"Poetry", anyone? [explicit]

[Rance]

Let me explain myself.

I hate poetry. I hate it with a passion. It's one of those things that I believe everyone can do, but only a few people can do it right (and some of the famous poets you and I are familiar with are not some of those people). I've always believed that it's an overly-accessible art, a thing that is praised by aristocrats of language because it bends the laws of language, tries to stretch outside of those laws and tries to act like it's perfectly alright to exist outside of them.

Now, I can't say that I hate all poetry. I love Robert Service, I love Robert Frost. I like Rabindranath Tagore, Anne Bradstreet, William Blake, and Walt Whitman. I think that poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is particularly readable, and that there are some beat poets who have a thing or two to offer to poetry.

But on the whole, I think poetry sucks. So I decided to write some. Mind you, I'm not trying to remedy the sickness that is poetry -- I'm just intending to add more bullshit to it.

Posted below are selections from my work-in-progress, a book of poetry I'm intending to title, Take A Shit On This Book ... and Other Poetry. What follows is not for the faint of heart. The expressions are base, crude, offensive, homophobic (which I am not), potentially racist (which I am not), simplistic, juvenile, and downright idiotic. If poetry is supposed to make us feel emotion, then why not piss a few people off while I'm at it? If I were going to have any artistic message to convey, it's that poetry is perfectly able to express unpleasant messages as opposed to pretty ones, and that this poetry is my contemporary vision of our society as a whole, especially its unpleasant parts.

If you're easily offended, I'd suggest looking at another thread. If you read this poetry and hate it or get angry because of it, then my poetry has succeeded. Otherwise, prepare for the shittest / awesomest thing you've ever read.
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"Dear Mrs. Bradstreet,"

I have taken into consideration the works of your
contemporaries along with your creative ancestors,
And were that I to give an award to my favorite,
I would likely give it to you.
In fact, your work is far superior
to many of your poetic successors.
Thank you for writing verse that isn't equitable to absolute dogshit.
Your domestic skills were also rumored to be
as precise as those of your pen.
So, bitch, cook me dinner,
and iron my clothes.


"Bad Hair Day"

"Oh, I'm just having a bad hair day," you say,
as if that simple excuse for the disarray of your hair-folicles
will somehow explain what you so profoundly lack
in acceptable human fibers and expressions of social grace.
"Seriously, don't worry about it," I say,
with a smile that bites down on the thin line between
sarcasm and moral support.
"No matter what, you always look like shit!"
And that admission leaps -- like Apollo on steroids -- across
vast, sky-scraping mountain-ranges,
roiling, raging-wild rivers,
and a bunch of other poorly descriptive bullshit,
to slide right home, into the uncharted wilderness of total-****ing-understatement.


"Grande Slam"

All of a sudden, the Great American past-time
operates less like a sport and more like an arms-race,
only in this arms-race, the high-powered weapons are
off-shore immigrants whose lack of ability to
speak English,
hold steady employment,
and avoid steailng televisions
is more than compensated for by their uncanny talent to
run bases,
throw sliders,
jump fences,
and swing, swing, swing those bats.
Stealing American jobs has never been so easy, has it?

But still I sit, watching, waiting, cheering for players whose names
I pronounce less accurately than a lysdexic dearing a dictrionary bass-ackwards,
filling my ever-expanding American face with
fistfuls of beer,
greasy palmfuls of peanuts,
mustard-lubricated all-beef hotdogs,
because I could really care less if you're stealing an American's dream
to be part of the Great American past-time
as long as you get into a pitching-mound fight
and knock out someone's teeth the way you do
when you fight over scrap-metal stolen from a construction site.

[Rance]

"Dear e.e. cummings,"

go ****

y
o
u
r
s
e
l
f.

"26"

He took control of the Panama Canal with no intent
but to use it to ram awesomeness straight up your ass,
and when he wasn't busy writing ****ing books and reading a ton of intelligent crap,
he was playing cowboys and Indians
with real cowboys
and real Indians,
spraying lead like it was going out of style
(and it was, because science was synthesizing better metals),
and being so rough a rider,
that he probably had something like, four-thousand half-white, half-Indian children
(all spawned out of one squall, impregnated from fifteen thousand miles away with prior consent
(he got a permission slip signed from her mom)),
because he pissed out beer,
drank blood,
and bathed in piss,
and he probably invented heavy metal, too,
because even though Teedie wore glasses and probably crapped his pants once or twice
as a kid--
(I think he was born from Sasquatch and bull-semen)--
he was one really swell El Presidente, and I know that because
history says so,
and so does the Smithsonian,
and Wikipedia,
and we all know how right those are,
except for when they left out the best part
about how he got super-ramped one day when he saw that
his likeness hadn't been included in the natural landmass of Mount Rushmore,
and he blasted a perfect portrait of his face
right into the rock with his laser-eyes,
and I almost forgot,
when you were a horny woman,
Teddy Roosevelt would lift you up over his head and shout out,
"Moustache rides for five cents,"
and if you didn't sit on his face and stuff five cents in his hand,
he'd probably punch you right in your clam,
and God knows, with the amount of vaginal juice Teddy Roosevelt accumulated
on his hand
from punching girls
in their clams,
you probably wouldn't want that to happen.
Teddy Roosevelt truly was the greatest man what ever lived.


"Dear Mr. Hughes,"

It's always been outstandingly surprising that you
managed to galvanize your career,
and cement your niche in history,
by complaining that you weren't born white.
But it's alright.
I cannot help but wonder -- dream, if you will, --
how much more beneficial your language would have been
to your legacy, your wallet,
and your cause,
if you had not squandered it all
on being such a ****ing whiner.
Have some pride,
and enjoy a backbone while you're at it,
punk-bitch.


"Dear Mr. Ginsberg,"

You have quite a bit of nerve, being famous the way you are,
and measuring myself up to you, I realize that
I've got quite a few things going for me
that you don't.
For starters, I don't eat dick--

and I think
that's really all there is to it.


"The Most Religious Poem Written to Date"

Oh, Christ,
Holy shit,
Goddamnit all to Hell,
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
Amen.

[Atsu]

Write one about me. I'm a poet.

You are correct, poetry I believe can be written by anyone. It's a matter of feeling what you want to write about and just doing it. But it is exactly like any other art, anyone can do it. It takes practice. Many people have the ability to draw lines and circles, but it's a matter of knowing where to put those lines and circles to create and artistic masterpiece. Just like poetry it's a matter of putting the right words an feelings into the right order.

Again write one about me, I'm one of those bloody poets you despise =p

[Error404]

You remind me of Maddox sometimes, keep working and one day you'll reach his level of win.

Funny stuff though.

Do you like songs? The majority of songs are just poetry put to music.

[Rance]

Blake,

I definitely agree with your sentiment. I think one of the things that's always bugged me about poets is that they manage to cement themselves these timeless places in literary history with effortless, over-analyzed garbage. I don't think you're a bad poet at all, honestly -- I read some of yours and I thought they were enjoyable, thoughtful reads. That's definitely a lot more than I could say for the majority of both contemporary and classical poets that I've read.

Error, I could never reach his level of win! Agreed, songs are a kind of poetry, too, but there's a lot more at work there -- there's something magical in the body of a song, between its conception all the way until its instrumentalization. Most songs that we hear nowadays would sound like pointless bullcrap if it weren't for the instrumentalization. If we read some of those lyrics in a poetic manner, they'd probably sound like two dogs ****ing. There's definitely something that happens when words are put to music that give them a life and a consistency that they otherwise lack.

[Mandi]

Oh Rance these are amazing, I absolutely love them. I'd love to see more, since, you know, you abandoned your other story. Dickweed.

[Digital]

I much prefer literature. From Orwell to Ben Elton. The lot of it. : ]

[Rance]

I love literature, too, Digital -- prose form, anyway! I do like long-form poetry and classical epic poetry, and even more contemporary poets can win me over if they tell a story with their poetry. When and if I ever get a chance to teach, I'm going to great teaching poetry -- long and short prose are my interests, and I know I'll be animated about those, at least!

Mandi -- it's still in the works! I don't know why I stopped with the story. It just wasn't holding my interest very long. I do need to get back to work on my first manuscript, though -- I need to boot myself in the ass, get it finished being edited, and get it out there ... I've just been lazy!