On Awful Poetry by Sydney Lea

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            I was at a gathering not long ago –the venue isn’t important– when I heard a soldier recite a poem. He’d been struggling after getting home, and small wonder: twice deployed to Afghanistan, he’d also been twice wounded, one of those times pretty critically. He told us that the poem he gave us had kept him going through several horrific ordeals.

             I think the poem was called “Hope.” It was awful.

             For all its clichés and bromides, however, that poem had been a literal life-saver for the man, so by what right do I sneer at it?

            Driving home after that get-together where I heard the GI, I got to thinking back some twenty years, when my wife and I were sitting one evening in a backcountry restaurant. Apart from us, there were only three patrons: a mother, her adult daughter, and her son-in-law. The daughter had composed a poem for her mom’s birthday, and we couldn’t help overhearing it. That poem too was awful.

            But again, how do we claim the superiority of “high art”?  

            Such a matter provides much food for thought, no? I mean to avoid strong opinionation, to make clear that my judgments are that, period: my judgments, hence not ones with any special authority. So if I ask you to consider quality vs. awfulness here, I mean primarily to raise an issue, not to offer some pat and prescriptive solution to it myself; I’m far from convinced that one is available.

            The soldier and the daughter poet moved their listeners, certainly, more than many of the recent (and to me inscrutable) I have seen in print. 

            What do we make of that?

 

Comments

[Wallis]

This brought tears to my eyes. I'm afraid to write because I'm afraid of being awful.

[The Best American Poetry]

Wallis, Don't let fear of being awful stop you. Everyone is awful at some point. Give yourself permission to be awful. If you have the chance, track down first drafts of some famous writing and you'll see what I mean. At the same time, I do think that it's perfectly OK to judge something as awful;that's what one is able to do with a lifetime of education and study. But it's important to know when to keep those judgements to oneself.
Much to comtemplate here and in previous posts Sydney. Thank you.
Stacey

[Sydney Lea]

I agree with Stacey here. I like Don Hall and quite a bit of his poetry, but his assertion (I am not quoting but glossing) that you must attempt to rival Yeats or Milton or whomever each time you sit down to write is the purest nonsense. Who, including Don, cold ever hav e truly started a poem with sort of inbuilt challenge. I recently went back to some unpublished work by my hand and thought, "Well, this is no good. But I just hadn't put in the time yet to have the skills to handle it. Let's try it now." I'm not the one to judge the results objectively, but the experiment was fruitful.

Yet what I was really getting at was the fact that patently awful poems -- Hallmarky stuff, say -- often resonate more profoundly with the Common Reader than a lot of our more sophisticated efforts. We need to ponder that, not that I am offering a pat conclusion.

[Surazeus]

Maybe by the artificial standards of the poobahs of modernism, who think poetry is just a language game, those poems were "awful", but I consider them valuable since they served well their intended purpose of personal communication.

There are many levels of poetry. Epic narrative, gritty satire, Hallmark sentimental lyric, angst existential diatribe, political jeremiad, romantic song, blues, folk, rebellious rock, assertive rap, commercial jingle, tragic ballad, and many more.

Academic language games are just one small field of the poetic country.

[Desmond Swords]

Having just read your poem Beautiful Miles at the Poetry Foundation that I thought was truly awful, it's clear that, in my own judgement at least, your own idea of what good poetry is - is truly awful.

You don't offer us any evidence to make up our minds about these poems, but anyone who comes up with the lines:

A snake always lisped, jetting its feces. They reeked.
A single peek,
And the younger boys thought, This is danger. But each a child,
Each smiled

...shouldn't be writing poetry. It is truly very bad. Reeking feces, each child smiled, god no wonder you're confused.

[Sydney Lea]

Nah. They were awful.

[Surazeus]

Grin.

I always feel that no matter how awful a poem may be, at least the person made an attempt to express their thoughts.

Better to have awful poetry than silence or groans.

[Sydney Lea]

Gee, coming from the creator of "Merry 'N Square & A Poem," that really hurts. I'll out me quill back in me goose, and bow down to your the high mythic Oirish majesty.

[Sydney Lea]

I'm with you, kid.