Hey there, look at me! or, How to write a very bad poem (8.3.21)

I know how to write a bad poem, but I can't do it consciously, at least not with any consistency.  But I can write bad poems one after another when I'm in the zone for it, that is, when I'm writing on auto-pilot.

By auto-pilot I don't mean that I'm not paying attention to what I'm making, but that I'm paying the wrong kind of attention.  I'm listening to the voices of The Moderns or The Victorians or The Beats.  I'm listening to The Poet in me, making grand verbal gestures and figurative flourishes that'll get 'em when they read this.

Poems that I write when on auto-pilot make big statements about big subjects.  They're ornamented with Symbols and Seriousness.  They want so badly to be in a Norton Anthology of American Literature, to have term papers written about them!

Here's a recent example:

The Dance Card
 
She dances toward the flickering hearth
in the arms of a knight and a fool,
a glass of champagne tipping in one hand.
 
A bottle dance, she is combustible.
The dance will draw her to the fire
and the fire will eat tonight.
 
The music is slow, and the dance, a waltz,
quick over the floor, interests us, the hot spinning
holds our attention though we’d do more
than watch, if more were to be done.
 
The portraits of the fathers look down
from under the ballroom’s starry ceiling.
 
If more could be done, we’d see it done:
the tables and chairs not tumbling past us,
the champagne not spilling through
the brilliant, delirious night.
 
We take an interest before turning back
to the news of the day and our questions,
to the imperatives of the evening, its music,
to the smoke, the knight and the fool.

The title has possibility.  Beyond that, and from the very first line, the poem indulges every wrong impulse a writer can think of.  Let's start with that flickering hearth.  Seriously?  Can you imagine a more 19th Century way of saying fireplace?  Well, at least I didn't write "lambent flame."  

Then take a closer look at the moldy imagery that is the first stanza: woman, dance, knight, fool, champagne glass.  You're meant to hear Music in these images, preferably Waltz Music.  And if you don't pick up on Allegory too, then you're just not reading.  Or paying attention.  But I'm paying attention.  I'm channeling The Bard.

"The dance will draw her to the fire, / and the fire will eat tonight."  Now what does that mean?  The lines sound like they mean something.  The rhythm rises and falls with Meaning.  Hmmm.  This must be so profound that it escapes even me, the writer.  Deep!  Rough paraphrase: a drunk lady almost stumbles into an open fire.  I might have explored what it means to be drunk and dancing too near a hearth big enough to "eat" you, what's brought a woman to such a place.  Or I might have pondered what the speaker's doing there, nothing much actually, just watching a partier make a fool of herself (as the next stanza confirms, without irony).  But instead I stop at Meaning, or rather, I stop short of meaning anything, hoping that you, reader, will make something profound out of this.

Then the portraits of the fathers . . . etc.  The poem is back to Allegory.  But what's allegorized here?  Nothing.  This is Allegory meant to hide the obvious: the poem has nothing to say other than and here is where Allegory would go in a better poem.

The rest is, well, puffery.  "The brilliant, delirious night," "the news of the day and our questions," "the imperatives of the evening" . . . until we're back at the knight and the fool.  Obviously, when your poem has nothing to say and means little, you hit the repeat button.

A bad poem isn't bad thought or feeling.  It's the absence of thought or feeling.  It's self-regarding in the worst way: Hey there, look at me!  It's like that fool at the dinner party who thinks he can sing and dance, or worse, thinks you think he can.