When I was a child, my mother would try to lull me to sleep by reciting poetry.
Not nursery rhymes. Poetry. Real, genuine adult poetry. The earliest one I remember is Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman, the tragic tale of a dashing rogue, his beloved Bess, and their eventual fate as moonlit ghosts. That this poem may have led to a lifelong obsession with swords, top boots, sweeping romance, and long-haired, somewhat roguish men is surely not what Mum intended, but it clearly demonstrates the power of poetry on an innocent child.
Alas, not all poetry is good. I still remember being bewildered, then somewhat nauseated as a middle school friend presented me with a copy of Rod McKuen’s Listen to the Warm. I might have only been thirteen but I knew what I liked, and books that tried to tell me that “warm” was a noun weren’t it. I had the same reaction in college when someone gave me a carefully underlined copy of a book by a favorite actor who’d decided to dabble in poetry, illustrated by his own photographs. Although the photography was good enough that I wasn’t surprised when the actor made it a second career many years later, the poetry was so bad I had trouble watching him for quite some time.
There are many, many bad poems. Those familiar only with The Norton Anthology may think that poetry of the past was uniformly good, but a quick glance through history proves that this is not necessarily so. Praxilla, an otherwise well regarded ancient Greek, became a by-word for awful metaphors when she attributed these profound thoughts to the dying Adonis:
Finest of all the things I have left is the light of the sun,
Next to that the brilliant stars and the face of the moon,
Cucumbers in their season, too, and apples and pears.
Praxilla was far from the only good poet to succumb to produce a silly, tasteless, or just plain terrible poem; a female troubadour of the early Middle Ages, far from singing of sweet love, urged a young friend to become a nun instead of taking a lover because pregnancy would cause her breasts to sag. Perhaps the most tasteless line in Western literature can be found in William Dunbar's late medieval The Treatise of the Three Married Women and the Widow when Dunbar compares an impotent old man to a urinating dog with a kidney blockage, although a French verse bluntly (if truthfully) claiming that James I of Bible fame [censored] the Duke of Buckingham isn't far off.
Later ages were no less strewn with bad prosody. The 18th century may have brought us the novel, the newspaper, and the monthly magazine, Dean Swift and Madame de Stael and Tom Paine, but it also produced men like John Armstrong, who wrote an epic poem about, of all things, that “tenacious paste of solid milk” called cheddar cheese, while another, James Grainger, believed that
“Come, Muse, let us sing of rats!”
was a fine way to begin an epic poem right up until his eager listeners fell out of their silken chairs in hysterics.
Today is no exception. Modern poets may not write heroic couplets about rats, but bad poems continue to appear, year after year. High school free verse remembering the football player who wrapped his Mustang around a tree…literary productions about the glories of dawn over a cattle skull in the potter's field of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico…limited edition chapbooks of slam poetry by disaffected hipsters who wish they’d slept with Basquiat, or someone who’d met Basquiat, or at least been an extra with him in the video for Rapture….
As bad as the above examples are, though, they don’t quite sink to the level of Poetry So Bad It’s Good. PSBIG should not only be memorably bad, but be consistently bad. One or two stinkers by a good poet, or a few lines by a plodder, aren’t enough. The body of work is what counts, and though this may be a curious way to celebrate National Poetry Month, tonight I bring you two poets who are so splendidly awful that only one or two rhymesters can approach them as Poets So Bad They’re Good.
Colley Cibber, Poet Laureate of England – Colley Cibber is best known today, if at all, for being the object of some of Alexander Pope’s wrath in his epic Augustan snarkfest, The Dunciad. Pope, the finest poet of his age, could not be Poet Laureate because he was Catholic, and he reserved some of his most refined vitriol for the man who actually wrote the commemorative verse, had his lyrics set to Handel’s glorious music, and received his yearly pension of royal sack.
If Cibber, a one-time theatrical producer and father-in-law of the celebrated diva Susannah Cibber, had had the slightest talent, Pope’s fury might be dismissed as mere jealousy rather than justifiable outrage. A single glance at Cibber’s works puts the lie to this assumption: Cibber was terrible. Epically, gloriously, eternally terrible, in a way that Douglas Adams fans would think possible only among the Vogons:
The Blind Boy
O SAY what is that thing call’d Light,
Which I must ne’er enjoy;
What are the blessings of the sight,
O tell your poor blind boy!
You talk of wondrous things you see,
You say the sun shines bright;
I feel him warm, but how can he
Or make it day or night?
My day or night myself I make
Whene’er I sleep or play;
And could I ever keep awake
With me ’twere always day.
With heavy sighs I often hear
You mourn my hapless woe;
But sure with patience I can bear
A loss I ne’er can know.
Then let not what I cannot have
My cheer of mind destroy:
Whilst thus I sing, I am a king,
Although a poor blind boy.
And in case anyone is naïve enough to think that surely Cibber wasn’t always this bad, here’s an excerpt from one of his royal commemoratives:
Ye grateful Britons bless the year,
That kindly yields increase,
While plenty that might feed a war,
Enjoys the guard of peace;
Your plenty to the skies you owe,
Peace is your monarch's care;
Thus bounteous Love and George below
Divided empire share…
Fortunately, Cibber himself was under no illusions as to his talents. He knew that Pope’s grocery list was more lyrical and scanned better than his own laboriously crafted St. Cecilia’s Day odes. He was a mild mannered fellow who never quite understood why a genius like Alexander Pope devoted so much ink to mocking, name calling, and generally doing his best to make Colley Cibber a laughingstock. It’s little wonder that he eventually replied in kind, authoring a pamphlet revealing an embarrassing encounter the dwarfish Pope had had with a statuesque prostitute that compared Pope to a “terrible tomtit, pertly perching upon the mount of love.”
It may not be the kindest metaphor, but it’s better than most of what he wrote for the House of Hanover.
Julia Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan – one of the best and funniest passages in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn details Huck’s encounter with the poetical and artistic relicts of Emmeline Grangerford, an artistic young miss who died young. The girl, a devotee of the 19th century obsession with death and mourning, wrote melancholy poetry, sketched scenes of droopily bereaved maidens, and generally seems to have lived her life in a state of mild and perpetual thanatopsis. Her masterpiece was a drawing of a dead bird entitled “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.” Huck averred that he didn’t understand it but the girl’s family set such great store by it that it must have been good, although the modern reader may be more inclined to trust Huck’s taste in this matter.
Julia A. Moore would have disagreed.
The self-proclaimed Sweet Singer of Michigan was a farm wife of refined and sentimental tastes who, seemingly without any encouragement from her family, friends, or much of anyone else, suddenly turned to poetry in 1876, at the tender age of 31. The result, The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public, later known as The Sentimental Songbook, would have been right up Grangerford’s alley. In one slim, blood soaked volume, Moore, whom a contemporary called "worse than a Gatling gun," racks up a body count that would do Ted Bundy proud, taking out almost two dozen characters, many of them dear little children
Those little girls will not forget
The day that Hattie died,
For she was with them when she fell in a fit,
While playing by their side.
or hapless innocents on a train
Have you heard of the dreadful fate
Of Mr. PP Bliss and wife?
Of their death I will relate,
And also others lost their life
Ashtabula Bridge disaster,
Where so many people died
Without a though that destruction
Would plunge them 'neath the wheel of tide.
Even though no one dies, the threat of violence lurks even beneath the romance of this excerpt from Croquet by Moonlight:
Two young men were among them, that loved this pretty Dell:
Although I write about them, their names I will not tell.
They were fine young fellows, so bashful, and yet so gay;
They tried to beat the girl with the blue ball play.
Of course word soon got out that Michigan had produced a poet of singular talents, and the Sweet Singer found that she’d written a surprise bestseller. Intellectuals roared, the hoi polloi wept over poor Mr. PP Bliss (and wife), and Mark Twain (who may or may not have had Julia in mind when he wrote Huckleberry Finn) eventually went on record as saying that her poetry had given him joy for twenty years, although perhaps not in the way she intended.
Alas, “nothing gold can stay,” as a much better poet later said, and the Sweet Singer’s subsequent efforts never approached her initial glory. She returned to being a simple Michigan farm wife, writing only for the local newspapers and sinking slowly into obscurity. Perhaps she had only had the one memorable book in her. After all, as she herself had once said:
“Literary is a work very difficult to do.”
Truer words were ne’er writ.
Let us now praise awful poets, fellow Kossacks. Who’s your favorite? 19th century horrors like William Topaz McGonagall? Modern kitschmeisters like Rod McKuen? Medieval bore Hartmann von Aue? Don’t be shy. Gather round the hearth and join the bardic circle as we summon the ghosts of mediocrity past!