I haven’t seen this yet, and I’ve no idea who wrote it, but apparently it was written after the death of Queen Victoria:
Dust to dust,
ashes to ashes
Into the tomb,
the great queen dashes.
With all due respect to everyone else, as far as I’M concerned, we have a winner here.
Good God, Capacitor, I’d forgotten all about that.
And while you win, damn you for reminding me of that damned poem!
Well I don’t know the poem, but I don’t think the worst poem can be a parody (sorry, that goes for Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings too).
The worst poem must be sincerly bad.
Blake?! No!
Ok the symmetry/eye thing as always annoyed the hell out of me too, but only BECAUSE it was such a good poem.
“And did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?”
Hey, good question.
Blake doesn’t belong in a discussion of worst poems anymore than Williams does.
I was thinking…who was that guy, very popular in the 60’s, name starts with an “M”. I remember he was pretty horrible. I also have totally repressed his memory. But if anybody knows what I talking about, I think he could be a contender.
Rod McKuen. I’ve seen his slender volumes in used bookshops, but never delved in. His reputation is too mighty for little ol’ me.
re: Blake. It’s my understanding the the word eye, at the close of the eighteenth century in Great Britain, was always pronounced as “eee.” As in “Doctor Sardonicus, the Eee, Ear, Nose and Throat Man.” So it rhymes, okay?
Lay off Blake, or I’ll get mad. You don’t want me getting my gang of English majors together, do you? We got bicycles chains and thesauruses.
I always thought “This is just to say” was about a serial killer who keeps the severed head of a woman in his refrigerator and then one day eats the eyeballs and leaves this note inside one of the eye sockets.
Well? Prove me wrong!
That poem could be about anything. It’s garbage.
Here’s a brief William Carlos Williams impression:
this is not
a poem
(By the way, show that to a bunch of English freshmen, and you’ll get some dork defending that as great literature, too.)
Of all the poetry I got saddled with in my high school and college years, Williams bugs me the most. I’m also not found of e. e. cummings, but at least he has something to say, and I’m not a big Gertrude Stein fan, but at least she comes up with some innovative use of language. Williams is a complete waste.
Uke, cut out the threats or I’ll sign you up for the Thomas Kinkaide mailing list.
Or, if it’s violence you’re after, I’ll poke out your eee.
Able was I ere I saw Elba
Thank you! I was driving me crazy. So I looked him up- but apparently even his fans no better than to put his actual verse out in public. I could find only one poem actually quoted, and I still had a hard time picking a line:
“How many Frank Sinatra’s do I know? Another one
every day. The one whose gentleness to women
touches on the renaissance. I honestly belive
he’s never met a woman yet he thought to be a tramp.”
And this guy was REALLY sucessful. I couldn’t find the text, but the title of his big hit poem:
Listen to the Warm
has to qualify as a worst line all by itself.
I figured it was something like that. Still- it makes it akward when you try to drop it into casual conversation. And don’t think I don’t.
Actually, that’s a pretty fair [b[Richard Brautigan** impression.
Prove your interpretation of Williams’ “This is Just to Say” wrong? Well, one of the basic tenets of Derrida and the Yale Hermaneuticists, who founded the Deconstructionist school of literary criticism, is close reading of text.
When we examine the text carefully, it is difficult to miss the appearance of the words "plums."
We’ve established that we’re of like minds on many subjects, so I hope you won’t take it amiss when I ask if the weekend has restored your strength enough to have a go at making me recognize Williams’ brilliance. I don’t hate the shorter works, and there are many I find at least readable (“Pictures from Brueghel”, for example). I often, however, find myself unable to discern in Williams’ poems any rhythmic principle whatever (and yes, I’ve read his own pronouncements on the subject, noting his own claimed disdain for vers libre, etc.). It’s not as if I haven’t made lots of attempts to enjoy Williams; I’ve read extensively in the shorter poems (primiarily those compiled by Charles Tomlinson in the Selected Poems), I’ve read Paterson and enjoyed parts of it, I’ve read In the American Grain, etc.
I also find Williams’ attitude towards his human subjects too frequently patronizing or superior; he writes often of “peasants”, “proletarians”, etc., and almost always in a way that registers a sense of superiority and thinly veiled (if veiled at all) contempt, particularly when the subject is female; “doxies”, “slatterns”, and similar terms of disapprobation occur throughout his work.
My main beef with Williams isn’t really his fault. Along with Whitman (whom I do enjoy and admire), Williams’ influence on later poets has been, in my opinion, almost wholly to the bad, as two or three generations of American would-be poets with no sense of rhythm and without Williams’ physician’s eye for the telling detail have squittered out hundreds, if not thousands, of volumes of flat, toneless banalities broken into lines of one or two words, claiming WCW as their model.
Feel free to start a new thread, either here or in Great Debates (if you feel this discussion constitutes one) to puruse the topic. Of course, I also won’t be upset if you politely decline or summarily dismiss me as a hopeless Philistine; I long ago gave over taking any aesthetic debate personally.
From Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes:
quote:
``Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.’’
Apparently, poor Robert mistook “twat” for a nun’s head covering. In fact, it had the same meaning then as it does now.
Could it be that Browning had been in Yorkshire near to when he wrote that ?
It is still common, especially in South Yorkshire, to hear people use the words thee, thou and thy.
Thes are often shortened to just one letter as in the song
On Ilkley Moor bar t’hat
Here bar t’hat means without ones headgear - bar the hat.
You may hear a Yorkshireman say something like
“Get t’at on lad.”
Meaning - Get thy hat on.