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It’s official: Poetry is shit!
May 12th, 2009 at 23:25
One of the most boring responses to a criticism is probably the phrase “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it”. It sounds pretty clever when you’re discussing something trivial, but to follow this logic through to being consistent would lead to me having to give committing genocide a go (perhaps starting with a race with a small population? Just to test the water, like), and using the phrase “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it” in conversation when other people slag off things that I like, just to experience how it feels when you use the phrase. And I’m not sure I could quite bring myself to do that.
My point is that for years I’ve been slagging off poetry – the creative medium that best manages to put up a fight to musical theatre in the battle for “crappiest art”. It’s drummed into us at school, as if to imply that it’s actually in some way vaguely important (much like how being able to dribble a football around some cones becomes important for twenty minutes a week as the PE teacher goes on a power-trip) – and I don’t think it would be unfair to say that it’s perceived as a dying art. After all – before telly was invented, watching a pompous cock read out some words that may or may not vaguely rhyme was the only means of entertainment, assuming you weren’t rich enough to have one of the serfs executed for laughs.
Today, for reasons that made it seem like a good idea (I might explain later if an idea I’ve had comes to fruition), I went to see some poetry, and I’m pleased to report that I was right all along – and if poetry is a dying art form, I say let it die, and put a bullet between its eyes just to make sure.
It was an open-mic poetry reading. And it was bad. Very bad. I’ve written a bit of explanation below in the style of a bad poem, to try and illustrate how torturous it was.
People sat in rows holding notes,
Berets, wine, and middle class satisfaction filling the air,
Posters for ’spaces’ to rent in Hoxton pinned up on the wall,
Faux-intellectualism permeating through the atmosphere,
As Islington ponces read collections of words they call ‘poems’.
They rarely rhymed, as real poems don’t have to,
Their structure was about as consistent as this,
They had no message, no meaning, no stance,
“Here is a poem about about Yorkshire I wrote whilst on holiday in Yorkshire”
Said one man, failing to recognise that he was wasting his life.
He was just reading out his blog with a few dramatic pauses
Punctuated by applause.
A “jazz poet” from Lewisham was up next,
He pronounced his “I”’s like “Ah”, like he was Gambit out of X-Men.
A ginger woman gave an uninformed rant about the role of religion in politics,
Probably because she’d describe herself as “spiritual”,
Given the bollocks she was talking in previous poems.
One man said he was going to read some prose that we might find “poetic”,
So he was basically reading an article he wrote,
About the campaign to release some bloke in America,
I’m sure his poem was going to make all of the difference.
The worst bit was when someone had a poem about the BNP,
“Are there any BNP members here?”, he asked,
“Yep, right here”, said one man in the audience, oddly proudly,
“I hope this isn’t fascist poetry night”, I thought to myself.
The poem wasn’t what you’d expect,
No “smash the fascists”, no “fuck the BNP”, no rallying cry,
Just some bizarre metaphor about full moons,
I didn’t really get it.
I think “Poetry” is just a pretentious name for a collection of words that those not talented enough to write music or those not big headed enough to write a blog use to describe a “collection of words about something”.
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