[Gumlegs]

Be careful out there. Stephen Robins could be reading. (I wonder if my favorite bad poet is included, J. Gordon Coogler? From his Purely Original Verse,Alas for the South! Her bookss have grown fewer/She was never much given to literature. Perfectly ghastly). See here.

[Gumlegs]

Sloppy work. Next time the "preview" function doesn't work, don't take that as an indication of perfection.

[Gumlegs]

Ping.

[Mr. Mulliner]

I once had a job as a freelance editor for a publishing company that specialized in self-publishing: the author pays puts out the money for all the work that goes into it. My job ranged from proofreading, to rewriting, to writing critiques. Once I was given the job of critiquing a few hundred poems written by a guy who had been honing his skills for probably a couple of decades...and was still as rotten a poet as you can imagine. It was shear torture to read through those poems, all of them sounding alike, all of them having the same meter and cadence, but with a few dissonant lines or words thrown in to make you screw up your face. Before long I could almost always figure out what he's going to rhyme...and they ALL rhymed (provided you broaden your definition of rhyming just a tiny bit). I got so I could only do about 10 pages at the most of those poems, then would have to take a break and just clear my head. I had a couple of hundred pages to get through and was expected to read them all and make comments.

Perhaps the hardest part of that job, besides just reading the tripe, was writing the critique. Since the company makes its money from people who decide to publish their stuff, I didn't think I could completely reject this guy's stuff. On the other hand, I didn't want a book like this unleashed on the unsuspecting public for fear of the consequences and that my name might somehow come up in association with it. So I had to look for just those few poems which seemed they might have a tiny bit of merit and encourage him to work on these and get them ready, then to make general comments on the rest without being too harsh on his ego.

[lowbridge]

One bright day, in the middle of the night,
two dead men got up to fight.
Back to back, they faced each other,
drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise.
He came and shot those two dead boys.
If you don't believe this lie is true,
ask the blind man, he saw it too.

[boris]

This is really much too high-class for this thread, but I'll give you two of my faves from Stanislaw Lem:

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye;
I hear the tender tensor of thy sigh;
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such a-squared-cosine-two-phi.

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short.
Sorely shorn, soon shackled slave,
Samson sighed.
Silently scheming, sightlessly seeking
Some secret, spectacular suicide.

--Boris