How Bad Is This Poetry?
I have a thing for readings. I love them. Even really bad ones. I once fell in love with a man after we attended a really, really terrible reading from a book about prison rape.
On Saturday, I attended a reading for the new issue of the local literary magazine Barrelhouse. This is my favorite kind of reading—it supports local authors. And, it was in a bar, the Big Hunt. I didn’t fall in love with my “date,” but the young poetess who read delivered one of the most truly awful bits of doggerel I’ve had the pleasure of hearing. Before she started, the Belarusian wordsmith told the audience that the noise from the fan above her head made it seem like the audience was separated from her by a pane of glass. I wish we had been, so that she wouldn’t have heard my stifled giggles. I tried my best to keep quiet. I stared at her, at the copy of Barrelhouse, at my drink. I inhaled my drink hoping it would distract me. It did not help.
Almost everyone else in the audience was silent. So, I realize it’s possible I was wrong. Perhaps the lady from Minsk is the next Emily Bronte. I offer the examples from Valzhyna Mort’s “Utopia” so you can judge for yourselves.
This perplexing stanza: “this is why we know neither good nor evil / sometimes our words can cut meat.”
These lines, describing the path of a red moth flying down by a brook (apparently because the moon looks like a cocoon): “and our men try to subdue it / they jump on its back / like overripe plums falling from trees / to tame the horse of the planet.”
This bit, too: “if a heart could be pulled out like a tooth / if memory could be killed / we’d have been so happy living / under the yellow lemonade flag”
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6:27 pm
Well, this was delightfully awful. Nothing as good as bad poetry.
The only topper I can come up with off the top of my head is a woman who applied for a job with our magazine and, as one of her “clips,” offered a rhymed poem in which both unicorns and the homeless made an appearance. I rue the day I lost my copy.
Shall we start a little chain with one of these lines?
Under the yellow lemonade flag
I make pee-pee in your Coke
And grieve the twilight of my virginity
You’re a Nazi, Dad! You’re, like, practically Hitler.
… [add your doggerel here] …
3:55 am
As bad as this! http://corrupt1.blogspot.com/2007/05/do-you-have-someone-in-your-office-like.html
8:53 am
I was moved by the surreal imagery of the mental dental cautionary tale.
On the other hand, you, Carrie, have stolen my heart.
9:41 am
Umm, I was there, and while the noise behind Mort was distracting, I like her poetry a lot, especially the two other poems she read. It’s cool that you decided to cover an event for a fledgeling magazine with such honesty - I hope this publicity really helps them despite your opinion of her poetry, but I think it’s fair to point out that at least some folks think Mort is a very promising young poet.
Here’s some more info on her for those of you who might be interested in :
http://www.blueflowerarts.com/vmort.html
9:42 am
Sorry meant to finish that sentence - ‘might be interested in other opinions of her’
10:12 am
Most poetry looks stupid out of context. As Mort explained in her intro, much of the imagery from the poem was taken from a Belarusian translation of a fairy tale Pinocchio story. She was also telling me that to write in Belarusian is considered a dissident act in Belarus where Russian is the “acceptable” language. I think the “red moth,” “yellow flag” stuff is part of a political allegory that underpins some of her work and wouldn’t be apparent to most American readers. Not that she needs my defense. This month her work appeared in Poetry magazine and she has a book coming out from Copper Canyon, one of the most important poetry publishers.
10:25 am
Just as an example of the difficulties of translation, in many languages “Mort” is a word or root that means “death”, whereas in English it often means “nerd”.
11:01 am
“Mort” could only mean “nerd” because of nerds named Mortimer. The root still means death, right? Mortality, mortician, mortuary…
our words cut meat / but ham transcends
12:48 pm
BPE: do you think she is making an oblique reference to “The King in Yellow” (which contains acidic political commentary)?
3:27 pm
I’m not sure that most poetry looks stupid out of context. I think you could scribble Auden or Larkin on a piece of bubble-wrap and they’d survive the context. But of course, that’s unfair company to ask a young writer to meet.
Nonetheless …
[following Delaney]
Ham transcends!
Ham riseth above the city like a pink moon!
Oh sweet honeybaked vision:
a pig that good, you don’t eat all at once
but in small segmented pieces like
the shivery bullet-nicked cities of
the former Soviet Union.
3:38 pm
I’m afraid your review reflects far more poorly on your own writing (not to mention your lack of familiarity with poetics) than on the work you’ve quoted.
It’s pretty embarassing for you, really.
3:57 pm
Wuthering Heights is an incredible poem.
5:55 pm
I don’t know poetics? You’re talking about a woman who memorized The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes in the sixth grade. I knew my poetics at age 11!
6:06 pm
Our words can cut meat
My beef is ground on the streets
But ham transcends
And now the Pigs got their hands on me
So while I’m hog-tied
I’ll be thinkin’ about spicy treats
Sweetbreads and patties, too
Step to this scrapple, fool
And some flesh will go ’smack’ on the grill.
6:25 pm
Angela - I applaud this much needed call for a return to the fineries of 19th century verse. I doubt very much that Ms. Mort is the next Emily Bronte, and indeed, that is a shame. The poetry world has been waiting for ~150 years for a new Bronte to emerge, and alas, it was not to be at the Big Hunt on Saturday.
Maybe you can judge a CP-sponsored Emily Bronte Poetry Writing Contest and show these Belarusian upstarts some real poetry.
7:26 pm
[...] the City Paper’s lame reaction to Vhalzyna Mort’s reading on Saturday. The next Emily Bronte? [...]
7:29 pm
cubes of ham slither
In a puddle of mayonnaise
it is paradise
8:04 pm
Um, Angela. Did you Google the word?
10:32 pm
Heathcliff: You’re making me wish I came ham-haiku-style in the first place. I pop this for you:
Lipid gossamers
Sweet pink proteins exude brine
Toothpick destiny
11:43 pm
Ripple of rainbow glaze on hamslab!
Crunchy cracklins of 7-11’s gray morning!
Oh bacon! Bacon!
Let your beige fat
gather in the sweet curve of my cast iron skillet.
Love this ham-handed versifying. The nastiness over “poetics,” not so much. Is it not possible to say you thought a poem sucked without having your grasp of “poetics” challenged? For god’s sake, Frost and Eliot and Pound and Stevens all hated some poetry. Sometimes they hated each other’s poetry, but they had enough respect to not bring out their Webster’s and fling definitions of “poetics” about. Are we really at a point where you can’t say you didn’t like something unless you can cite Cleanth Brooks on why?
It says a lot about how weakened a state poetry’s in that someone giving an unfavorable review of one reading brings out such hostility. Poetry — and this young poet — will survive someone not liking a particular piece of her work and saying so in print. After all, she’s just gotten into Poetry magazine and had her work published by Copper Canyon, y’all!
Anyone read David Orr or William Logan in the NYTimes? They hammer at beloved writers like they were building a house. And what’s the result? People get pissed and talk about poetry. I say halle-freakin-lujah to anyone who’s got any opinion about poetry at all. Thank god for a strong opinion, because without them, all you got in the bookstore poetry section is Mattie Stephanek and those rainbow pastel paperbacks with titles like “I’m So Glad I Had a Mother Like You.”
12:44 am
Oh please, Carrie. A mere “I thought it was stupid” is a complete cop out for anyone who decides to judge a work of art. Even this paper can hold itself to a higher critical standard than that. It doesn’t require a Phd in crit, just a sense of fair play and some basic understanding of the poem itself.
2:29 am
I don’t believe I made an argument for “I thought it was stupid” to become our phrase of judgment here. Nor did “I thought it was stupid” make an appearance anywhere in Valdez’s write-up. Nor does the phrase appear in the NYT crit pieces (though you can read it between the lines of Orr and Logan both).
Valdez reported her response and quoted the work in question for others to read. She may have done so snidely, but hey, welcome to the blogosphere: show me a blog without snide, and I’ll show you a blog with no readers. Her post (note, BLOG POST, not an in-depth critical article considering Mort’s poetry), captured a hard-to-sit-through-event: the sincerely intended poetry reading that makes listeners snort. I’ve been to many of these, and may have given a few. Few will acknowledge them when they happen. The thoughtfully appreciative face, the slight audience “ah” as the poem ends — these are the accepted responses at a poetry reading. Snorts are unwelcome, but sometimes warranted.
Valdez captured that need to snort-muffle nicely. She pretty much established the tone at the outset with the anecdote about falling in love at the prison rape reading. Snide it was, and much more amusing than the implications about her writing skills and lack of understanding of “poetics” that followed. If you’re turning to this blog for sincere, in-depth, rigorous poetry analysis, that’s pretty embarassing for you.
9:38 am
You’ll note that -I- never advocated for bookstores full of Mattie Stepanak either.
Yes, it’s a blog. Which is why there are blog comments. Which is why people offered them.
But I’m done with this. It’s impossible to keep up with your strained logic and self-contradiction: Critics of the OP must be snobs! Critics of the OP must be anti-intellectuals. Etc. It’s just too tiresome. But congratulations on the word count.
10:42 am
Ham transcends this mortal beef.
11:38 am
Juanita needs to workshop her blog comments before posting them.
1:37 pm
Frankly, I wish this strand had stayed a run of tasty ham and lemonade poems. It was much more pleasant and was whetting my appetite. I’ll leave it on that note. (By the way, if anyone is actually reading for more than this sad little catfight and wants to check out an extraordinary poem about pigs, check out Galway Kinnell’s “St. Francis and the Sow.”)
The piggy-wiggy cries out the wilderness:
Lo, there shall be a great Loaf of White Bread in the Sky
A smothering shroud of lettuce and tomato
O gestation crate! O mother of sows!
My heart is cloven as my hooves
And I am shredded in a Carolina-style vinegar-based sauce.
Squeal, boy! Squeal with your pretty mouth!