Foul Expression: Recognizing What Stinks in Poetry
Even if you have never studied poetic devices and prosody, you know bad poetry when you hear it. Like the rest of us, you have groaned over lyrics like, “I’m just a shy guy looking for a two-ply Hefty bag to hold my-y-y-y-y-y-y love,” (from Train’s song, “Drive By”).
Maybe your basic decency as a human being helped you to look grateful when your mother bought you that special card.
But you knew these were foul expressions of poetry, unworthy of print–literary moments to be endured rather than enjoyed. But do you know WHY?
Pay careful attention to the following list of seven foul literary practices because tonight’s homework is to produce a bad, bad poem.
1) Use an inappropriate metaphor. For example, “His thoughts tumbled like underwear in a dryer without Cling Free,” or “Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.”
2) Force your rhymes. For example, “You are so sweet; let me repeat; I think you’re neat.” Or “Whenever we go out for a walk, with you I like to talk.” Or “I love kittens; they are so silly. I also have a brother whose name is Billy.”
3) Use an inconsistently metered (rhythmic) line. For example, “The face that broke across the sky was hers. / The clouds and rain came down in storming grief. / Tribulations upon tribulations.” (That was two lines of iambic pentameter followed by one line without a recognizable metric pattern.)
4) Write without any imagery or poetic devices at all, but put your words into stanzas so it looks like you are writing a poem. For example:
5) Use cliches. Cliches are turns of phrase that have been so over used that no one actually pictures their imagery or feels their power . For example, “He was naked as a jaybird.” (Are jaybirds even naked?) Or “Make no bones about it…..” (Did people once “make bones”?)
6) Tell rather than show. Good writing creates a sensory experience for a reader rather than simply telling about one through a dull adjective or abstraction. This rule is even more important in poetry. A bad poet might characterize happiness as “really great” whereas a good one might say it was “rain falling on the open sea” (Jane Kenyon).
7) Feel sorry for yourself. The more pathetic you seem, the worse your poem will be. For example, “Sometimes I feel so down./The aches inside hurt./Nobody knows how bad I feel./I just don’t feel like doing anything at all.”
Your challenge today is to write the worst poem you can manage. Take advantage of all seven of the foul literary practices described here. Post your horrible poem in our Schoology update feed. Tuesday, if you want to read your horrible poem at coffeehouse, I will give you a public submission credit. (This is the only time I will do this for horrible writing.) Whoever reads the WORST poem at coffeehouse Tuesday will receive a special, horrible prize. Note: Sometimes students, in response to this prompt, write poetry that is SO bad that it transcends badness and becomes good because it’s that funny. If you accomplish this feat, feel free to use your poem in your final portfolio. All bad poems also receive full credit as first draft material in your raw pages.
