Thoughts on Poetry (Reposted from Twitter)

How to fake a poem: 1) Remove prepositions 2) Adjective as verb or noun 3) Sex that shit up 4) End on a pointless, but sweet image.

Objective signs of shit-ass verse: 1) Tries metrical schema & fails 2) Tries rhyming & fails 3) Symbolism is nonsensical 4) Narrative is nonsensical 5) Removing the linebreaks yields poorly written prose 6) Can be summarized in fewer words than the poem 7) Repetitious symbolism 8) Repetitious vocab 9) Incomplete thoughts 10) Incoherent thoughts

Violence against women is bad:


Violence against jackasses is good:


Hmm, further investigation reveals that this was an idiot-on-idiot crime:


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Mother of Fog of War [Today's News Poem, February 10, 2011]

Mother of Fog of War [Today's News Poem, February 10, 2011]

Bring the majority unit.
Speak, let the gasses cohere
Misting the windows with promise.
Cadres in uniform blow
Fog of all—mother of warfare
Into the room. She invents
Shackles for fingers and eyelids,
Vises for arteries, veins;
Clamps for the lungs and the heartbeat;
Stencils to color the thoughts
Squeezed out of blemishes, pimples.

"Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority."
—CARL HULSE, The New York Times, Published: February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/us/politics/10congress.html

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