Another discussion question for the poem-friendly element of the Doper community: a companion piece, in fact, to the one I posted earlier.
Are there any poets, or specific pieces, that you like a lot, even though they’re considered poor, lousy or downright awful by Those Who Decide What’s Good Or Bad? Y’know, the stuff your sophomore English teacher would dismiss out of hand as being trash, or doggerell? The verse you know is corny, but it still moves you? I try to avoid the phrase “guilty pleasures”, because I don’t think anyone should feel guilty or ashamed for loving the art that they love, no matter what anyone else says about it --but it’s an apt enough term for what I mean.
I’ll cop to three which have one thing in common as far as I’m concerned.
The Raven,by Edgar Allen Poe (of course). People are finally starting to realize that Mr. Poe has been given a pass for many lines of utter clang-bang-clank, such as “chilling and killing my Annabell Lee” and “the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells”. The reaction, unfortunately, is sometimes so thoroughgoing as to claim that the poor dead fellow was really no poet at all, or no great one anyway; that his verse is mostly mere melodrama, a melange of stentorious sturm und drang, syrup-sopped sappiness and a drunkard’s dreary dramatics. To such nay-sayers I reply: THE RAVEN. It rocks.Dig it.
Then there’s “The Highwayman”, by Alfred Noyes. I’m not sure but I think even in his day this chap was regarded as the poetic equivalent of a pop-pandering purveyor of potboilers. And from some other stuff of his I’ve read, that reputation wasn’t entirely without merit. But he did write “The Barrel Organ”, which remains somewhat enchanting in a hokey way; and he did write “The Highwayman”. What some sophisticates might call a morbid melodramatic mythic-manque tragic romance, I call a pretty damned enjoyable and stirring, with so fabulous a sound that the sense is redeemed
The Congo by Vachel Lindsay. In his time he was the most successful and popular poet in the USA. He’s almost forgotten now. Of the dozens and dozens of poems that flowed from this man’s (figurative) feather-quill, only three or four survive even in the minds of us poetry nerds.This poem is one of those survivors, even though it has fallen from favor almost universally because it sounds jaw-droppingly racist by today’s standards. The author really didn’t mean any harm or disrespectt; indeed he saw it as being quite the opposite–but that ain’t the way it is, these days. Besides which, aesthetic standards have changed dramatically and drastically since Vachel Lindsay’s day and his style, which was once the very moment, is antiquated and irrelevant. I like it very much anyway, for the sound of it far more than the sense --it’s fucking lovely sound-wise. Read a passage or two out loud to yourself if you don’t believe me.Which brings us to that reason I mentioned up there three paragraphs back for loving all three of these poems, corny or over-wrought or un-PC as they are:
The SOUND of them, GODDAMN IT! Specifically, the fact that all three of them are SUCH A BLAST TO READ ALOUD, or to hear someone who’s good at and enjoys reading/reciting poetry so it is HEARD. There’s some poetry where it’s the sense that matters most, or sound and sense combined – these three are all about the beautiful sound.And so I think those are three great fucking poems, and whoever disagrees with my assessment just does not have good taste in poetry (hee hee hee!)
And finally I want to give a shout out to Mr. Ogden Nash (1902-1971). He wrote what was called “light verse” --considered at the time to be fluu and puff stuff, that the white haired eminences of quality lit would never deign to notice or acknowledge. But dammit, I have read and even revelled in enough of that deep, daring, aesthetically chewy poetry that I am damned well entitled to enjoy what this man did just for the fun and love of playing with words – to get paid, yep, but also (mainly?) to make people laugh.