the worst poem you have ever read

[Poetaster]

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?"

Ha! Very good.

[cacian]

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.

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.

[PeterL]

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."

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.

[Ecurb]

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:

106. In a Station of the Metro

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

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.

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.

[108 fountains]

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.

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.

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.

[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.

But one word isn't a thousand pictures.

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.

[YesNo]

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

[108 fountains]

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.

[YesNo]

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.

[Sospira]

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

Do you mean"The Leaves of Grass" poetry collection by Walt Whitman?? How can you compare Whitman with the tripe that is "The Desiderata?"

[PeterL]

Do you mean"The Leaves of Grass" poetry collection by Walt Whitman?? How can you compare Whitman with the tripe that is "The Desiderata?"

It was very easy. Both seem to have similar form and content, and there probably are people who like both.

[Sospira]

As for the brindled cow, is it that you don't think it's poetic? He was observationing the fractal like nature and self symmetry of nature which, after Benoit Mandelbrot's "discovery," of the Mandelbrot fractal are pretty common "knowledge" now. A cow's brindled patters are similar to patterns found elsewhere in nature, like clouds or sand dunes. There was a very interesting documentary on this, "The Secret Life of Chaos."

Hopkins thought the divine was in everything, right? So the stippling itself that the artist was doing, would be God working through the artist... I am not crazy about this poem either and prefer 'The Windhover.' But he had a thing for patterns and wrote about patterns he saw in nature in his diary, I think he saw it as the divine running through everything and forming itself in different ways, but still unified.

[Ecurb]

I didn't want to knock Hopkins TOO much -- he's a fine poet. In fact, looking at the cloud-flecked sky the other day and remembering this thread, I thought to myself, "You know, that does look a little like a brinded cow."

Purple cows, of course, are also an excellent subject for poetry.

[Sospira]

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.

Yes maybe it is reasonable advice, but not deep, sophisticated or beautiful enough to be a 'poem.' It is just a motivational speech. But people think it's an example of poetry. So what annoys me is that people don't understand what poetry is even though they think they are 'educated' because they have a Masters degree.

[YesNo]

There is a lot of poetry that I think is gibberish. At least this desiderata was understandable.

If we are going to have poetry and prose categories then for completeness we would need two more categories: (1) neither poetry nor prose and (2) both poetry and prose.