Bad Line Contest [by David Lehman]

In honor of Susan Sontag, who introduced the logic of camp (something so bad that it's good) into the cultural discourse, may I propose a bad line contest? It is remarkable how many bad lines one encounters. Usually I let myself be guided by Frank O'Hara's advice: ignore it, and let it slip into oblivion, rather than call attention to a bad poem.

But sometimes a bad line is bad in a particularly exemplary, even beautiful way, and if this is the case, the author of the bad line should not feel insulted, should feel even honored, to have produced something worthy of analysis dripped not with contempt but with.  . . curiosity. To such an author we might award the mauvais vers prize.

For an example, let me offer a stanza from a sonnet in the Italian by Louise Labe (trans. Richard Sieburth] that appeared in a recent New York Review of Books (2014). Sieburth, an experienced and reliable translator, whose fidelity to the original can scarcely be doubted, renders the sonnet's second quatrain as follows:

Love, your eyes drove through me like a blade,
Piercing my startled heart in one fell deed,
And there you settle down, there you feed,
But you alone can heal the wound you made.

To "Piercing my startled heart in one fell deed" goes the prize for mauvais vers de la semaine. Why? It is a poignant instance of the genuine fake. It doth sound like poetry, does it not? Yet once you remove the bogus words from the line, what are you are left with  but a broken heart? The real words in the line are "my heart." (There is a splendid poem by Frank O'Hara entitled "My Heart," which I recommend.) Piercing, startled, one fell deed: Petrarch marries the oratory of Julius Caesar. The language and imagery are tired, any subtlety or other layer of value compromised for the sake of preserving the A-B-B-A rhyme scheme. "Sonnet" concludes with the clause "I might as well be dead," and you can hear the cry of anguish as the poem asks to be put out of its misery.

Can you beat that? – DL

From the archive; first posted April 7, 2014

Comments

[Mark Minton]

Although "Ozymandias" impresses like a revelation, and I do love "Ode to the West Wind" too. this line of Shelley's from the latter has always raised an eyebrow:

"Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!....."

If one pictures this image in the mind's eye,the effect seems improbable, even metaphorically.

Sometimes a wonderful style can be pushed a bit too far. Call it, Romantic over-reach...

[Pam]

I’ll play. It’s really two equally bad lines, either will do. Cringeworthy.

My life is an endless maze and I am
always searching for the path that bears my name.

[Molly Arden]

The scream of cicadas concealed by a scrim.

[Steven Silberblatt]

"I want to know a butcher paints,
A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
Candle-stick maker, much acquaints
His soul with song, or, haply mute,
Blows out his brains upon the flute."
-- Browning

With respect to the baker, Empson glosses this to mean "something like: 'I want to know that a member of the class of butchers is moderately likely to be a man who paints, or at any rate that he can do so if he wishes.'" Whatever we make of such a longing (foolish? transcendental? elitist? futile?), we may extend it to encompass to the other two celebrated tradesmen.

We may appreciate the parallels between blowing glass and blowing a flute, to the point of allowing that the latter is something at which a candle-stick maker might, given his unique skills, be especially good. And the dual meanings of flute, as instrument and wine glass, afford an opportunity for bridging the two ideas in a manner which, if not exactly sparkling, one finds at least cordial.

But would it not have been better to have stopped there rather than have him 'blow out his brains'? What would lead us to want or expect either the making of glass or the making of music to deserve such a morbid outcome? To insist on a jocular, non-literal understanding ('blowing for all he's worth') seems more than a little strained -- perhaps especially when we take into account a third contemporary meaning of flute as referring to a pistol, or to the notion that death comes to those who have taken their last breath.

We may even be justified in finding 'haply mute' to be an incongruous (if not egregious) choice. It is one thing, after all, to understand 'haply' as mere happenstance; it is another, and less comfortable matter, to be unable to dismiss the closely-allied sense of the word as meaning something propitious, a good outcome. As when Claudius conspires with Polonius to exile Hamlet: "Haply the seas and countries different...shall expel this something-settled matter in his heart, whereon his brains still beating puts him thus from fashion of himself." (If our candle-stick maker "acquaints his soul with song" does he also put himself 'thus from fashion of himself' -- to the point of extinction?)

In sum, I submit that Browning's longing for a candle-stick maker-cum-musician yielded lines that deserve, at least, an honorable (?) mention for the mauvais vers prize.