bad poetry

if you read my earlier post, you will have a good example of what bad poetry is all about. i have always held that poetry should be spontaneous (although I pretend to like the modernists) and should not be attempted when you don't feel it from within. some translations are weak, but the essence of the spontaneity comes through even through that. that is when a poem is successful. i have read some really pathetic poems in my lifetime, and some really abstruse ones, but the ones that are most dangerous are like the one I have published below. my own blog, so i can publish anything, but this was done with a purpose. is poetry always conceived and executed with an end in mind? is it just a means to an end? always? do love poems satisfy the lover and make her yield into an abyss, a victim of charm?

whereas this was an example of something that came out of casual flirtation, there are also serious attempts that are born out of deeper emotions. emotions are flirtatious too: they are always transient and seem foolish the day after. so, if your objective of using that emotion for creating something is met, you are successful.

I am not a fan of Derek Walcott. Or Ted Hughes even. Give me a footnote to howl or something, baby, to light my fire.

the same poem, written for the same person a year later when things are deeper, may read:

eventually
walking back to the kettle
another morning,
i drank straight from it.
my rational faculties,
awake by then,
didn't ask me a why or a how.

by then, after the night
i knew
it was tea to be savored
hot, cold, dark, or orange.

and from my lips
it went straight to His ears.

and hers.