Especially BAD poetry. 

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. Oscar Wilde

When you are learning about blogging, you will listen to most anybody that seems successful. When I started out, that was anybody who had been blogging longer than I had. So I stumbled around quite a bit in the early days before I found my ‘voice’. I listened to all kinds of advice, particularly about improving my writing skills. Since I thought I was a pretty good writer, I tended to avoid the really hard stuff like writing serious pieces with structure and logic. What I preferred was the stuff you could just wing. One of the ideas I actually pursued was the suggestion that you could learn about writing by writing poetry, even bad poetry.

I have never in my life been very much attracted to poetry. I hate the kitschy rhyming cliches in greeting cards and I can’t understand the free flowing stuff from the ‘real’ poets. Sometimes Shakespeare gets through but mostly I’m a lost cause for poetry. So naturally the idea of writing ‘bad’ poetry was very tempting. How could I go wrong?

My preference is limericks. I know that they are lowbrow but they have the only rhythm that I understand and they are usually humorous. So that is where I started. I posted them on my blog feeling that I shouldn’t waste all that effort. Here is an example.

 

Blogger Jack

There once was a blogger named Jack

Whose writing was loaded with drack

His intelligence was shorte

For cliches were his forte

SEO kept Jack’s jack in the black.

If that isn’t bad enough for you I have a whole page full of bad poetry you can check out.

But even worse, earlier this year Justin got the hare brained idea that we weren’t high brow enough here at COC and he gave us one of his ultimatums. He demanded that we all write haiku for our weekly posts. Poetry wasn’t enough for Justin. He needed us to write in inscrutable oriental mode. He demanded haiku. Well one thing a Coot learns early on is don’t mess with Justin so whatever crazy idea he comes up with, the Coots deliver. So we wrote cantankerous haiku like the one below.

Boring, routine day

Take the road less traveled

Be cantankerous

So if writing bad poetry was any clue about good writing, the Coots would have a Nobel Prize or at least a Pulitzer. We’re still waiting for the phone call.