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Celebrating Bad Poetry

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the Guide

The Vogons, of course, are a particularly nasty race from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. “The series tells that, far back in prehistory, when the first primeval Vogons crawled out of the sea, the forces of evolution were so disgusted with them that they never allowed them to evolve again,” says Wikipedia. It makes sense then that these lowly forms favor poetry and use their particularly poor poetic skills (3rd worst in the universe) as torture. As such, the livejournal profile for the Vogon Poet’s Society reads as follows:

The Society is centred upon the desire to write Painful Poesy: Poems so horribly bad that they cause cancer in lab rats, crippling pain and terror, and publication in MLA poetry anthologies…Please do not post mediocre poetry. And please do not post light-hearted poetry. We only want the worst. The absolute bottom-of-the-barrel sludge of modern poetry. Scrape it up, chip it off, and throw it at this community.

The concept is laughable, and truly there are terrible poems. Here’s one entitled “Belgium!”

Ah! my smelly jelly!
How fishy of you to have noticed
Your quotas are teminally deficient
It reminded me of summer
I hated it/you/life...

And another, entitled “A Cold Vogon Heart.”

...My car starts up like a horse with TB
and my glasses are so fogged I cannot see
I ponder wearing grandpa wear 
So that I can scoot through the day without a care...

Learning Chinese

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I happened upon this essay on The Paris Review Tumblr page — happened upon it courtesy of Facebook power-user and UT classmate D.A. Hosek (subscribe to his Facebook feed if you, dear reader, can). Anyway, so here I was, all happened upon this essay by Roberto Balaño — “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories” — and two things occurred to me:

    A) To write, you must read. But it is impossible to read everything.

The majority of Balaño’s advice concerns reading suggestions. I have read much of some of the suggested authors; I have read a little of some of the others; I have read none of a few as well.

We want to read great writers. It is just as much a component of learning writing as the writing itself. Just as when learning a foreign language, we must listen to a native speak Chinese just as much as we must practice 你好 ourselves; there must be input and output.

    B) But we must stop reading and start writing at some indeterminate point. Or maybe a point determined by inspiration.

Which is why Mr. Balaño’s point the second resounded so well with myself and several other MFA students:

Short Story Method

(Pardon me as I snip the image rather than transcribe.)

Balaño’s advice to write more than one story at a time is a freeing concept. Write as inspiration leads you, at least when it comes to short-form writing (there’s little choice when it comes to a novel or epic; revision is the space for inspiration in that medium).

And rather than wait for inspiration to hammer away at the same story, let new inspiration create new rivulets of writing. It is potent advice from Balaño, and we are wise when we follow it.

A Medium Reimagined

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A filmmaker and close friend of mine, Ford Seeuws, shared this Verge article Tuesday morning. It introduces the video game Proteus, which offers little action, little storyline, little graphical innovation. In fact, the game looks and plays much like a game we might expect released in 1998:

But here is where it differs:

It may sound boring, as these kinds of games so often do, but Proteus is a surprisingly enjoyable way to spend an hour, and that’s mainly due to the music. Trekking across the island will cue different sounds — from the soft tinkling of rainfall to the excited hops of pixelated rabbits — but unlike more obvious music-focused games like, say, Wave Trip, you can’t use Proteus to craft an inventive new song; it’s much more passive than that. “We didn’t want to make a literal musical instrument,” says Ed Key, who developed the game alongside composer David Kanaga. “It’s more about the world as a piece of music that you can go through and explore in different ways.”

It is a game that focuses on the experiential — the emotional and intellectual — reactions to basic sensory data. It reminds me, in a way, of the brilliant TED Talk from Neil Harbisson, a colorblind man who listens to colors — and encourages other to join him.

What I like most is how the creators of Proteus re-invented their medium. In the past, artistic expression in video games came most often through expensive graphics or complex, orchestrated soundtracks or bizarre, far-flung worlds — think the epic RPGs of Square Enix or the vivid realism and creative worlds of Bioshock. But, the Proteus creators have found an almost impressionist, almost modernist means of creative video game art.

Writers and artists of all brands and genre should aspire to that ingenuity.

Meinke’s Inspiration

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St. Petersburg resident and all-around Super Poet, Peter Meinke, once had the MFA students at the University of Tampa visit the Salvador Dalí museum. Meinke himself frequented the museum. The daring and talented paintings inspired Meinke to think, pushed him to be creative.

I am not a big fan of Dalí myself, but his paintings, his warpings of the world, his unique means of protesting, preaching, and confessing forced even myself to look at communication, writing, and art anew.

As writers, we are wise to draw inspiration from different mediums of art. Some of Meinke’s poetry — and some of the great poems in the English language — started with or simply are a description of an actual painting.

It is with that in mind that I pass along this music video. Of Monster and Men did the song “Little Talks,” which many younger readers (or radio listeners of all ages) will have no doubt heard. The latest music video, released last week, has — I hope you will agree — the rich vividness and openness of purpose that Dalí so well-weilded:

(Pump it to hi-def, if the you’ve the bandwidth for it.)

The Odd Dangers of Writers as Readers

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Here is T.S. Eliot reading “The Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock”:

In undergrad, I read Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape and loved it. Then, near the end of that same semester, I had a chance to see the play performed by a man Beckett had personally chosen to play Krapp. It was like seeing the piece performed in Beckett’s own mind — I was thrilled.

Until I saw the play.