30 Sep 2018 Bad Poetry Challenge: "He's the Best Around"

Trees by Joyce Kilmer is famous for being one of the worst poems ever written. It inspired me to write bad poetry. Click here to join the Bad Poetry Challenge! Here is my first attempt.

"He's the Best Around"

God made a burrito so big
No thing could eat
Then God ate it like a fat pig
God is so neat!

God made a burrito so spicey
No thing could taste
Then God tasted it like a ice tea
God is so crapulous!

God made a burrito so hot
No thing could touch
Then God touched it like a cold pot
God is so sclerotic!

God made a burrito so good
No thing could sufficiently compliment

Then... God sufficiently complimented it!

God is so oxorious!

25 Sep 2018: Bad Poetry Challenege #1 “My dream date with Wittgenstein”

Trees by Joyce Kilmer is famous for being one of the worst poems ever written. It inspired me to write bad poetry. Click here to join the Bad Poetry Challenge! Here is my second attempt.

“My dream date with Wittgenstein”

Philosophy and meaning are super freaks

Thus they can’t say anything of super peaks

If I went to Wittgenstein’s house,

I’d kick my muddy feet up on his couch

He’d get mad, and open his mouth

But he just sits there like California in a drouth

“What Witty? Nothing to say?”

He passes over in silence to this day

It’s not cause he’s dead (he is though)

It’s cause he cannot speak

He passes over in silence, in dread

But I’m like Rick James; I’m rich bitch!

The world consists of facts

And cocaine is a hell of a drug, blow that!

24 Sep 2018: "Trees" By Joyce Kilmer

This poem is famous for being one of the worst poems ever. It, along with Episode 62 of The History of Literature Podcast, is inspiring my new goal: to write bad poetry. Click here to join the Bad Poetry Challenge! Here are my two attempts: first and second.

"Trees" By Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

23 Sep: "Whoso list to hunt..." by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

by Sir Thomas Wyatt

*Note: Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘Whoso List to Hunt‘. One of the oldest sonnets in the English language, written in the 1530s and published in the 1550s, ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ is also one of the very best. Its use of rhyme is masterly, and the background to the poem – Wyatt’s former friendship (romance?) with Anne Boleyn, now married to King Henry VIII – is as fascinating as the language Wyatt employs.

22 Sep: "There is another sky" by Emily Dickinson

There is another sky

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

by Emily Dickinson

*Allie note: "Emily Dickinson's "There is another sky" is an innovative, or American, sonnet. The lines are short, only 3 to 5 metric feet, and with Dickinson's characteristic slant rime, the rime scheme is roughly, ABCBCDECFCGHIH. This innovative sonnet sections itself into two quatrains and a sestet, making it a gentle melding of the English and Italian sonnets."

21 Sep: "To Eva" by Sylvia Plath

To Eva

All right, let's say you could take a skull and break it
The way you'd crack a clock; you'd crush the bone
Between steel palms of inclination, take it,
Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.

This was a woman : her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.

Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.

The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.

Sylvia Plath

*Allie note: 14 lined sonnet

20 Sep: "Sonnets XX" by Langston Hughes

Sonnets xx

by Langston Hughes

POOR soul, the centre of my sinful earth--
My sinful earth these rebel powers array--
Why dost thou pine within and suffer death,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men;
And Death once dead, there 's no more dying then.

19 Sep: "Sonnet in Search of an Author" by William Carlos Williams

Sonnet in Search of an Author

By William Carlos Williams

Nude bodies like peeled logs

sometimes give off a sweetest

odor, man and woman

under the trees in full excess

matching the cushion of

aromatic pine-drift fallen

threaded with trailing woodbine

a sonnet might be made of it

Might be made of it! odor of excess

odor of pine needles, odor of

peeled logs, odor of no odor

other than trailing woodbine that

has no odor, odor of a nude woman

sometimes, odor of a man.

18 Sep: "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

Those Winter Sundays

By Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

17 Sep : "Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost

Acquainted with the Night

By Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

16 Sep: "Leda and the Swan" by W.B. Yeats

Leda and the Swan

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

15 Sep: "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 - 1926

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

14 Sep: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." by Elizabeth Barret Browning

Sonnets from the Portuguese 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

By Elizabeth Barret Browning

13 Sep: "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" by William Wordsworth

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

By William Wordsworth

12 Sep: "Spirits of the Dead" by Edgar Allan Poe

Spirits of the Dead

Thy soul shall find itself alone

’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone—

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,

Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead who stood

In life before thee are again

In death around thee—and their will

Shall overshadow thee: be still.

III

The night, tho’ clear, shall frown—

And the stars shall look not down

From their high thrones in the heaven,

With light like Hope to mortals given—

But their red orbs, without beam,

To thy weariness shall seem

As a burning and a fever

Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,

Now are visions ne’er to vanish;

From thy spirit shall they pass

No more—like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—

And the mist upon the hill,

Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,

Is a symbol and a token—

How it hangs upon the trees,

A mystery of mysteries!

By Edgar Allan Poe

11 Sep: "Japan" by Billy Collins

Japan

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.


It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.


I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.


I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.

I say it in front of a painting of the sea.

I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.


I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.


And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.


It's the one about the one-ton temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.


When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.


When I say it at the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.


And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

by Billy Collins

10 Sep: "Much Madness is divinist Sense-" by Emily Dickinson

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

by Emily Dickinson

9 Sep: "I felt a Funeral in my Brain" by Emily Dickinson

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

By Emily Dickinson

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum -

Kept beating - beating - till I thought

My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

8 Sep: "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap, 
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

By Sylvia Plath, 23-29 October 1962

7 Sep: "Cut" by Sylvia Plath

Cut

For Susan O'Neil Roe

by Sylvia Plath

What a thrill -
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man -

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump -
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

6 Sep 2018: The World Is Too Much With Us By William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

5 Sep 2018: "Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds" By William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

4 Sep 2018: "When Romeo Meets Juliet" by William Shakespeare

ROMEO:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO:

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET:

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO:

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET:

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO:

Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

3 Sep 2018: "Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes" By William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

2 Sep 2018: "Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" By William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

1 Sep 2018: "Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.