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Very Bad Poetry: The Appeal
Mar. 8th, 2013 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammerSo, I hear some of you ask through the ether, what's the appeal of bad poetry? I confess I don't have a clear answer here -- nor, apparently, do most of the critics and editors who write about the stuff. (Defenders of "good bad movies" have a similar problem.) But I do have a couple thoughts.
One possible reason is the amusement of seeing language handled that badly. Whether this is more closely related to the appeal of watching a disaster unfold or the appeal of watching people fail, I cannot say. Possibly the latter -- certainly, there are poems that deserve to be set alongside the Fail Blog. But there's also something of the same startled recognition that particularly mangled Engrish evokes, here divorced from some of the guilt because this sort of bad poetry is, in fact, perpetrated by fluent native speakers.
But another part of it is the wonder of "Don't these people realize how bad they are?" This gets into tricky territory. It's not like many (most?) of the poets didn't get feedback. Some, we know, dismissed the barbs of critics under various headings such as "jealous of my accomplishments," "misunderstood my genius," "yes but I'm popular so neener-neener" and so on. McGonagall is particularly interesting, as he made something of a living from recitations where he was routinely pelted with rotten veggies, with every apparent sign that he considered the filled theaters a sign of his popularity. It's been speculated that was all a sort of performance art, but if so, he managed to keep a remarkably straight face about the whole thing -- as did all his critics. The alternative is, however, that he had a thick skin and powers of self-delusion worthy of the great Emperor Norton.
Or maybe we're just all being ironic hipsters/post-modernists/whatevers. Though I'm skeptical of that, given you can find essays on the appeal of bad poetry going back to the turn of the 20th century, when what modernists there were were all pre- and the hipsters were all Decadents. But the ironic zeitgeist certainly hasn't hurt the appeal.
For me, at least, there's an element of "There but for the grace of competence go I." This is why I sometimes emphasize the object lesson aspects -- "Don't do this." But that's is certainly cannot explain the glee a deliciously incompetent poem inspires in me.
Those of you who enjoy bad poetry -- why?
---L.
One possible reason is the amusement of seeing language handled that badly. Whether this is more closely related to the appeal of watching a disaster unfold or the appeal of watching people fail, I cannot say. Possibly the latter -- certainly, there are poems that deserve to be set alongside the Fail Blog. But there's also something of the same startled recognition that particularly mangled Engrish evokes, here divorced from some of the guilt because this sort of bad poetry is, in fact, perpetrated by fluent native speakers.
But another part of it is the wonder of "Don't these people realize how bad they are?" This gets into tricky territory. It's not like many (most?) of the poets didn't get feedback. Some, we know, dismissed the barbs of critics under various headings such as "jealous of my accomplishments," "misunderstood my genius," "yes but I'm popular so neener-neener" and so on. McGonagall is particularly interesting, as he made something of a living from recitations where he was routinely pelted with rotten veggies, with every apparent sign that he considered the filled theaters a sign of his popularity. It's been speculated that was all a sort of performance art, but if so, he managed to keep a remarkably straight face about the whole thing -- as did all his critics. The alternative is, however, that he had a thick skin and powers of self-delusion worthy of the great Emperor Norton.
Or maybe we're just all being ironic hipsters/post-modernists/whatevers. Though I'm skeptical of that, given you can find essays on the appeal of bad poetry going back to the turn of the 20th century, when what modernists there were were all pre- and the hipsters were all Decadents. But the ironic zeitgeist certainly hasn't hurt the appeal.
For me, at least, there's an element of "There but for the grace of competence go I." This is why I sometimes emphasize the object lesson aspects -- "Don't do this." But that's is certainly cannot explain the glee a deliciously incompetent poem inspires in me.
Those of you who enjoy bad poetry -- why?
---L.
