Incredibly bad poetry that was popular in its day for some reason

Cafe Society
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Heh. I was only familiar with the version sung by Wayne and Wanda.

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That is inappropriately pleasant. And short. Could they try another take, one in which it sing-songs, seemingly, forever?

(Is iampunha still around? As I recall, he’s a Kilmer and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.)

Anyway, I wondered if Trees was written on a bad day, and his other poems were better. Here’s one called Delicatessen. Surely it has a gritty, urban feel!

*Perhaps Fame thinks his worried eyes,
His wrinkled, shrewd, pathetic face,
His shop, and all he sells and buys
Are desperately commonplace.

Well, it is true he has no sword
To dangle at his booted knees.
He leans across a slab of board,
And draws his knife and slices cheese.

He never heard of chivalry,
He longs for no heroic times;
He thinks of pickles, olives, tea,
And dollars, nickles, cents and dimes.
*

I guess not. But he was a poet of the Great War! Could life in the trenches have hardened his outlook and turned him into another Owen, Sassoon, or Graves? Here’s his most famous war poem, about a trench collapsing, trapping 21 of his colleagues from the Fighting 69th. He knew those guys, so Kilmer should be able to draw more raw emotion, even art, out of it than a Scotsman writing about a bridge collapse, right?

In a wood they call the Rouge Bouquet
There is a new-made grave to-day,
Built by never a spade nor pick
Yet covered with earth ten metres thick.
There lie many fighting men,
Dead in their youthful prime,
Never to laugh nor love again
Nor taste the Summertime.

I guess not. Christ, Robert W. Service wouldn’t climb out of his own puke to write that crap.

O God, take the sun from the sky!
It’s burning me, scorching me up.
God, can’t You hear my cry?
‘Water! A poor, little cup!’
It’s laughing, the cursed sun!
See how it swells and swells
Fierce as a hundred hells!
God, will it never have done?
It’s searing the flesh on my bones;
It’s beating with hammers red
My eyeballs into my head;
It’s parching my very moans.
See! It’s the size of the sky,
And the sky is a torrent of fire,
Foaming on me as I lie
Here on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

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It’s been covered by a variety of virtuosos:

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