This blog could easily become a laundry list of my literary failings. And blogging failings. But instead here’s a poem that makes me feel good even though it is typographically inaccurate because I can’t figure out formatting very well at all:
Winner of the Bad Poem Contest
Just throw em under the pile
all the bad poems written
never to be seen again
all the poems of
the twentieth century[*]
you know, the sailboat poems,
the narcissistic poems, the ones about
hangovers, the academic poems
about
next to
nothing, the personal poems
about everything, the New York School poems about cruising,
the personal poems
about everything:
the language poems
about
something or other, throw
em all over the pile
& write no more lest
when jail
becomes the only other alternative you’ll
be so famous
or something
those horrible poems’ll’ve been saved
& then
when you die
in jail anyway
everyone will know you
for being
the worst poet of the twentieth century,
or worse,
one of the least good of the worst ones
of the turn
of the century
in which cases
yr high class executors
who know lawyers who
drink Chardonneigh & eat pistonnes
& don’t know love’ll say
you were something
you were not
for the sake of making a killing over sake
in this really huge world in
which I woke up this morning
Thank you very much.
[*] PerfPo, RegPo, LangPo, OtherPo, AcaPo, CommPo, PunkPo, ImmortalPo, BeatPo, NYPo, CalifPo (and other states), Internt’lPo. On the other hand, “Noli in Spiritu Combueri” (“refuse to be burnt-out”)-Ed Sanders
- by Bernadette Mayer, thank YOU very much.
