Use your prose to showcase your poetry


‘What are you working on, Pen?’ He leaned over her shoulder to look. Penelope put her hand over the page.
‘It’s nothing. It’s just...’ She paused, too shy to reveal what she had been writing. ‘It’s kind of a poem.’
‘Let me see.’ He picked up the paper and started to read. ‘My God,’ he gasped, after a few seconds. ‘This is amazing.’
‘No,’ she mumbled. She could already feel her face flushing.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘You’re an amazing poet. The best I’ve ever read, and I’m the poetry critic for a national newspaper. This is nothing short of genius.’
‘Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would be interested,’ she said, modestly.
‘You must read it to me,’ said David. ‘I could never do it justice. I need to hear it from you. Out loud. In full.’
‘Well...’ said Penelope, blushing. ‘Okay. Here goes...’ As she read the poem, the whole world seemed to fall silent as new layers of consciousness were opened by her words:
O! My aching soul aches for the refreshing touch,
Of crystalline water my soul too refresh,
Like a dry frog jumping in a pond after sunshine to much,
Our thought’s and feeling’s and live’s now must mesh.
The silver moon high up above us in the dark, black, night, sky,
Is like a silver light in the sky so black,
It hangs up above so very, very, very, very high,
It rises in the night and in the daytime it goes back.

26 comments:

  1. Good heavens, that is truly abominable. Well done!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fuck! *Stamps off to re-write 900 page novel*

    ReplyDelete
  3. That's almost bad enough to be Vogon poetry... with misplaced apostrophes even!

    ReplyDelete
  4. My eyes... they bleed...

    (I <3 this blog.)

    ReplyDelete
  5. jdarr beat me to it, as soon as I saw this I thought of Tolkien. I confess, great as his works may be, I skim or skip pretty much every "song" he sticks in there.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ahahaha! "...after sunshine too much"

    Don't we all wish we'd have such an encounter with the poetry critic from a national newspaper - ha!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Cat (et al): That's your loss. I used to think the same until I actually sat down and read them. What impresses me is that you can just read the poetry in LotR and not only get some great work in its own right, but also still get a pretty good impression of the whole story; certainly the underlying mood of melancholic loss is very strong.
    I've persuaded one person who detested the bumptious opening to give LotR another go by telling them to *only* read the poetry to begin with! It tells you so much about the world of Middle Earth in an interestingly different way to normal narrative techniques.

    Whereas I absolutely agree that shoehorning bad poems in for the sake of it is generally not a good idea.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Christopher Paolini! I didn't know he was writing poetry again! ;)

    ReplyDelete
  9. I especially appreciate her poetic use of word repetition and misuse of grammar. Brilliant.

    ReplyDelete
  10. oh, if only you could have began:

    The sudden jolt forced the scrap of paper from his pocket.
    "What's this, Mr. Bond?" the villainous Blofeld spat.
    "Nothing. Just a sort of poem..."

    ReplyDelete
  11. *rolling on the floor laughing*

    ReplyDelete
  12. The Antipodean, who has taken a day to recover from how gob-smackingly, brilliantly awful this is,Saturday, July 31, 2010

    I think Ceridwen has it: the only appropriate description is Vogonically vile. I had always thought Douglas Adams was exaggerating when he talked about poetry being able to cause internal bleeding, but having attempted to read this aloud I have a new appreciation.

    There are a few authors who take the easy way out (L. M. Montgomery springs to mind) and tell you that their characters' poetry is stunning, perhaps quoting a small extract, but don't actually write any... I must admit, I always found that frustrating too.

    On Tolkien, while not arguing the songs / poems are up there in the top 10, they aren't this bad either; in my opinion they're not 'bad' at all. You also need to bear in mind that some of them are written 'in character' i.e. by Bilbo or Sam, and I think at one point Aragorn teases Bilbo about presuming to write poetry around the elves. And what's more, most of them are supposed to be songs rather than poems, but that's a whole other debate.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Do you have a collection of bad poetry around, just for such a blog post?

    ReplyDelete
  14. No, but it's surprisingly easy to bang out – a few abstract nouns, a few redundant adjectives, deliberately hobble the metre and you're pretty much done.

    ReplyDelete
  15. This could be extended to writing about fictional great writers, brilliant wits, political visionaries, amazing seducers, profound philosophers etc etc etc. If you have to provide an example you're lost.

    Painters and singers and mandolin players are hackneyed. I believe the only geniuses in fiction should be cooks, like Anatole.

    ReplyDelete
  16. BEST. ONE. EVAR. I tip my hat to you, sir. Well done.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I thought of Paolini when I read this as well, especially with all the other characters talking about how wonderful the poetry is.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Most blogPoetry IS prose chopped up into lines that don't go all the way across the page.

    ReplyDelete
  19. There isn't any poetry as such in The Lord of the Rings. What there is, is a plot that occasionally involves people singing songs, or on rare occasions, reciting verses (Bilbo's stuff, or "Oliphaunt", for example). When that happens, Tolkien tells us what they said, just as he does when they are speaking in more ordinary styles.

    In one or two places in The Silmarillion, the narrator quotes from a long poem, one that Tolkien had actually written beforehand.

    ReplyDelete
  20. But Tolkein actually quotes the songs in full, where most authors would just say 'he sang a song' and maybe give a line or two. Not that I'm complaining; I like the songs in LoTR

    ReplyDelete
  21. I especially like the misuse of "to" and "too"... a particular pedantic pet hate of mine!

    ReplyDelete
  22. I love this, but would just like to interjeculate a moment here and say Mervyn Peake does it OK. The Frivolous Cake!

    ReplyDelete
  23. I actually did this in one of my stories...only the poet in question knows he's bad. I only had to write half the poem even, because the character who first reads it stops in the middle, unable to finish!

    ReplyDelete