21st
Official Verse Culture II
Despite pleasant weather and a nice free lunch, a mostly foul mood prevailed today after a largely sleepless night. I will emit some aggression by listing a series of first lines from immediately mediocre and sentimental poems I’ve read over the past few hours:
1. There is safety around the smell of coffee and laughter.
Right away you can tell that this poet is going to elaborate for about twenty lines on how everything is nothing, it’s all a lie but all also true, meaning is elusive, yet that’s somehow okay, and that is exactly what he does.
2. It’s grief that tears the paper lanterns
Sounds like someone took a trip to Japan and was momentarily sad.
3. Ruin is a promise
Is this poem about a break-up or geopolitics? The latter.
4. A girl of freezing ice in my stomach; a papoose
This poem will operate in a mode of precious juxtapositions ignited by enjambment.
5. I’d thought my life was too unfocused and without cause compared to Kubota’s,
An adulthood spent teaching at MFA programs will do that to you; thus unmediated autobiographical reflection is to be avoided.
6. I keep wanting to go back, across an ocean, blue-grey and uncaring,
Buy a ticket then, and the ocean cares, it really does, it just wishes you didn’t use that ugly hyphen.
7. You won’t believe it now,
No, I don’t. This poem turns out to be about disbelieving that now an old man you were once young. It’s slightly redeemed by name-checking Dr. Who.
8. It will be the past
This poem fulfills the promise of unadulterated unspecified nostalgia lust promised at the top.
9. Gobi (not your real name), where were you
Which is more objectionable—the superfluous self-consciousness of the parenthetical or the cuddly exoticism of the invented name?
10. In the city spring burns its way out
This poem isn’t so bad until its third line, where the word “lovely” drops in to confirm that this elegy will be more gum drop than fireball, but that initial prepositional phrase feels unnecessary and turns out to be just that, and the present tense verb signals disposability.
11. Dear Sufficiency, perhaps you’ll lose your best friend, partner, apartment
Listacular! As the penultimate word of this line indicates, the poem will be energetically politically correct.
12. This dream of a bird strange, tangled up. A hybrid: a bunting
Some nice lines in this poem, but an effective strategy for writing a poem about a dream of a strange bird should include leaving the words “dream” and “strange” out of the first line, maybe “bird” too.
13. I couldn’t tell one song from another, which bird said what or to whom or for what reason
Poet 12, it seems, is not the only American poet with a fowl oneiric life.
14. America, let the leaves that brush your blacktop
The primary modes of poetry in the United States today are lazy, nostalgic, liberal anxiety; anxious, lazy, nostalgic liberalism; liberal, anxious, lazy nostalgia; and nostalgic, liberal, anxious laziness.
—Brown
