bad poetry

The dumbest idea associated with poetry is that somehow the very existence of poetry and it being makes it somehow beyond the concept of good and bad. Sometimes this happens with art where a guy walks in and throws a bunch of paint at a canvas and claims its art and for a minute everyone scratches their heads until one free thinking common sense pioneer says "Sure its art its just not good."

The idea that there is no bad poetry is tragic in the sense that if there is no bad poetry there can be no good since having nothing but "good" poetry would destroy the terms distinction. In the nature of full disclosure a lot of people i have heard say there is no bad poetry write nothing but what most consider bad poetry and fear being labeled appropriately.

I want to give a few broad components of what poetry really stinks so that I won't leave people thinking that i'm just on here vaguely maintaining that some poets suck. The most widespread problem is the fault of factuality, a poems basis has to be true if an audience is going to listen and accept it especially read from the stage. If you are reading a poem about your love for someone else the audience will accept it but if I was to read a poem about how Arby's sauce gives me superhuman strength and people should fear me I would be dismissed. Not saying that most poems fail due to false Arby's sauce statements but this holds true for people maintaining facts no one else has. If you begin your poem by telling me that JFK was killed by French Mafia assasins hired by the government I can't help but wonder why no one else but you knew that. It's hard to think about a need for factuality in poetry since most of us think of it as allowing us complete fictional creative control but your audience inhibits that with expectations especially in slam which was founded to combat overly sophisticated none sense poetry.

Second, a poem can be too aware of itself. You can track at times when someone is dropping imagery into verse not to bolster a point or the theme of the piece but for the charm of the imagery. Indeed some poems are taken over completely by the potency of constructed contrast in images made with no point at all but to work words in a pretty way. That is bad poetry. I don't care what anyone thinks poetry and literature in any form is supposed to be a heightened form of human communication and the bottom line is what are you communicating? Flowers are beautiful? Blood is weird? Molotov Cocktails? If you don't connect it you should work on it or walk away from it.