And That's When I Clicked "Close Tab": 9/11 Poetry Edition
"Smoke billows rolled
As planes shattered glass
Concrete and steel
The trees and the grass
An enemy attack
On the Land of the Free
How could this happen
How could this be"
Amazingly, there are nine more verses to this, but this was about as far as I could go.
aaaaand the last line is in all caps. "Chele Stanton" is officially the best at being the worst.
Let's take a moment on this day to think about the trees and the grass.
I'm not sure why that tab was ever opened.
Needs more Qs and "Iraq dead."
This is the second time today you've caused me to laugh at something 9/11 related. If I had feelings, I might question this.
But I don't.
So proceed.
This is a lost Nostradamus quatrain, no?
Before i clicked through, I was betting it was Ms. $4-a-word herself.
Well there's also some critic-approved heavyweight bad poetry on the subject as well:
In the airplane blind-dating the south tower,
People are screaming with horror.*
The airplane meeting the north tower
Erupts with ketchup.
Thus Frederick Seidel, a poet published by Farrar Straus, quoted in the London Review, 6 August.
The reviewer, Michael Robbins, a graduate candidate at U. Of Chicago, is only slightly less idiotic:
"Only Seidel could make a work like `ketchup` offensive – but it's directed against the terrorists as well as those who would use their crime to venerate their own holy wars, and also against the poet's own incommensurability to the occasion."
*OK, thanks for letting us all in on that, Fred. No one would have guessed!
"blind-dating the south tower" is the worst line of poetry i have read in a moderately healthy history of reading and writing (bad) poetry.
From there to here, from here to there
Tragic things are everywhere
Why did they do it?
Were they mad?
I do not know
Go ask your dad
The original writer, they could be talking about something unspeakbaly bad, and they would still sound like a 4-year-old because of the rhyming couplets…
Let's compare: William McGonagall's "The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay"
BEAUTIFUL Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array
And your central girders, which seem to the eye
To be almost towering to the sky.
The greatest wonder of the day,
And a great beautification to the River Tay,
Most beautiful to be seen,
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.
Yep, it looks like the man finally has some competition. Let's get this into the anthologies, people. Never forget! WOLVERINES!