(Untitled)

[wwidsith]

The next best thing to reading something wonderful is reading something truly awful - so awful it seems to crystallise everything you want to do in terms of what it isn't. I recently came across this little gem of a poem, by Jack Gilbert. I hate it.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

Comments

[witchsis]

If he's happy despite all the misery in the world, fine! Most people are, most of the time. But he shouldn't try to justify it or to depict this as God-given, that's absurd.

Did he get this published?

[wwidsith]

Oh yeah, it's from his latest book. "Beautiful wisdom", "words to live by", and "the essence of great poetry" according to some reviewers on Amazon!

[soshesays]

That is truly a terrible excuse for a poem. I apologize for gratuitously laughing and rolling my eyes. We live in a bizarre world if stuff like this is seriously getting published, and people are seriously calling it the essence of great poetry.

[wwidsith]

It's weird with reviews, people find it hard to say "This was OK." They either want to say it was the best or the worst thing ever.

[gnossiennes]

Which is why I like The Filthy Critic. He is not afraid of grey.

[wwidsith]

This is great, thanks. Anyone who loves Mulholland Drive that much is OK by me.

[muckefuck]

I demand that you post or link to an actual decent poem so that I may wash away the memory of the minutes I spent reading this one.

[wwidsith]

OK since you read Spanish, here's my favourite poem of the 20th century

http://www.swans.com/library/art8/xxx081.html

(ignore the English parallel text, it's not very good)

[gnossiennes]

If the English version isn't very good, then I must learn Spanish just to read this poem! I think it is beautiful.

Have you read any Wislawa Szymborska?

[wwidsith]

Yes indeed, I sat struggling with a book of her poems (Widok z ziarnkiem piasku, or View with a Grain of Sand) when I was learning Polish - Wisława Szymborska is awesome! She is someone else that has not been very fortunate in her translators, but then translating poems well is essentially impossible I guess. -No, that's not true. I just find it hard to really enjoy translations of anything because I am more interested in turns of phrase and sentences than I am in plot, character development etc., so I'm always very worried that I'm not seeing what the writer actually wrote.

[gnossiennes]

Ew.

That is all I have to say.

[wwidsith]

And yet it seems to sum everything up so well.

[gnossiennes]

stuff the day job. Be an academic......

[noramay]

oh dear! oh no. the worst is that because this is a poem with a PURPOSE, with an ARGUMENT and a claim, the writing has that schoolmarmy, priggish, insufferable, non-writerly patina just slathered all over it. it's not poetry at all! and that's ignoring the total moral vacuum at the center of this vision.

well, this is why the west is decadent i guess. it's a kind if rot in the brain of the comfortable yet still quasi-bohemian mind.