It's time for America's most popular poetry game show, “The Daily Poetry Show”. Now, here's your host, former "Gong Show" regular, Son Rivers!
Hello, everyone. I hope you're as excited as I'm pretending to be, because we're ready to play "The Daily Poetry Show". Okay, is everyone ready? Let's meet our three reviewers: self-professed inventor of barf and former editor of “exspell”, Nolo Lingua; winner of the 2005 Formzilla Kills Freeversala Awards, Ry Foote; and current chairman of the Members Only Poetry Club and seven-time winner of the Members Only Poetry Club Chairman’s Prize for Elegant Diction and Big Brains, otherwise known as the Dickhead Award, we’re honored to have with us tonight the great Tweed Majors.
And now our first contestant: come on down.
Truth About Love by Bob Hicok
Lingua: If he’s a better poet than a man, then he must be an effing woman. I feel like I’ve read a too long Hallmark card.
Foote: What is the reason for the couplets in this poem? Or, for that matter, the indents. None that I can see, and I’ve looked hard at this mechanical wreck.
Majors: I love his skewed sense of speech and his outright display of sentiment.
Rivers: I’d like to taste a little more of the skew.
Elegance by Linda Gregg
Lingua: I kept on falling asleep after the fifth line. Sorry. But did I hear the B52s?
Foote: Just because she rhymes at the end doesn’t mean the line breaks otherwise make any sense. Although I do like that simple ending for a poem about simplicity.
Majors: I wanted more subjectivity that I could wrap my ears around.
Rivers: It’s the pure objectivity that makes this poem work as much as it does.
Today, Part III by Erik Sweet
Lingua: I’m not sure.
Foote: I’m sure that this poem is formless as well as senseless.
Majors: I’m sure he doesn’t have to use words like ‘pissed’.
Rivers: I’m sure I’m not sure.
6 comments:
Me thinks Lingua is the Simon Cowell of poetry!
Skye
Re the Hicok poem, somehow the mechanics (per Foote) make sense to me. Sometimes I look at linebreaks not from POV of breath et al but the resulting line...and each line of that poem (if read as individual lines) stands on its own and is interesting (to me). The indent I can see for facilitating emphasis on individuality of said lines...
My pre-coffee comment. Good morning,
eileen
Good morning Eileen. Of course Mr. Foote's comments were post-coffee and therfore a bit more emphatic than maybe my own. But still I think I lean more to his opinion here. I can see what you're saying in the first two couplets. I think they work great. And a few later on, like the Adam Smith. But too often things don't. Of course we can always supply something with two opposing segments. But I'm lazy and I'd like the poem to do it for me. But I agree with you on the indents.
Well, I've never watched that show, Skye. Although you really can't get away from its fallout. But I think Simon Cowell is the Nolo Lingu of judges.
Hmm. It occurs to Moi that the pre and post coffee perspectives ... affirm the fact that poems are best read while one is in the midst of a glass of wine...
Wink,
Eileen
Now, with that, I completely agree. A votre sante!
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