have this ability to hear music in my head - I mean, really actually hear it when I concentrate. Once, just out of curiosity, I lay on the sofa and "played" the second side of the Beatles' Abbey Road album in my head and timed myself. Then when I checked the length of the actual recording, I was only off by eight seconds.
But one word isn't a thousand pictures.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
Since I don't know, nor care to know, what a drindled, brindled, or brinded cow is, the poem that uses the word has to interest me by its sound. If the meaning is weak, the sound must compensate.
I do hear sounds more clearly than I visualize images. There are meditation techniques that I have tried suggesting that I visualize a white light entering my body (or leaving it) and I can pretend I am seeing something like that, but I don't see anything.Quote:
Originally Posted by 108 fountains
But is that the point? The question is not whether I hear sounds or see images in my mind when I am reading. The question is whether those images are in the words? And if they are, those images should be similar no matter who is reading the text. If PeterL sees a brinded cow and I see a Cheshire cat, the images aren't the same. If you see ten gusty trees and I, trying hard, see two, the images are not similar enough to say they are in the text and not just something we are making up.
It is like asking something like this: Are there sounds in that photograph? Sure, if there are birds flying in the photograph, "The Bird is the Word" song might go through my mind, but just because that happens, and I hope it doesn't, it doesn't mean that song is in the photograph. It is in my mind.
That all makes sense, but on the other hand, I did not have an image in my mind of leaves rustling and branches swaying in the wind in a dark forest at night until I read the line, "The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees." So there must be something in the words even if they might not convey the exact image to different readers.
The words are about wind rustling and branches swaying. That would be their meaning. The sound is how this idea is delivered to you. Since both of us understand it, there must be a communal aspect to this, something that we share, or we couldn't use words to communicate.
I wonder if an image, unless it is a symbol or mandala of some sort, is only about itself rather than something else. Languages aren't created out of images although I suspect the imagists thought Chinese might be an example of that.
However, images do seem more substantial than sounds, more real. They persist through time.
Do you mean"The Leaves of Grass" poetry collection by Walt Whitman?? How can you compare Whitman with the tripe that is "The Desiderata?"Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL