[lit-ideas] Re: Bad Poetry Competition 2011

  • From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2011 08:35:01 +0100 (BST)

--- On Mon, 6/6/11, Judith Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Hey!  What's wrong with passionate grapefruit?!

Lower case is unbecoming for the name of a post-punk indie band.

> I had a strange reaction to the poems -- the ones you posted, Donal -- I was 
> convinced I'd read them before. Parts of them, anyway. "Derivative", I think, 
> is the word.>

Not entirely which poems or excerpts are being referred to.

"For she is everything that is the case" is a clear nod to and a lift from 
Wittgenstein - perhaps more romantic than calling her the totality of factual 
propositions or a ladder that you discard when you've climbed up it. I am not 
well enough versed in...everything can seem derivative after a while, so that I 
could convince myself I've come across the Bishop of Uppsala before even though 
we've actually never met. 

But derivative or not, one of the two poem-excerpts entered as "Photographs of 
K" in the BPC2011 was dashed off by me without conscious plagiarism having cut 
and pasted the other. Should be obvious who's wearing no clothes there?

Donal
London 






So

"You couldn't make it up. Well, uh, someone did."


Yes and no....
Judy Evans, Cardiff, UK

  

--- On Mon, 6/6/11, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:


From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Bad Poetry Competition 2011
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Monday, 6 June, 2011, 22:51


Look

if I tried to write a bad poem I'd be
afraid
somebody would find meaning 
in it and give it a prize
and me a fellowship to the
Academy of Poetasters
in Arcadia ego which is
south of Id
where they grow
passionate grapefruit
and the dogs sleep in the sun
all day like tired lions
before the steps of the Temple
of Juvenile Jupiter 

in the Badlands parched
number lands of Euclid
and flat as a note from Ulysses' trombone

I need a number
pick one
O! I am so sorry
but we have for you
this wimp's prize
three month's vacation
in Samothrace
including the Gathering of the Underdogs
on Mount Suribachi overlooking
the pissgreen sea where Wally Stevens
lost his images
and all esperanza.

We should start a magazine
full of hopeless beauty

Dun

————————————————
I will get into the spirit of the thing, soon.

Robert Paul,
having dark thoughts in a green shade



Entries (multiple entries allowed) should be presented one at a time and given 
a title: e.g. "Look".

The entry should then consist of two parts

(1) A poem or an excerpt from a poem written by a poet.

(2) Something written by the entrant, which may bear some resemblance or no 
resemblance to what is written by the poet.

The aim of the competition is to make it difficult to guess which of the two is 
the real poet.

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