A Guide to Modern Poetry

If Tennyson or Lord Byron saw what people have passed off as poetry since the Beat generation, the two would be very confused as to what exactly about it is poetry(, this run-on caught by EricKei) or moved to suicide at the death of their art.

A generation has grown up writing formless “poetry” with no meter and no rhyme. What is poetry with no form, no meter and no rhyme? Broken prose with an overdose of adjectives.

I have thought of a solution.

Someone needs to contact Houghton Mifflin with my new textbook idea.

The material will be a standard-issue guide to poetry, but turned on its head. Rather than use “great” works of the last 40 years, there is a cost saving alternative — LiveJournal.

LiveJournal is full of starving “poets” who pen their poetry in ink mixed with emo-tears. Even the writers are not emo are very bad.

Very bad.

So what you need to do is contact these LiveJournal poets about licensing their work. Most would be overjoyed at the idea, as the closest anything they write will get to publication is on a vanity press.

Buy some of their poems, say 100 or so, and send them over to Houghton Mifflin along with some of that bullshit literary “analysis” that dots all the company’s books.

The title of this text? Garbage: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

Schools have long speculated that children like reading works written by people from their own age group. I think that children, when transitioning from the classics to this garbage, will recoil in horror and ask for something with a plot.

If you teach people to recognize the smell of shit at an early enough age, they won’t try to eat it as adults.