Oh, I’m just talking about poetry. I have no problem with profound novels, movies, etc. That said, I’m quite fond of The Raven and The Road Not Taken, but free-form angst-flogging gets a pass.
High school poetry isn’t all bad. I was in the creative writing club at my high school, and there was some great poetry, and then a whole lot of people who had some really good stuff going but needed to work on it more. But yeah, some of it was really bad, including some of my poems. I wrote some really bad poems, but I also wrote some that I think are pretty good. I’m almost tempted to ask people here to read them and tell me what they think.
Anyway, I think that the biggest reason that high school poetry or internet poetry is so bad is that the people who read it don’t really have any standards and will highly praise something that’s not so good. So when everything that they write gets praised, they don’t try as hard to make really good stuff.
I partly agree, and partly STRONGLY DISagree with the OP. I think that having poetry read at a pep rally is stupid. It’s not going to make anyone like poetry, it’s just going to bore people and turn them off of poetry even more than they probably already are.
That said, once it’s agreed that the poetry club will get to read a poem at the pep rally, I VEHEMENTLY disagree with the idea that the administration should censor it for anything short of libel/slander/legal obscenity/fighting words. (And in California, thanks to the state Education Code, the administration probably can NOT censor it, although in the rest of the country, thanks to the asstacular Hazelwood decision, it can.)
If we’re trying to teach our kids to be good Americans, that includes the most precious American ideal, the right to free expression. Which, in turn, includes the right to spout gibberish and be laughed at.
and I have seen
blind children puking in the gutter
and I have seen
honest men gutted by night
and i have seen
women who glow
I bleed.
I scream.
I moan.
I cry.
I sweat. No, wait… I “glow”
I spin.
I reel.
I fall.
I rise.
I throw.
I fling.
I hurl. (no, wait…)
Beauty. 
Really, the administration couldn’t have done the punk a better favor. Now he imagines he’s dangerous and provocative. Nothing would have been more instructive to the young man than to be allowed to give the school his best, hist most political, his most ef-word laden spew, and find that his peers are not inspired to take up arms against the man or vote democrat or give money to greenpeace or whatever effect he expected to have. He’d read his poem and get his golf clap and that would have been that.
Did vinnie email the poem to you? If that’s how you get to read it, can I get a copy? Or can you post it here, vinnie?
I haven;t showed anyone the poem yet. I’m a tad confused. I’ll type it up as soon as i can find a copy.
A little update: I brought the matter up at my school representative meeting, and learned that nearly EVERYONE agreed that there shouldn’t be poetry at all.
To clarify: this poem was going to be read at a SPORTS assembly. It contained, along with a number of controversial political statements, many obvious references to drug use on the part of the author.
I think it would be inappropriate for Vinnie to post the young man’s work here just so we can laugh at it.
Inappropriate, perhaps. Entertaining, certainly.
Against copyright, absolutely.
Hmm, quotations are allowed. Can’t we just hear the “best of”?
Doesn’t the fair use doctrine allow quotation of copyright material for critical analysis, educational purposes, stuff like that?
Yes, portions of the work can be excerpted, but the whole thing (which is how the discussion sounded) may not be. I should have explained better in the post I made, but I didn’t have any caffeine yet. Excuses, excuses.
I am not insupport of excerpts being posted to this thread. Adult poet who’s making money from the work? Fine. Young person whose only crime is being pretentious? No thanks.
Yikes OK I didn’t intend to open up that can of worms. I won’t post the poem.
May not be? So is it illegal or should it not be posted because you personally don’t think it would be a nice thing to do? Are you a copyright lawyer?
First of all, whether or not we think it’s a nice thing to do, it is illegal. No, I’m not a copyright lawyer. The fact that the author of a work has sole authority over the reproduction and dissemination of that work is not some subtle point of copyright only a specialist would be able to comprehend – it’s the very meaning of copyright. It’s not even Copyright 101, it’s the prerequisite to taking Copyright 101.
Second, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s illegal, it’s not a nice thing to do. My original post on this topic wasn’t even about copyright, student privacy, online harassment, or anything else related to the law. It was just a personal, ethical position.
To his credit, Vinnie has shown no intention of doing so, and has said that he won’t.
I haven’t stated an opinion about whether or not it should be posted as a matter of ethics.
jsgoddess first said that it was “absolutely” illegal. Then she said that it “may” be. So what the fuck? It’s a fair question. It struck me as disingenuous that she gave one reason, which may not be true, for not posting it when her real reason was entirely different.
So is it illegal or not? I’m not a lawyer either but everything I’ve ever read about copyright tells me that at the very least a portion of it could be posted under fair use. We have had a moderator say that it was fine.
Walter, you may want to read this Wiki article about copyright and fair use. Here is the relevant quote:
Yes, a portion of a copyright may be posted legally. My comments about copyright were only in regards to the complete work.
I think it would be a risky an tenuous position, though, to claim that short excerpts were used in the fair use domain of “commentary and criticism,” when the author is an unpublished minor, and the tone of the thread is clearly not academic or scholarly.