Last Wednesday I went back to my alma mater to practice for my friend Erin's senior recital, which I am participating in as "Violinist II" for some violin duets by Mozart and Bartok. While I was there, I picked up a copy of The Polemic, that same college literary journal that published my poem, The Bitterness that Colors My Life Grey. The quality of most of the poetry has not improved any since I graduated.
For example, here is a brief excerpt from He Passeth By, by Richard Pitaniello:
Rain drops
Slicing through the trees
Clinging to moths
Drowning them
The butterflies are gone
Please compare, if you would, that stanza with my own poem that I analysed in this journal several weeks ago. They are of the same cloth; the only difference is that I was kidding.
A poem that profoundly bad takes me back to my own college days, when I read bad poetry in The Polemic while I "chilled with my homies" in the Underground. It got me to thinking of my old college roommate, Clay Templeton, who would take off his shirt, wiff his own armpit, and exclaim, "I SMELL DELICIOUS!" Clay also had a certain ease with things scatalogical, and the following poem, which was inspired by this most recent issue of The Polemic, has, and Clay you can feel free to disagree with this if you want, a certain Templetonian ring to it.
Vainglorious Bowel Emptying
Poop flows out of me like a river
only not a river because it's
a solid cylindrical block
and everyone who sees it weeps out of surprise and terror
and not a little bit of envy
Until the birds fly down and carry away bits of it to use in their nests
they frolic and chirp
and I look up at my once mighty excrement and feel alone
Jesus, if you were here now I'd be up in your grill
Asking why my turd's home to some whippoorwill.
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