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This week: Poetry Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
-Robert Frost
My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
-Groucho Marx
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
-Steven Wright |
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Yeah, you've opened the right newsletter. This is the Comedy newsletter, not the Poetry newsletter. Nothing against that - I read it myself - but just wanted to clear that up.
So today, kids, we're going to talk about poetry.
Not intentionally comic verse, though. That's another subject, one which I vaguely remember having covered in the past, maybe. No, what I'm talking about now is the pretentious crap people put into lines and publish and call it "poetry."
I'll give you an example. A friend of mine told me she took a creative writing course, and it was taught by a woman who fancied herself a poet. Okay, the instructor wrote things in lines and had them published, so "poet" is a technically accurate description, but, well, she showed them this one poem and said she expected everyone to write in this kind of style.
Here's the poem: http://www.versedaily.org/2006/secondstoryman.shtml
Now, I'm mostly a comedy and short story writer, but like many writers, I've tried my hand at poetry to varying levels of success. I don't have any delusions about my poems ever showing up in print, though I think I have a chance with my fiction. So I'm not a "poet." Everything I say here is from the point of view of a consumer of poetry, a reader. And from the point of view of a consumer of poetry:
What the hell is that crap?
It's a bunch of random words and phrases, stuck together in a transparent attempt to appear deep.
My memory is not the greatest, but I know I've said this before, though it bears repeating:
Incomprehensibility is not depth.
"Who else to launder the cat-suit?" "Wanted: sticky-fingered au pair?" What the HELL?
Stop it. Seriously, just stop.
Never mind that anyone who uses the term au pair unironically is hopelessly pretentious to begin with. Yes, YOU.
Look, here's the thing. I've ranted before about "art" (notably about a year ago, in a different newsletter: "Fantasy Newsletter (February 15, 2012)" , which is written from the perspective of someone writing fantasy and/or science fiction). But my points about art remain, and are, to some extent, applicable to poetry. Specifically, I shouldn't have to have a Ph.D. in literature to grok poetry.
There is, however, one big difference between painting and poetry, and it's not that painting usually doesn't involve words. It's a matter of time investment. If you're in an art gallery, you can spend as much time as you like in front of a painting - or, more importantly, as little as you like. You can also deliberately avoid "modern art" or "postmodern art" or "post-postmodern art" or "Jackson Pollack" exhibitions and spend your time trying to figure out the symbolism and creativity in, say, Munch or van Gogh or Dali or whatever.
With poetry, though, you get handed a book of poems and you start reading, and it takes time. Sometimes you get to the end of a poem and go, "Well, that's five minutes I'll never get back," which can be mostly avoided in an art gallery.
So if poetry pisses me off more than art, that's why: I've invested time in it, time that I could have spent fighting bandits in Skyrim.
Here's what I'd like you all to take away from this: When someone solemnly hands you a poem and says, "Read this. It is deep," and you read it, and you don't get it, and you're thinking that everyone around you is nodding, lips parted, so they must understand it - they don't. They're pretending, so they don't seem like they're stupid. Don't pretend. You're not stupid - the poem is BAD.
Right now, some of you have read that poem and want to comment something to the effect of, "But that was a great poem! You just don't know anything about poetry!"
That's right. I don't know anything about poetry. But that's my POINT. I shouldn't have to. I can pick up something by Poe or Leonard Cohen (he was a poet before he was a songwriter) and immediately grok it. Hell, I can even appreciate T.S. Eliot, if it's one of those annotated editions that explain some of the more obscure allusions, or if it's about cats. Those people wrote poetry for people to read, not for other poets and/or critics to pick apart.
And that's the problem: poetry, like art, some movies, and most "literature," has suffered from what I call "snob creep" - that transformation that just about every art form undergoes eventually, to its detriment, where the producers have taken too many classes in it, classes led by people like the "poet" above, who, in their hunger for something "new and innovative," suck the soul right out of the art form. It's like if it were a crossword puzzle, and someone goes "crossword puzzles are dull. I think I'll do one in three dimensions!" And then crossword puzzle "experts" nod sagely and praise the "new" innovation, whereas I just want something to do when I'm on an airplane and it hasn't taken off yet and I can't turn on my Kindle.
Or to take an actual thing from something I usually enjoy: beer. Beer is simple: malt, yeast, hops, water. But people have to mess with it. I was at a brewpub in West Virginia (don't get me wrong; West Virginia has some good breweries) and the brewmeister has created a concoction that includes hemp. People all around me were pouring it into their beards, nodding sagely, and praising the innovation.
To me, it tasted like cat piss.
There's a reason Germany, long ago, passed beer purity laws; it was to prevent abominations such as that. The result was things like Budweiser, which was just fine until someone started mass-producing it, at which point it became crap by moving in the other direction - but that's an entirely different rant. The hemp beer most likely won some sort of "brewer's choice" award, which explains why it's undrinkable - brewers are jaded by the Four Basic Elements and want something new.
So it is, then, with poetry. There's a reason poetry is considered unpublishable these days, and it's not because people don't know what good poetry is - it's because what a publisher looks for is diametrically opposed to what a reader looks for, which is to understand the damn thing. There are elements in modern poetry that I don't get, can't get, will never get.
Or, as one poet put it long ago,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-second-coming
Yeah. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Comedy, prose, poetry, whatever - write to be understood, not to convince people you're deep. I may not know poetry, but I grew up on a farm, and I know horse dooky when I smell it. |
And just because this week's theme is poetry, here's some comedic verses for you.
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Last time, in "Comedy Newsletter (January 8, 2013)" , I talked about resolutions and why it's counterproductive to make them. Now that it's February and you've all failed every one of your resolutions, here are some comments on that newsletter:
doublemeasure: Grapefruit, porn and pizza...... you only get this sort of combination in the Comedy Newsletter, and that's why I love my subscription! Looking forward to your next editorial.
Hope you're not a poet, doublemeasure!
An apple a day....  : I always look forward to the "Comedy Newsletter" because we all need to laugh more. You never disappoint me...thanks  .
No, thank you for the glowing praise! Your $20 is in the mail!
Voodoo Shampoo  : Well i stuck to no resolutions since i made none, thus i stuck to all of them i guess. HAH!
I'll say this bluntly, screw the resolutions. We are free to do what we like and there is no need to set up imaginary borders for ourselves. Why not instead try to break away from the limits we have. Do what the hell you want. It's as simple as that. If you didn't quit eating your KFC chickens, then maybe you really don't want to. If you didn't loose weight, then obviously you didn't really want to nor care about doing so.
I know few people who lost weight since their health and life was in serious danger because of it. Maybe it takes something extreme like that to make some people change their wants and want nots.
Here's the thing, though: Some scientific studies indicate that we could live a substantial amount longer if we limit our caloric intake to something like 800 a day, all vegetables and grapefruit, for the rest of our lives, don't drink and don't smoke. But what is the point of that? You live longer but can't do anything worth living for, and you're hungry all the time? If that's your choice, great, I'm not going to tell you it's wrong for you - but it's sure as hell wrong for me.
k-9cooper: Hilarious, I have also taken up the resolution of no resolutions. You have made this funny and I love it. Thanks
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Mumsy  : I just can't picture you even pondering the possibility of eating grapefruit. Unless someone stuck a wedge of it on your beer glass. Nah, even then . . . I more picture it flying in a sweeping arc through the air as you attempt to distance it from your vicinity. 
Aw, now, grapefruit isn't that bad in moderation. But last time I bought one, I forgot about it, and it migrated to the back of the fridge. I think I identified three new life forms when I finally found it.
scarlett_o_h: Great Newsletter again and thanks for featuring my poem 'Hot Stuff.' I'm with you on the resolution front. No resolutions - no failure. Just waking up in the morning is enough of an achievement these days.
Hell, I can't even do that. I woke up at 1:30 this afternoon. Congratulations on your achievement!
And that's it for me for February - see you next month! Until then, remember to de-verse-ify and
LAUGH ON!!!
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Comedy: February 05, 2013 Issue [#5499]
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