Worst poem EVAR!

From a page about poetry, the worst poem ever written in the English language!

“A Tragedy” by Theophile Marzials

Death!
Plop.
The barges down the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop …
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop …
And my head shrieks – “Stop”
And my heart shrieks – “Die”

Yet I knew – I knew
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from the beginning to the end –
My Devil – My “Friend” …

So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air –
I can do,
I can dare
(Plop, Plop The Barges flop
Drip, drop).

And let myself run all away with my head
And Stop.
Drop
Plop, flop.
Plop

UPDATE: My new friend salimma who is starting a Free Culture chapter at Indiana U originally posted about this.

13 thoughts on “Worst poem EVAR!

  1. <lj-cut text=”You really don’t want to read this, stop now…>

    You forgot a quote there, thus causing danger on all of our friends lists.

    Danger.

  2. The page on poetry is pretty fucking awful too! I feel LESS informed about poetry than I did 10 minutes ago.

    “In the Celtic language, “trees” meant “letters,” and Druidic colleges were founded in woods or groves. “Beech” is a common synomym for “literature.” Druids or poets were “oak-seers,” and thus came the idea that poetry was magic.”

    NON SEQUITURS MUCH???/2

    “Today’s poems should also tell a story, but they don’t necessarily rhyme. Many modern poems are simple, such as Carl Sandburg’s “Fog.”

    Fog

    The fog comes
    on little cat feet.
    It sits looking
    over the harbor and city
    on silent haunches and then
    moves on.

    Sandburg compares the fog to a cat.”

    JESUS I WOULDN’T HAVE GUESSED! THAT’S THE MOST INSIGHTFUL THING YOU COULD HAVE SAID ABOUT THAT POEM! I FEEL LIKE I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND IT NOW!!!!1

    • Wow, I just kind of skimmed the page, I hadn’t realized how truly awful it was. I think that there is such a thing as “negative education”, where knowledge is sucked out of you and understanding is replaced with confusion, and unfortunately it is taught in many of our public schools. 😛 This person obviously had a full dose of it.

  3. Haha, funny, I just posted about that a few days ago. A friend of mine read that to me while we were in Cambridge, what, 5 years ago? It was quite funny when orated in front of a slightly inebriated audience..

    • Aha! I forgot where I had gotten it from, I just read about it on your LJ. I’ll update the post to link to your post 🙂

      • Sure 🙂 I thought I added you yesterday, but the request must have timed out..

        Oh, btw, it’s Indiana U, not U Indiana 🙂 Funny how the convention varies from country to country; in UK the more established universities are uniformly ‘U of …’, with ‘… U ‘ relegated for those established after the 70s.

  4. hi. could you post this on the SCDC community?

    IDEAS@SOOB

    for anyone who is interested straight out of brisbane festival 04 and vibewire.net are hosting a virtual think-tank of the future of copyright in australia and the affect of creative commons licensing. get onto the vibewire forums to get involved.

    :: Copywrite/Copywrong ::
    Culture is a dynamic, evolving organism that should be freely interpreted and reconfigured. How do exclusive rights on creativity effect the development of art and science? Has copyright become an instrument for censorship? This session will look at how ancient knowledge & new ideas get fenced-off, injected with growth hormones, & sold to the highest bidder. Our ‘speakers’ will introduce the latest tactics for rescuing the warm & fluffy creatures of intellectual capital. The big question: can you keep your intellectual property rights & share them too

    chaired by Mark Fallu
    speakers/thinkers Tim Parish, James Arvanitakis, Sarah-Jane Woulahan and Elliott Bledsoe

    the virtual think-tank is also hosting two other tanks:

    ::”You can’t govern a nation by Google” The future of ideas online ::
    How will new technologies affect the way we produce and distribute ideas? In the 90s the rise of email & open publishing paved the way for campaigns without consensus (like the anti-globalisation movement), and conferences without conclusions (like the world social forum). What will new web applications, P2P programs, & the rise of peer-edited websites bring? How might universities, NGOs, activists and think-tanks react?

    chaired by Daniel Mackinlay
    speakers/thinkers Tim Parish, John Sutton, Sam da Silva, Alex Burns, Damien Lewis

    :: What’s on the cards? Long term agendas for change ::
    With a royal flush of Liberals in both houses, Australian laws will be changing faster than you can say “fold”. Who has plans to change Australia over the next three years and beyond? How are they going to make it happen? How do political parties and lobby groups plan for the future? How can we look over the shoulders of the men who are holding all the cards – or even start dealing a few decks of our own? Is it time for the rest of us to start coming up with our own twenty-year plans?

    chaired by Miriam Lyons
    speakers/thinkers Graham Young, Mark Davis, Hamish Alcorn, and James Arvanitakis

    this is an exciting concept, and i encourage anyone interested to head on over to the vibewire.net forums and get thinking. head to the SOOB ideas page on vibewire for more info

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