News Poet News is a site I wish I liked more than I do: every day a new poem that comments on the news. The cool thing about the poems is that they are in verse, but that is also the problem: the verse is not regular enough. As Don Brown wrote in a comment on my "What are Critics for?":
"No formalist myself, I do believe formal patterns should be adhered to if attempted. The ... sloppy ... attempts at form just make us all look bad. If you can't come close to John Hollander, get out of the game."
Of course, if you want to read formally sharp light verse that occasionally ventures into the political, you should check out Light Quarterly. (Yes, I know LQ publishes my poems, which makes this shameless self-promotion!)
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3 comments:
The problem is not just that the verse is not regular enough. Judging by the couple I looked at, the site suffers from verse that is sloppy and incompetent in any number of ways. Yikes!
Agreed! Anybody who likes to versify sometimes thinks about writing verse comments on the news (à la Calvin Trillin), but there's no point in doing it if the verse is no good.
Maybe the news generates the kind of poetry it deserves. Shoddy news, shoddy poems, "so runs the world away."
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