the worst poem you have ever read

[cacian]

because we have had a thread with BEST poems i thought we could post pieces we thought were worst.

[YesNo]

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.

[Sospira]

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?

[Sospira]

I hate it so much when people think crap like 'The Desiderata' is poetry. But how can you educate these people?

[cacian]

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.

this very one

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

[cacian]

I hate it so much when people think crap like 'The Desiderata' is poetry. But how can you educate these people?

The Desiderata?
can you elaborate please.

[YesNo]

What didn't you like about it? The simpleness of it? Lack of imagery?

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.

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.

[Mohammad Ahmad]

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.

[108 fountains]

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.

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.

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!).

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.

[108 fountains]

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. I've pretty much given up poetry now for short stories.

[Poetaster]

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 bins

she 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 time

And thought I could see all of creation

at the end of a

beer soaked night.

?

Trampoline
dreams

I
me
I

!

in a shopping market I

there was a bang and

(Arma vamque cano)

buscuits.

[Ecurb]

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:

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.

My side of the argument went something like this:

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.

[PeterL]

I hate it so much when people think crap like 'The Desiderata' is poetry. But how can you educate these people?

I never saw that before, but it's no worse than "The Leaves of Grass", and many people think that's good poetry.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gongsu/d..._textonly.html

[PeterL]

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.

[AuntShecky]

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