It is also filled with godawfully crappy poetry.

Below please find the shame of humanity.  Shudder as you witness these crimes against art, language and intellect.

Poetry is linguistic and intellectual craftsmanship of the highest order.  Or at least it should be.

Why then, are most of the poems on the internet reeking of the worst spelling and grammatical atrocities committed since Star Trek first split the infinitive?  Have you enjoyed the poem called "Independance Day" (sic)?  Trust me: the poem was worse than the spelling of the title.

Why then, are most of the poems on the internet suffering from a level of saccharine sentimentality that would make the Osmond family and Hallmark greeting card authors vomit?  Witness the numbers of angels, cloudy backgrounds, floral arrangements and references to love.  It seems childbirth, in particular, is a catalyst to the production of the most dreadful poetry.

Senile dementia also seems to uncork the wellspring of putrid poems.  Senior citizens seem to believe that poems must rhyme at any cost, and that endless moral diatribes and lectures will do the rest of the world a power of good.

Poetry should be like nose-picking and masturbation: everybody does it, most people deny it, but few do it in public.

Hereunder, please find annoted public nostril-mining onanistic travesties of the English language.  Sometimes I wish one needed a licence to write poetry.

SELF DEFENCE TIP #1

Learn to recognise the enemy.

Really bad poetry is often flagged by the following:

a)  nauseating graphics, usually angels and/or roses.  The evidence to your left was lifted by forensic poets at the site of a particularly nasty random poetry crime.

b)  accompanying music such as "Tears in Heaven" or "Wind beneath my wings".  At least the music is sympatico,  and we can excuse Eric Clapton that one dreadful song considering the circumstances.

Modern Poetry
 -- by L.B. Strawn - Copyright 1997 -- l.b.strawn@juno.com

Recently I have begun to believe,
Much to my chagrin and dread,
That the world of sensible poetry
Is on the brink of being dead.

So much of what I see in the books
Of the published poets of this age,
Makes me shudder, and I ask myself,
"Is this the trend? Is this the gauge?"

I guess I have been somewhat blind
‘Cause it's been famous for many years.
My poetry belongs to those of the past,
Which brings to my mind great fears.

Most of this modern poetry has such
Rambling dialogue and hidden meaning
That I ask myself, "What does it say?
What is the message I should be gleaning?"

And, punctuation is a thing of the past;
I don't even know how it should be accented.
What are we telling our children in school,
"That it doesn't matter how it is presented?"

But---that seems to be the accepted form
Of any well known poet, published, today
Will that remain the tolerated norm?
Is it here for a while, or, here to stay?

I trust the poetic world will return
Not only to rhythmic but rhyming as well;
And hope that the present day modernist
Hasn't sounded, to rhyming, the death knell.

dan falzone (dfalzone@ccscad.edu) wrote on Wed Sep 4 15:34:45 2002.

I was reading through your bad poetry section, and I completely agree, most of it is horrible poetry... But then I read your little poem about bad poetry, and it's easily just as bad.
It reads like a f*ing third grader trying to fit words that rhyme into a poem. You wrote also about people trying to be deep and introspective, but your poem suffers just the opposite.
It's so bland and surface value, you have no room to talk. You bitch about rhyme and rhythm, but all your rhymes sound like your digging to find any word that will fit the verse,
and your rhythm just sucks. Do me a favor and actually read the poem you wrote out loud..
It just sounds all garbled and sh*y. My point is, who the f* are you to be bitching about how people express themselves.Especially picking apart the trivial details, some of which are arbitrarily bad. Your poem sucks, and you spend all your time overanalyzing other peoples poems, to find words that are misspelled. Well congratulations you stupid f*, your the same as every other artist out there who thinks he's unique because he's blinded by his own self-bias.

Don't you just love people who are 100% wrong with such passion? If he had actually read the poem, he would have seen it was written (and copyrighted) by a soul called "L.G." which is not me.

As I said elsewhere on these pages, the last thing I would do would be to inflict my own poetry on the unsuspecting public.

The thing that really annoys me about Dan is not that he made a mistake, but the violently abusive tone he adopts. Are manners nowadays optional when talking to complete strangers? Or is it the curse of email? Or is he just American? ;-)

I left his name and email address on the email for a purpose. If he gets back to me, I might remove them. Or, I could just lodge an abuse report with his school... Whatever.