Bad poetry? Oh noetry!

The Tay Bridge Disaster


Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

’Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”

When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say-
“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”

But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

So the train sped on with all its might,
And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,
And the passengers’ hearts felt light,
Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.

So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o’er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill’d all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made them for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale
How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

William Topaz McGonagall (March 1825 – 29 September 1902) was a Scottish weaver, doggerel poet and actor. He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.

He wrote about 200 poems, including his notorious "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and "The Famous Tay Whale", which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature. Groups throughout Scotland engaged him to make recitations from his work and contemporary descriptions of these performances indicate that many listeners were appreciating McGonagall's skill as a comic music hall character. Collections of his verse remain popular, with several volumes available today.

McGonagall has been acclaimed as the worst poet in British history. The chief criticisms are that he is deaf to poetic metaphor and unable to scan correctly. McGonagall's fame stems from the humorous effects these shortcomings generate in his work. The inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary, and ill-advised imagery combine to make his work amongst the most unintentionally amusing dramatic poetry in the English language. His work is in a long tradition of narrative ballads and verse written and published about great events and tragedies, and widely circulated among the local population as handbills. In an age before radio and television, their voice was one way of communicating important news to an avid public. (Wikipedia)

Please note. I have absolutely nothing to say about this McGonagall. Like the excruciating soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, he was good at being bad, and people liked it. I love bad poetry, but I was unable to find anything at all that pleased me tonight. It was either gross and full of fucks and sucks, which I didn't want, or trying too hard to be either good or bad. The truly bad has that effortless quality which we associate with greatness. 

I did a post ages ago, Valentine poems that were sublimely bad. But it's hard to find stuff on just that right frequency where you want to howl with bliss. 

A lot of the stuff featured on bad poetry web sites is just too good. Bad poems by the great poets have to be just a LITTLE bit good, because these are, after all, real poets. An awful lot of it is just boring, and if bad poetry equals boring poetry, there is entirely too much of it around. 

I remember the dialect poetry I got so stuck on a few years ago, but it too can wear out its welcome or even verge on the racist. The Sonnet on Stewed Prunes by William F. Kirk comes to mind:

Ay ant lak pie-plant pie so wery vell;
Ven ay skol eat ice-cream, my yaws du ache;
Ay ant much stuck on dis har yohnnie-cake
Or crackers yust so dry sum peanut shell.
And ven ay eat dried apples, ay skol svell
Until ay tenk my belt skol nearly break;
And dis har breakfast food, ay tenk, ban fake:
Yim Dumps ban boosting it, so it skol sell.
But ay tal yu, ef yu vant someteng fine,
Someteng so sveet lak wery sveetest honey,
Vith yuice dat taste about lak nice port vine,
Only it ant cost hardly any money, -
Ef yu vant someteng yust lak anyel fude,
Yu try stewed prunes. By yiminy! dey ban gude.

These poems are meant not to be read, but performed, in the fine old tradition of poets getting up and giving long windbag recitals of their work. Being an elocutionist was actually a profession then, something you made money at. McGonagall got up and performed, and so did Kirk, and that other guy, what was his name -  

You bad leetle boy, not moche you care
How busy you 're kipin' your poor gran'pere
Tryin' to stop you ev'ry day
Chasin' de hen aroun' de hay--
W'y don't you geev' dem a chance to lay?
Leetle Bateese!

Off on de fiel' you foller de plough
Den w'en you 're tire you scare the cow
Sickin' de dog till dey jomp the wall
So de milk ain't good for not'ing at all--
An' you 're only five an' a half dis fall,
Leetle Bateese!

Too sleepy for sayin' de prayer to-night?
Never min' I s'pose it 'll be all right
Say dem to-morrow--ah! dere he go!
Fas' asleep in a minute or so--
An' he 'll stay lak dat till de rooster crow,
Leetle Bateese!

William Henry Drummond, whom we "took" in school ad nauseam, the teacher actually reading these poems aloud to us in "French" dialect.

Awful.

There's always a postscript, isn't there? A couple of years ago when I wanted to find something on Drummond, there was barely anything. I couldn't even scrape together a list of his works.  Now there are entire sites of nothing but his poetry - his awful poetry - all that wretched stuff we choked down in school about "de stove-pipe hole" and all that appalling shit. Not only that - there are now dozens of YouTube videos of people reciting Drummond's awful awful poetry! I won't blight this already-too-long post with any of THAT. But it makes me realize the internet just keeps growing like a malignant fungus. And there must be an awful lot of older people like me interested in setting up poetry web sites, because surely no one under the age of 60 would be able to gag down a monstrosity  like "Leetle Bateese".

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One dead possum: will trade for chocolate

Dead opossums, and other strange things you could be swapping on Bunz Trading Zone

BY STEVE KUPFERMAN

FEBRUARY 23, 2016 AT 2:26 PM

http://torontolife.com/city/life/bunz-trading-zone-opossum/

Bunz Trading Zone, an unlisted Facebook group where users can barter their stuff for anything except money, has become Toronto’s worst-kept secret. With over 30,000 users on Facebook and a claimed 12,000 on the new Bunz iOS app, the group generates dozens of new postings every day, most of which are attempts to swap mundane items like kitchen appliances and used clothing. Still, more eccentric trades are commonplace, with people exchanging opened packages of birth control pills, half-eaten foodstuffs and even dead animal carcasses. It’s currently impossible to join the group without administrator approval, so here, for those on the outside, are some highlights from the past few weeks, some of them potentially NSFW:

Dead Animals

The ask: “Naturally deceased small mammals for taxidermy.”
The trade: This post didn’t lead directly to a trade. But later that same day…

Dead Opossum

The offer: One opossum, dead of presumably natural causes.
The trade: The yoga instructor and amateur taxidermist who made the post seeking dead mammals snapped up this unlucky critter in exchange for a chocolate bar.

Nintendo 3DS

The ask: A popular handheld video game system, which retails for around $200.
The trade: In exchange for the 3DS, this Bunz user agreed to deliver coffee to someone at their office for a month.

Birth Control Pills

The offer: An opened package of prescription contraceptives.
The trade: The user accepted three subway tokens.

Pizza

The offer: A complete stranger’s leftover pizza.
The trade: Someone exchanged a tall can of beer for this.

A Boat

The offer: An actual, 30-foot sailboat. The owner says he lived on it for two summers.
The trade: None yet, but there have been a number of offers, including a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a trip to Australia, and free movie-production services.

Mannequin Heads

The offer: Five disembodied mannequin heads.
The trade: The user couldn’t find anyone willing to take all of the heads, but someone gave her four tall cans of beer for one of them.

Intercity Key Delivery

The ask: When a Montreal-based designer forgot to give keys to her catsitter before she took off for Toronto, she decided to canvass Bunz for a lead on someone travelling in the opposite direction.
The trade: Bunz itself didn’t lead to a solution, in this case, but the user was able to find someone through another online group, who delivered the key in exchange for a used Montreal monthly transit pass.

Massive Collection of VHS Pornography

The offer: More than 60 cassettes, each crammed with hours of low-def smut.
The trade: None yet, but the user is in negotiations for a Bluetooth speaker.

Bag of Used Dildos

The offer: This is the legendary Bunz bag of dicks, as chronicled in the Globe and Mail.
The trade: In exchange for her dildo collection, the user accepted some frozen pizzas.

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Who was Winsor McCay? I'll tell you

I don't know much about Winsor McCay, one of the early pioneers of animation, but I DO know that I love this snippet from his innovative 1910 work, Little Nemo. Though his 1914 short film Gertie the Dinosaur is often called the "first animated cartoon", that is far from the case. People were already experimenting with animation (not yet called "cartoons" - those were the things you saw in the newspapers) back in the mid-1800s, when the concept of stop-motion/flip-books was all the rage. Praxoscopes, zoetropes, mutoscopes, and all manner of scopes were attempts to make still pictures move, and hand-drawn pictures dance around and make us laugh.

Gertie had this long, long, non-animated lead-in which was supposed to be some sort of teaser, and was in black and white. This gorgeous thing is hand-tinted, one frame at a time. Its motion is not terribly smooth, but it's still convincing. For some reason I think of Max Fleischer's charmingly-drawn figures in his early Koko the Clown cartoons. The best part, the most innovative, is the way the dragon (alligator?) swivels around and walks away with its back to us. That's a radical shift in perspective, and it works very well.

More later, I hope. This is too interesting NOT to pursue.

Oh all right: a cute cat video!

Just twist my arm!

Like clowns, dolls are all uniformly terrifying.

I don't care how cute they are.

They are demonic. And none more than Saucy, a pert-looking thing dressed in pink. Wrench her arm around, and all sorts of things will happen. 

Since no video can do this justice, I sat there and made an endless series of gifs of her twisting, wrenching, macabre facial expressions. Since this was 1965, long before the advent of sophisticated robotics, there must have been some kind of grinding metallic mechanism under the vinyl face that made her expression change like that: and wouldn't THAT make a great YouTube video, if someone peeled back Saucy's skin to reveal the Borg-like structure within?

There's a certain amount of overlap here because my Makeagif program cuts off a second or so at the beginning and end of the time you set up for your gif. So I've had to compensate. We don't want to miss one second of the fun!

So enjoy these - or don't enjoy them: be creeped out by them. I know I am.

Oh, and! Each gif is approximately 20 seconds long, unlike the jerky two- or three-second things you normally see. So you have to spend a bit of time with them. Oh come on, do it anyway. 

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I can see through anything

Here is Baby See n' Say, a doll who can see through things. Yes, it's true.

This is a one-doll post, because one short gif kind of gives you the idea of this doll's repertoire of facial expressions: jibbering lips and huge, rolling eyes. It's what she SAYS that's horrifying. Her statements start off innocently enough, but grow more and more disturbing, hinting at some sort of creepy supernatural ability - including the capacity to see through things (including you). Would you want to give this thing to a little girl? Unless she was Wednesday Addams, I don't think so.

Baby See n’ Say: what she says

You’re my best friend in the whole world!

You know what? Your eyes are pretty!

I have beautiful eyes ‘cause I eat carrots!

Can you make your eyes go ‘round and ‘round like this?

If I look down like this, I can see my nose!

Wouldn’t it be fun if you were a doll like me?

I can see in the dark. Can you?

If I look way up high, I can see the Man in the Moon!

My eyes are magic. I can see through anything!

40 Words for Emotions You've Felt, But Couldn't Explain

40 Words For Emotions You’ve Felt, But Couldn’t Explain

Brianna Wiest 

Exulansis: when there’s not an actual word for what you’re trying to explain. We feel more than we have the language to articulate and express, which is in itself profoundly frustrating. People work through emotions by being able to identify them and use them as signals. A lot of the time, we’re left in the dark. Enter the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the brainchild of writer John Koenig, who is here to give you words for the feelings you may not have even known you were having. Here are 40 of them. 

Blogger's note. No there aren't, 40 of them I mean, because the piece was too long and I didn't like 19 of them. Here are just the BEST what-do-you-call-its, "whatevers" - there's no word for them anyway! That's the whole point. In boiling these down, I had several criteria.The word either had to sound/look nice, like gnossienne, or represent something very familiar, like kenopsis. This would seem to solve the problem of "those feelings we can't put into words", but the problem is, if I started talking about kenopsis, people would think I had some sort of gross skin disease, like keratosis.

In any case, I've included my observations after each definition. I will not be using these terms any time soon, and you will soon discover why.

Onism n. the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience. Imagine standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

The problem with this is that it sounds like "Onanism", which people through the ages have taken to mean masturbation. But it isn't. In Genesis, Onan was supposed to impregnate his brother's concubine or something like that, but he decided at the last minute that he didn't want to, so he pulled it out before he came and "spilled his seed on the ground" (which is why Dorothy Parker named her pet canary "Onan").

That's it, folks - it was coitus interruptus, the good old, tried-and-true, disastrous "pull-out method", the one that explains why Catholics have such huge families. Aside from these concerns, onism is something I experience every day of my life. 

Mal de Coucou n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

Synonym: social media.

Chrysalism n. the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.

This brings to mind the dreamy Lovin' Spoonfuls song You and Me and Rain on the Roof. Caught up in a summer shower, drying while it soaks the flowers. Maybe we'll be caught for hours. Waiting out the sun.

I particularly love to be indoors during a rip-roaring hailstorm that leaves piles of diamonds on the ground which smoke under the sun.

Altschmerz n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

Synonym: life.

Ambedo n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an act that is done purely for its own sake.

I'd say social media again, because of the emphasis on self-absorption. But yes, we do sometimes fall down peculiar rabbit-holes in our own minds, and don't come out again for a long time. Our dream self and our waking self are not so separate after all. They aren't just joined: they're the same thing. Chew on that one for a while.

Nodus Tollens n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

Some movies are this way. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Being John Malkovich. Groundhog Day. To quote Bob Dylan in Motorpsycho Nitemare: "Oh, no, no, I've been through this movie before."

Vemödalen n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

All I can say is, OK, PUT IT BACK IN YOUR POCKET.

Vellichor n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Does this explain why, when I read an old book, or even an old-ish book like the one I'm re-reading now (Positively Fourth Street, which is about Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the '60s and which came out only about six years ago), I keep sticking my nose into the book because I keep on picking up this punky, book-papery smell? Where will this smell go when I finally get with the 21st century and buy a Kindle?

Rückkehrunruhe n. the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.

If I could begin to pronounce this word without sounding like I'm either trying to dislodge a giant piece of toffee from my back molars, or having a stroke, I might be able to figure it out. I think it's just about vacation regret and getting that pesky joy-extinguishing Visa bill, and realizing that in the course of twenty-six days, you have put on twenty-five pounds.

.

Rigor Samsa n. a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.

I know a lot of people who have one of these. Personally, I think they're better off. I've always gone around like an egg without a shell. I don't even know how I've lasted this long.

P. S. is this something like a samosa? Because I've never really known what that is.

Silience n. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.

OK, so THIS one I understand. I always have these thoughts about Third World children: they die before they can even GET to school, many of them, but how many potential Einsteins die in the process? Is it so far-fetched to think that potential world-savers may be trapped in conditions so wretched they may die before they have a chance to do any good? This word keeps wanting to flip into "silence", which is annoying. "Silience" is kind of like "resilience" or "silica", or even "silliness". Or saliva. Or salience. Or - 

Gnossienne n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

On the other hand, if the other person is a complete idiot, they probably have no such door.

Anecdoche n. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say
.

Ah! Simon and Garfunkle. People talking without speaking. People hearing without listening. I'd say it's social media all over again, or texting, since conversation is beginning to wither away and die, going the way of the VHS player (or, worse, the one we had - beta).

Catoptric Tristesse n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.

Oh, fuck this!

Anemoia n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.

This is what allowed me to write The Glass Character, a. k. a. The Book that Never Was. Or it was, but nobody bought it, which is too bad. It's a good book, you should get yourself a copy. In order to write it I had to anemoia (anemone? Anemia?) quite a lot. 

Daguerreologue n. an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself, an enigmatic figure who still lives in the grainy and color-warped house you grew up in, who may well spend a lot of their day wondering where you are and what you’re doing now, like an old grandma whose kids live far away and don’t call much anymore.

This word is much better for the beauty/bittersweet quality of its sound/look on the page than for its meaning, which sucks rocks.

Avenoir n. the desire that memory could flow backward. We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way…

These are all so painful, I'm not sure I'm even going to get through this exercise! Today I had a bout of this, or something like it. When not absorbed in a useless replaying of scenes in my life where I felt I had fucked everything up, I kept recalling all the most joyful and emotionally-gratifying times I had ever experienced, collapsing with grief when I realized that it will never happen again.
















Kenopsia n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.

Movielike, again, but I can't remember which movie.

Ecstatic Shock n. the surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone you like—a thrill that starts in your stomach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spontaneous smile—which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts you to chase that feeling with a kite and a key.

Forget the kite and key part, this person is trying to show off their colourful writing skills. But I DO know about ecstatic shock, and how it's always somebody you're not even supposed to be seeing. Or at least, you're not supposed to be having these feelings about him. Oh, go read the novel.

Xeno n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

This is what happens from too much social media. Even the merest wave from your barber fills the abyss within your soul for just long enough to drag yourself through another meaningless, obscenely lonely day.  It's xeno, and it's "us".

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