dumbfoundry

I love bad poetry. What it lacks in aesthetic appeal it more than makes up for in amusement value. Until this month, the best places to find bad poetry were the New Yorker and poetry.com's real-time poetry contest entry feed. Now we have Allen Ginsberg's The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937–1952.

It's fitting that Ginsberg's juvenilia should serve as a beacon in the night of bad poetry—after all, his influence is responsible for roughly 60 percent of bad American poetry written today. The poems collected here anticipate the million adolescent wails that followed Howl—they consist of fruitless imitations of other poets, strident cliché, and forehead-slapping sentimentality. Ginsberg remained a bad poet until the end, and his later work isn't nearly as fun to read. It falls in the New Yorker category of bad poetry (albeit with more drugs and pederasty, fewer barns and grandfathers): well-wrought garbage for people with different taste than mine. [...]

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 10:47 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.