Saturday Suck: Casting Aspersions and Also Things Much Pointier Such as Stones at Glass Houses

So you may remember a few weeks back I embarked on a diatribe about being accused of shoplifting poetry at a Boston bookstore. I also delivered my critique of one of the books purchased at that establishment. Somehow, in the wonderful ways of the almighty Internet, the author found my scathing review and posted a comment at the end of that blog entry.


I've posted my response, I'm not sure if I'll hear back from him. But in his comment he mentioned, "At this distance, it would be silly to defend anything...." And it certainly made me think about my own crappy work, not just the juvenilia but everything failed and misguided. And so I decided to put my shame on display as any good exhibitionist will.


First some very early crap, practically diaper-filling: I think I wrote this at fourteen.

feeble minds (grief is me)

Matt Quarterman

my mind races at the speed of light
trying to remember my name
and my face in the mirror
unforgiving, stares at me
who is he?

shame is tattooed on my forehead
acceptance is not an option
but what else is left
suspension of belief
acceptance and grief

mavrone, i cry to the bewildered stars
sick with hunger for expectant mankind
strengthen feeble hands from falling
what can we do?
many versus few




So much here to love to hate. We have scientific inaccuracy:  neuroscientists find that the firing of neurons in the brain is actually faster than the speed of light. So when I say my mind races at the speed of light, I'm saying my brain is slowing down, which could explain why I can't remember my name, apparently. We have the complete lack of capitalization which I can't even justify as an e.e. cummings fixation. We've got the word "mavrone," which Irish people stopped using in the 19th century, probably because it was too overdramatic even for 19th-century Irish people.


And then we have the wonderful teenage ambiguity, the complete refusal to speak in specifics, to let metaphors occur naturally rising up out of the details of a situation. Is it a poem about amnesia? If so, how does the speaker remember what to be ashamed about? And why do stars want to eat humans? (Bonus points if you just mentally cried out, "'To Serve Man'... It's a COOKBOOK!")


But I'll give it this much - the formal elements are fun because they set up an expectation and then subvert it. Most beginning poets fall into one of two camps, one that was born from Emily Dickinson and one that bursts fully-grown from Walt Whitman's head. The Dickinsonians have that tight, incorrigible rhyme and meter where every one of the 1,776 poems can be sung to the tune of either "Amazing Grace" or the "Gilligan's Island" theme song. The Whitmanists see rhyme and meter as chains imprisoning their personal expression, man,you gotta fight the powers that READ!


This poem at least has the oddball distinction of being both and neither. You can see the seeds being planted, even if those initial shrubs are really just overgrown weeds in need of a good soaking in Agent Orange.


So here's a more recent bit of crap, more of a three-cheesy-gordita-crunches-from-Taco-Bell-on-a-Saturday-afternoon kind of dump.

Exaggeration

Matt Quarterman

Every time you write it feels like dying,
the end of the world too early.
You tilt the backrest down before even trying,
the sedative staves off the hurting.


The end of the world comes early, flickering
with smash cuts in the ad breaks.
You feel someone behind you is snickering
when collapsing from the work day.


The breather that your life seems to be buying
(the nothing that nothing gets you)
will just collapse your lungs, the wheeze and sighing
are witnesses who will attest to.


The energy you save you never use,
calories thickening the fat.
But if this entertainment will amuse,
lie down: it’s not as bad as all that.




Hoo boy. The convoluted grammar: "witnesses who will attest to." You can't end a sentence with a prepositional phrase lacking an object, it's like ending a song before you get to the chorus! The melange of unrelated references to air travel, television, health and self-improvement. But worst of all is how forced it all feels, the meter jumping all over the place like trying to force mustard back into the squeeze jar, the slant rhymes that slant as far from each other as shingles on a shack. And then the almost Kiplingesque last line that is so cringe-worthy.


The more I look at these two, the more I think I did better at 14. Come back, mini-me!


So there's my self-flagellation for the day. This was fun, I'll have to indulge in literary masochism more often for Saturday Suck.