Customer Reviews

Pegasus Descending: A Book of the Best Bad Verse

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Compilers Camp, Kennedy, and Waldrop came up with this gem of a book in the early seventies, and as far as I know it was one of the first of its kind. Here are some of the worst poems ever proferred in English, made doubly funny by their earnest sincerity. They have even found a few clunkers by great poets, among them Emily Dickinson. Chapters include terrible opening lines and outright "disasters"! These bad poems will bring you as much joy as any good poem can.

This shares the crown of "premier anthology of bad verse" with Wyndham's Lewis' wonderful volume, The Stuffed Owl. Don't read it in a library or anywhere else where you need to be decorous, as it provokes guffaws!

I've read some other compilations of "bad poetry," and most of the poems aren't that bad - they're just dull. Not the same thing at all.

I first heard of this book when I read X.J. Kennedy's excellent text "An Introduction to Poetry" in college. The book had a very funny chapter on "Telling Good from Bad."

I've owned "Pegasus Descending" for several years now, and some of the poems in this book can still make me cry from laughing so hard. The special genius of this collection is that the editors are never mean-spirited or snobbish in their comments; it's evident that they love poetry, even poetry written when the muse was evidently out to lunch.

Oscar Wilde was right in that bad art is sincere. And the poems in this book are sincerely bad. Much of it is bad in a high-school-lit-mag kind of bad; I've edited a high school lit mag. It can get much worse than this.

However, I cannot give it a full five stars, because it overlooks some truly execrable work from hideous poets. I mean, William McGonagall, worst of bad Scottish poets (Robbie Burns can erase only so much of that stain), wrote the immortal lines:

And when Life's prospects may at times appear dreary to ye, Remember Alois Senefelder, the discoverer of lithography.

The examples of his poetry in here are actually =better= than many I've seen elsewhere. His poem on allowing women the vote was something to be seen to be believed. So I think they could've picked poems even more amusing than the ones in there. The same goes for Julia Moore.

Also, I felt that some of the poetry picked was not truly horrible. There should be no question of the badness of the poetry, but some of the poems I came away thinking "I've seen much worse", or lines were taken out of context.

However, most of the poetry is extremely bad and extremely funny. It should be given to any aspiring poet as a warning. This book was published in 1971, and I believe the last 30 years has generated plenty of very sincere, very bad poetry which should be enough to fill another volume. Anyone care to edit a new book?