(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995… but this is the end of the line)
With an introduction by Matthew Zapruder **
Before we get started on the final, yes final, Bad Poetry Corner by Steve Almond, here are a few words from renowned poet Matthew Zapruder, author of Come on All You Ghosts:
The poems in Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry column were written by a young man (and not so young man), trying to figure out some things and be a writer. He has affairs, suffers bouts of self-absorption, and is self-aggrandizing and judgmental in an ultimately harmless way. Reading the column I remembered what it was like to be that age, also just starting to write. I was, of course, a total jerk, and I’m glad I hardly knew me.
The impulse to be a writer is often ridiculous, mostly unexamined, and almost certainly motivated by all sorts of retrospectively embarrassing desires to be listened to and admired. But it is not “bad,” not in the least. It is, actually, good, even noble, especially given most of the other options.
Yet it is also the case that the poems he has offered us over these past months are truly quite bad. But why? In Bad Poetry, Almond writes many interesting and useful things about metaphor, style, enjambment, compound words, and the dubious ethics of appropriating the suffering of others into your poems. It is a compendium of terrible decisions typical of our literary environment. Thinking about why these decisions are such bad ones will help any writer get past superficialities.
But the column was about something far more interesting and important than mere style, or literary merit. “Bad” is a moral judgment masquerading as an aesthetic preference. We reserve the term for art that doesn’t just bore or displease, but somehow offends. For Almond, these poems are “bad” because they are unethical. And they are unethical because they are dishonest.
Honesty in writing is of course not the same thing as accuracy. A piece of writing can be completely invented, yet emotionally authentic; on the other hand, writing can be factually true (autobiographically revealing and painful for instance) yet somehow emotionally manipulative and false. And some poems, like the ones in these columns, can be both false on the surface and also unintentionally revealing of immature emotional states, without any other merits. In Almond’s analyses of the poems, it becomes clear that what is wrong with the poems is also what was wrong with him.
So why was Almond not so good at writing poetry, when it turned out he would be very, very good at writing prose? I think it was not just because he was young. In the poems you can feel him searching for, and failing to find, some way of distancing him from his own raw feelings and turning those feelings into something that will be of use to others. In his analysis of “Weather Channel,” he writes “What was I trying to say here? What was I ever saying? Someone, anyone, help me. I’m dying in here. But that’s not a poem; it’s a suicide note.” Clearly the mechanisms of poetry did not provide enough distance for him from himself, and did not keep him from sinking into didacticism and self-absorption.
For whatever reasons of personality and inclination, Almond needed the mechanisms of prose, particularly story — character, setting, plot, etc. — to channel his emotional intensity, intelligence, antic and disruptive hilarity, and deep sadness. He needed those qualities of prose writing in order to get enough away from himself to be true.
Almond writes, about reading Thomas Lux’s poetry and comparing it to his own, “I knew there was something different and better about Lux’s poems, but I chalked it up to the poverty of my imagination.” It is not richness of imagination that makes some poetry better than others. Nor is it facility with language, or (despite what Aristotle thought) inventiveness of metaphor, or accurate visual imagery, or lovely sounds, or anything at all having to do with style or aesthetics. It is a matter of the purpose, the necessity, the emotional truth, of the poem. He goes on to write, “It never occurred to me that my heart was at issue.” Yes, it always is.
In his Confessions, Augustine writes about the same period in his life, “For I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls, so that my face, which looked toward the illuminated things, was not itself illuminated.” This, I think, is a typical and understandable mistake almost all of us make when we are starting out as writers. We don’t understand that writing about ourselves does not have to be self-absorbed or narcissistic. It can be a humble admission that we are ordinary members of the human race, and that our experiences (in however direct or altered fashion they appear in the writing) are like everyone else’s. To let a little light fall on one’s own face is the writer’s task, Almond didn’t achieve it in his poems. He fell on his face. But that fall, or series of falls, produced the column, a generous and funny literary reckoning.
***
Without further ado, here it is: Steve Almond’s FINAL BAD POETRY CORNER:
Ascension
He is a singular flock in a faded cloak
wooing with a sack of bread crumbs
in one hand, birds limned fist to elbow,
elbow to breast, cooing as if strummed.
Tourists stare from a bridge. Thin face,
underbite, eyes that blink too fast:
a flight risk chased from another state
and settled to this strange holy task.
The geese yank his pants with cheddar beaks,
honk at the pigeons and doves who dance
and peck his fingertips whitely, sleek
hungry messengers unfurled like fans.
Who wouldn’t want to be clothed in wings,
carried up each day to the heavens?
Yes, who wouldn’t? I mean: a bird! I mean: fly like an eagle. It’s such a totally killer metaphor for freedom and, like, the celestial.
But why was I writing about the celestial when that I was (in fact) an atheist? Because, as a Bad Poet, it was my specific job to pontificate about all the stuff I didn’t know or understand.
I also wrote about the marginalized and mangled, the diseased and destitute, those figures who made me feel a shivery sense of commiseration but who were, upon further inspection, receptacles of my own self-pity. That was me, folks: Jesus Christ, MFA. That was me, shamelessly slinging the liturgical hash, limning fists and cheddaring beaks. I couldn’t help myself.
None of us can. We’re all teenagers at heart, hiding from the mundane pointless sting of our woe. Listening to loud shitty music, cooking up feuds, scrawling purple code into journals. That’s, actually, what I love about us.
I’ve long been of the belief that people get better as writers because they get sick of their bad decisions. That’s all I’ve been trying to do, lo these many months. I exhort you to do the same thing, if you can stand it. Look back at your old poems and stories and rants. Figure out who were beneath all the fraught adverbs. (What was happening in your life? Who were you hurting. Who was hurting you? What did you want? What made you afraid? What were you afraid to want?) Then write about that. It’s a form of forgiveness, actually.
A few years back, I had the chance to examine the early drafts of one of my heroes, a fellow by the name of Vonnegut. He had this one novel that was just putrid, a kind of pulp version of World War II. He had to look at those bad decisions for 20 years before he wrote Slaughterhouse Five. It all takes longer than we think it will. For us Bad Poets, anyway.
*
As for the Good Poets, let us now praise them. Without their radical eloquence and honesty, I would never have worked up the nerve to launch so many leaky ships from the shores of overwrought metaphor.
Honestly: poets are the sexiest people on earth. They stand no chance of making any money. They’re totally out of touch with the relevant bourgeoisie enticements. There’s a decent chance they haven’t even seen The Wire. So let me thank a few of them.
First and foremost to Dave Blair, author of the remarkable collection Ascension Days, who suffered many of these Bad Poems with a bottomless and inebriated patience, and who remains a true friend and hero. To the hundreds of poets I’ve watched read over the years, often while weeping with envy: D.A. Powell, Tim Siebles, Mary Szybist, Seamus Heaney, Camille Dungy, Thomas Lux, Dorianne Laux, Stephen Dunn, Maxine Kumin, Frank Bidart, Tony Hoagland…
It’s a long fucking list.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should do everything. But I do believe we’re all doing the same work. We’re all teammates in the great contest of mercy.
Read as much poetry as you can stand. Late at night, alone or with company, drunk, nude, whatever. These folks won’t waste your time – not nearly as well as you do anyway. If you pay sufficient attention to their work, to the effect generated by a few precise words, your sentences will start to seem bloated and insecure. As they should.
But why listen to me when you can listen to Kim Addonizio? This poem is from her debut, The Philosopher’s Club, a book I keep reading, over and over, in the hopes someday I’ll get it right.
What the Dead Fear
On winter nights, the dead
see their photographs slipped
from the windows of wallets,
their letters stuffed in a box
with the clothes for Goodwill.
No one remembers their jokes,
their nervous habits, their dread
of enclosed places.
In these nightmares, the dead feel
the soft nub of the eraser
lightening their bones. They wake up
in a panic, go for a glass of milk
and see the moon, the fresh now,
the stripped trees.
Maybe they fix a turkey sandwich
or watch the patterns on the TV.
It’s all a dream anyway.
In a few months
they’ll turn the clocks ahead,
and when they sleep they’ll know the living
are grieving for them, unbearably lonely
and indifferent to beauty. On these nights
the dead feel better. They rise
in the morning refreshed, and when the cut
flowers are laid before their names
they smile like shy brides. Thank you,
thank you, they say. You shouldn’t have,
they say, but very softly, so it sounds
like the wind, like nothing human.
***
Fear not, Bad Poetry Corner fans, a collection of these columns is forthcoming from Steve Almond, available for pre-order soon!
***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
15 responses
We’re all teenagers at heart looking to grant and get forgiveness. Yep. This was a great way to go out. Thanks to all those poets and you. Now I’m going to go listen to some loud shitty music, that other great poetry in our lives.
i’m going to risk condescending snickers by saying that I don’t think your poems are bad. There is a charming innocence there– you lacked the self-censorship of the professional poets. I think ideas about what constitutes poetry have become pretty calcified by the MFA workshop poets or, as Bukowski referred to them, “sewing circle poets.”
The fact that, as a young man, you were able to cast about widely and even “appropriat[e] the suffering of others into your poems” is a strength. Now that you are older and have learned not to indulge in this freedom, your poetic imagination may be a bit poorer. No matter, it sounds like you have internalized the criticism and you won’t be “constantly risking absurdity” anymore (apologies to Ferlinghetti).
I love these columns of yours, Steve, and I’m sad to hear this is the final one. Great intro by Matthew Zapruder too. So glad to know I can buy the book soon.
you write the bad poems
to write the good poems
and vice versa
“I’ve long been of the belief that people get better as writers because they get sick of their bad decisions.” There is some excellent writing advice in here. Thank you.
This got my brain chugging along in a different pattern than usual. Very much enjoyed it, Steve. This is the sort of piece that reminds me I might not get anything out of an MFA program.
The stipulation that “bad” refers not to faulty technique but to an ethical dishonesty, a problem of inauthenticity, reminds me of some of the issues brought up in the review by Elif Bautuman linked yesterday on the Rumpus. There too, the author seemed to be complaining about how the workshop produces technically proficient, yet ultimately uninteresting, fiction. The argument was, of course, more nuanced than that, since it was so damn long. In any case, Bautuman spent a good while circling this question of how ethical it is to appropriate the suffering of others, i.e. ventriloquize the victim. Personally, I think the ethics depend on the extent to which the writing is “emotionally manipulative.” If it’s all a facade to avoid digging into one’s own issues, then it’s “bad.” However, I can see an empathetic side to this as well, but it somehow needs to include an authentic relationship between the author and the other, rather than a replacement, and thus a displacement.
Rambling put to paper may be honest, but honestly it bores me… especially when it’s contrived rambling, thus not honest at all. The second you modify the words of any poem, the second you write a second draft, the second you remove the word second because you used the word second too much you are being dishonest. Truth is arbitrary. Secondly, a truly humble person of the ordinary “human race†doesn’t need to keep reminding themselves not to be self-absorbed and narcissistic in their poetry so as to come off a certain way in their poems… also known as a contrived “I’m ordinary!†filter. A humble person will naturally write humble poems that are true. Matthew Zapruder’s “Come On All You Ghosts†inspired me to write poetry again. With that I proudly present “Come On Fluorescent Glo Wormâ€. As humble as I truly am, I honestly believe even the great Aristotle would enjoy it.
COME ON FLUORESCENT GLO WORM
Glo worm,
worm that glows,
or should I say plastic
head that glows?
I remember as a child
when I would press
your belly
and you would light up
with a glow.
A glow
that kept me warm
at night, not temperature-wise,
but mood-wise.
How many D-cell batteries
did you need? Four? Wow,
that made you heavy!
I put you away
in my toy chest one day.
How could I have known
that would be the last day
I would ever play
with you.
I sit in my attic
and I hear a cough
and I turn but nobody’s there
except you glo worm.
I pick you up
and press your belly. Nothing.
You feel a lot lighter to me.
You probably have no batteries.
I think I’ll take you with me
and stop off at 7-Eleven
and pick up some batteries.
I’ll make sure the
expiration date
is at least 2014
because now
they put expiration dates
on batteries and I don’t want
to get ripped off.
Until you glow again . . .
Maybe it’s the corner that’s bad.
the intro here, the poem, the explication:
so crazy beautiful it makes me feel ok i’m not doing nothing on yom kippur. wow. but . . . —agony— . . . there’s a typo in line 13 of addonozio’s poem. there is a difference between your “now” and her “snow” . . . if you get my drift.
if this column appears in a book i could hold, i’m sure i will violently rub my face in it. please ask the publisher not to print your text on cruel paper, if you can, and, yeah, i do know it is hard to make people do what we ask
joseph brodsky talk about “the personal to the universal.” which i think is another way of describing how “effective” poetry travels. there are things we share about ourselves that are so unique to us and strange that even if someone has never even imagined it, they can relate. that seems to be in tune with what mr. zapruder is saying, via “honesty.” the pieces i write that seem to be the most popular seem to be the one’s i have felt most leary about putting out there. i’d guess this is a universal truth.
Dammit. Why do I just discover this column today, as it ends? Okay , if someone else put a poem here, so will I. Steve, your poems aren’t bad.
If you would look at really bad poetry instead of niggling at yourself for the false note here and there, you’d see that BAD poetry is the stuff that makes you reach for you six shooter, the way Julius Streicher did when he heard the word “Kultur”.
Art Rosch
The Minefield As a Metaphor for Lif
Take one wrong step. Boom.
Your mistakes are buried in the ground,
you can’t see them
until it’s too late. You can prepare
all you want, you can study the ground,
minutely inspect each patch for strange
bulges and misplaced sprigs of grass.
The effort of living this way is insane.
You can’t walk at all. I see this
as a paradigm,
so much fear.
Prevent heart attacks.
Don’t eat trans fats.
Don’t smoke.
Watch out for prostate cancer.
Wring your breasts once a month
ferreting out tiny extrusions.
Run to the doctor,
run run run!
He’ll prescribe something
to save your life.
He can’t save the joy of it,
he can’t free your heart of the paralysis
you inherited from your TV set.
Achtung! Minen!
Watch how you step. On this very spot
a boy lost his leg. He was just playing,
he didn’t realize how vulnerable
vulnerable, we all are.
Watch out for those hot dog nitrates!
They can explode your pancreas.
The ice cream is loaded with Chinese poison.
Jesus, how does anyone take a single step
with all this crap hanging over our heads?
How long do you want to live?
How much will you spend to ensure
that you live to a miserable tottering hundred,
taking thirty eight pills a day?
It will always be a minefield, life.
Always has been, always will be.
Our obsession with minimizing risk
has made us into timid consumers
of saw palmetto and echinacea.
I say this: March cheerfully to your doom!
March and laugh, march and laugh,
nothing will prevent you from avoiding it,
nothing will save you or improve the odds.
You’re wasting time! You’re wasting your life
considering each step through the field.
Accept it. Any step could be your last.
Any choice could be wrong. How long will you
inspect the ground in front of you
before you move? How many opportunities
for love will you miss, as you protect your
fragile body from the hurtling projectiles?
March march! Be of good cheer! Bring up a laugh,
for god’s sake, life is a minefield, life is a bombing
range, life is an artillery target
into which you have stumbled.
The soldiers don’t know you’re out here
on your hands and knees
probing every inch for signs of doom.
They’re loading the guns. Fire, fire!
Boom.
I forgot. Gerald, beautiful poem. I long for the pillowcases that had
Prince Valiant and that crazy red-haired Viking. At least you’ve still got your glo worm.
Art Rosch
I love and agree with the concept of unethical, writing though I’d never thought of it in those terms. If only the desire to write honestly magically revealed our truths, huh? (The two don’t always align for me.) Having read a good batch of Steve’s prose, I’d argue his ethics are beyond reproach–true enough words to have a steady heartbeat, most of them–and that includes the fearless assessments trailing the poems in this column, all of which I will sorely miss. Thanks, Steve.
Nothing, Not
I am
nothing,
I was
nothing,
I will be
nothing.
I am
not,
I was
not,
I will be
not.
Shirley Smothers
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