by Leonard Gill
Very Bad Poetry, Edited by Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras, Vintage, 126 pp., $10 (paper)
he brother
and sister team of Kathryn and Ross Petras are back with their unerring
eye. The passage of time has apparently done nothing to cloud that eye,
because with Very Bad Poetry the Petrases have looked to the bottom
of the barrel and dredged up 129 of the stupidest -- and funniest -- poems
ever written.
If your taste in poetry runs to the macabre, the morbid, the depraved, or the deformed, and your taste in bad runs to the terrible, Very Bad Poetry is the anthology for you.
I refer specifically to James Whitcomb Riley's charming "The Happy Little Cripple" or Cornelius Whur's "The Armless Artist," Mrs. Marion Albina Bigelow's double entry, "Two Smothered Children" and "Children Disinterred," Georgia Bailey Parrington's "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy," and William McGonagall's "Calamity in London: Family of Ten Burned to Death," which title the Petrases single out as "Most Lurid Account of Tragedy."
(For a sample of this wildly popular breed of poem in the 19th century, see Eliza Cook's wonderful "Song of the Sea Weed": "Many a lip is gaping for drink,/ And madly calling for rain;/ And some hot brains are beginning to think/ Of a messmate's opened vein." Edward Gorey, eat your heart out.)
All is not gruesome depiction, though for clinical exactitude you'd be hard-pressed to find unlikelier subjects for poetic expression than "The Spleen" by Matthew Green, or from poet-dentist Solyman Brown a five-canto masterwork titled "The Dentologia -- A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth."
What, beyond what these titles and subjects already indicate, makes these poems so especially bad? The Petrases point out in their brief introduction that it comes down to one or all of many things in dreadful combination: anticlimax, off-rhymes, convoluted syntax, and a dependence on literary devices, from alliteration to cloddish metaphors to footnotes that run longer than the poems themselves. In addition, "it helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, a bullheaded inclination to stuff too many syllables or words into a line or a phrase, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence." A negative capability, then, but not as Keats imagined it.
Take, for example, that most formal and exalted of verse forms, the ode, lowered to subbasement level in James McIntyre's "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese (Weighing over 7,000 pounds)": "We have seen thee, queen of cheese,/ Lying quietly at your ease,/ Gently fanned by evening breeze,/ Thy fair form no flies dare seize."
Or this, by a regrettably unknown poet, in praise of a ditch: "Oh, wonderful sewer,/ Each year brings a newer/ And ghostlier charm to thy cavernous deeps!/ More puppies and cats,/ To say nothing of rats,/ And offal and filth of all manner of heaps."
For the record, the Petrases also include selections from such irresistible titles as "A Pindaricque on the Grunting of a Hog," "Song of the Three Hundred Thousand Drunkards in the United States," and "Lines Written for a Friend on the Death of His Brother, Caused by a Railway Train Running over Him Whilst He Was in a State of Inebriation."
These works at least fit into the recognized categories of traditional form, moral instruction, and disaster-mongering. Other examples resist even the Petrases' best attempts at classification (or, for that matter, clarification). Regarding Alfred Austin's monumental fulmination against the padded bra in "The Human Tragedy," we get this stab at exegesis from the editors: "Breasts appear in often unexpected ways or places, often doing unexpected things, such as ploughing the brine or opening doors." And this nod to Slocum Slugs' "I Saw Her in Cabbage Time": "This poem is probably one of the few American poems about the time-honored task of cutting sauerkraut ... and certainly one of the most compelling." (Does this mean there are others?)
The distinction of being "The Worst Poem Ever Written in the English Language" is, as the editors admit, no easy task, but they believe they've found it in Theophile Marzials' appropriately entitled "A Tragedy." In it, barges plop, drips drop, waters flop, and the poet's head shrieks, "Stop." (The head of the poet being lines ahead of the reader's.)
To return to the subject of cheese, though, final mention should be made of the Petrases' rediscovery of one J. Gordon Coogler, a printer in the latter half of the 19th century who advertised "Poems Written While You Wait" and whose poetry sold in the thousands of copies. The editors of Very Bad Poetry claim they can't always precisely define a very bad poem, but as in all great art, they know one when they see one. And they see one in Coogler's How Strange Are Dreams! I quote: "How strange are dreams! I dreamed the other night/ A dream that made me tremble,/ Not with fear, but with a kind of strange reality;/ My supper, though late, consisted of no cheese."
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