Does bad poetry matter?

[gurdonark]

Today was not a bad day at all. I felt that I was able to get a lot of things done, and that my remaining to do list is becoming manageable. I was excited when someone gave me a copy of a book, which people do sometimes because I somehow manage to be an amazon.com top 500 reviewer. I used to review a lot of things on Amazon, but I see that I have not reviewed anything since 801 Live!, which, frankly, is a wonderful CD to be one's most recent review. I wish that all art rock albums rocked out like that one does. Call me a relic, but I love Eno's vocals on this one. Perhaps my personal mission in life should be to learn all the words to "Miss Shapiro", "Rongwrong" and "Third Uncle", but at least I know all the words to "Baby's On Fire" (but never sing them in public, what with them being about a baby on fire, and all).

The book is called Texas Teachers, and I'm really excited to read it. It's a capsule of short bios of real world real teachers who do their job well. I am really attracted to those "short bullet point" coverages of things. Give me bite-size, just like those odd miniature Chung King egg roll bitlets I'm apt to make for myself when my wife is out of town.
Actually, on second thought, I think I deserve a trip to
the Pakistani-Indian buffet in Richardson. What a lovely way to spend an evening alone, ingesting Tandoor and feeding my inner Mr. Chips.

I like to read books about "ordinary people" who get the job done. I like that Peter Beagle bit about how we always celebrate the wrong people--conquerors and such, and how instead we must celebrate "the colonizers of dreams". My own experience is that so many teachers and professors colonized my dreams. I can't say, really, that school shaped my reading list much before law school, but somehow school was the nice ambient music while I pursued my own personal solos of ringing, if sometimes discordant glissandi. I was pleased that a colleage at another firm with whom I met today nearly got his PhD in English. He gave up and went into law because the job market was so tough in English. I find this Hobson's choice is one a lot of folks face--cool job, no money, or job with income, no time to enjoy it.

Now I've finished my late Friday evening meeting, I've got Be Bop Deluxe's Sunburst Finish album on. "Heavenly Homes" has already spinned through, in which the vocalist assures his lover that though he'd like to hold her through "the fields of darkest blue", which I believe in context to be a night metaphor rather than anything more ornately salacious, but that, in fact, heavenly homes are hard to find. Now I'm listening to "Ships in the Night", though, one of my personal favorites--"without love, we are like ships in the night; without love, selling our souls down the river, sailing away, and forever, our pleasure is blue". I've been less happy with my journal this last week or two, as it is too emotional-content-based, so it's a nice break to hear a solid sax line fade into a pleasant piano jog instead of all those darn feelings. If only I had the album with "Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape"'s live version here at work. I love the piercing guitar solo in that--glissandi which sends me as near to Heaven at 43 as it did at 18. I'm a fossil--but a fossil for truth and virtue.

I am pondering this bookcrossing.com thing. I hate the notion of releasing books in places where the people who "own" the place would not be comfortable with the idea. But I am ready to put books into the wild. I must ponder this a bit, but this weekend I will make my first release. I've only got 4 in my bookcrossing.com library so far, but more will be up soon,and if anyone wants one, I'll be happy to send them. The only obligation is to release them free to someone else or the metaphoric "wild"--like some Heavenly Home where all our books cross like Ships in the Night.

As I write this, Bill Nelson is singing:

"Go and tell all your friends that you've witnessed the end of the world in a dream".

On the subject of books, I am in desperate re-read mode. I was so impressed a while back by a thread in someone's journal in which so many people said they had not read "Lord of the Rings". Now for those of us in the age bracket from say, 40 to 49, not having read "Lord of the Rings" is almost, but not quite, a bit like not having learned the Pledge of Allegiance. I think it's kinda cool, in a way, to have abstained from such a commonplace touchstone of our culture, although, frankly, I imagine that a lot of things, like Stars Wars and Harry Potter, are less affecting if one cannot recognize old Frodo's shadow looming over them, like some odd hobbit dark lord who kept the ring and wrote books with it.

But I say that people should not worry. I, Gurdonark, read this book several times a year. In essence, it's some theory of equivalence. I've read the work dozens of times by now. So I kinda make up for all the folks who, for good reasons--lack of time, love of Edmund Wilson, the need to stand out from we the common herd, have delightfullly abstained. I feel your lack, my brethren and sistren, and grok its fullness in the core of my elf-infested being. So I will re-read Lord of the Rings for the xmillionth time, to relieve someone else from having to do so. Then I'll re read Mr. Chips and maybe those first two James Herriott books. Give me comfort food, please, and maybe gulab jamun afters.

I'm into incrementalism this week. I did not mail out my four packages, but I got most of them addressed. Saturday, I have every hope of stopping at some rural TX postoffice on our way to Arkansas, and posting each and everything. I am so committed to catching up the last poems and scrapbooks and exchanges and kindnesses that I need to do to take my place among the moral beings of this planet.

I love the way the CD is soundtracking me:
"My world is not like yours, I come from someplace long ago.
Now there's no way back, I'm lost and I feel so alone. Life in the Air Age isn't all the brochures say".

But the topic I affixed to this post is about bad poetry, and in particular "does it matter"? Let me posit a theory. I opine that bad poetry, bad art, and art rock do not matter per se, as things that kindly but astute (and rather over-attuned to sexual metaphor) nuns will cover on the PBS art shows of the future. But bad poetry matters, because when I open an envelope with a nervousness.org exchange, a bad poem is like a little valentine, but not the valentine of romance and intrigue and relationship, but the true-felt valentine of the
heart and soul. A valentine without strings, a valentine without a kiss, a valentine without genderal interplay, a valentine free of hormones. What could be bad about that? This is why I do silly trades on nervousness.org, the sillier the better. This is why I do postcardx and send my home-done photos on corruplast. I love to read the heart of the matter, and I love to pinch off my heart, and pop it in an envelope. I want to get back to writing my heart in turgid verse, and passing it out those any who want it. Oh, and I want to try one more time to mix my CD, so that my heart can have voice,
or, failling that, beg scottm to mix it for me, after all.
I want my heart mixed into two stereo tracks, with the sound of an electric football field hummin'. Take that, major league baseball!

Comments

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

I never read The Lord of the Rings. I read two pages of The Hobbit and quit out of disinterest. :-)

[sortofkindof.livejournal.com]

Yay, someone else to join us: at least me and nacowafer

[coollibrarian.livejournal.com]

i haven't read it either

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I've got you covered. I've re read it enough times to make up for it. I'm surprised, though, because its story might appeal to you, even if you aren't a fantasy kinda person.

[coollibrarian.livejournal.com]

That's what everybody keeps telling me. But ther's lots of other books to read as you know.

I haven't read Harry Potter or the Left Behind series which various folks tell me I have to read. Go figure.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Left behind = religious right flawed stuff

Harry Potter = Fun!

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Yes, now every time I read, I'll feel like I'm covering for the cultural standoffishness of one of you :). You guys can have a clique now, from which I'm excluded.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I won't do the bit about how the Hobbit and the LOTR are related but very different. I'll just say I've read it enough times to cover you, although how you got out of the 60s and 70s with so many radical notions but no LOTR is simply beyond me.

Re:

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I WAS quit the conundrum, wasn't I. I didn't smoke pot in college either. But I dropped a lot of acid. Go figure.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

By contrast, I was quite boring. I did nothing intoxicating in college. Nowadays, I think that's some kind of noble straight edge thing, but back then, it was merely out of step.

Acid. I knew a few kids who did a fair bit of that. Toxic stuff, though, as I recall.

[(Anonymous)]

what is bad poetry anyway if not the ice that botches Chaos? you maybe have a different definition. i don't know whether bad poetry matters. bad Poets matter [being comprised of matter, after all] and the Act of writing even the baddest bad poetry matters. incidentally, i just read lotr this past year. i also read pepys' diary.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Most of the bad poetry I've written certainly strives to botch chaos in some way, anyway!

Do you know, I've never read Pepys' diary? I think I read an excerpt, but never straight through. I sure remedy that.

[scott-m.livejournal.com]

I read The Hobbit because it was a freshman college assignment. In high school,
I tried to read The Fellowship of the Ring but couldn't get past the first 50 or so
pages.

So next time you're inclined to read Tolkien, start on page 51 and that'll cover me.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I'll be sure and include your missing pages in my next re-read!
I guess a lot more of us are non-hobbit than I would have imagined.