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Odd Poem Explained
The poem you just read is my submission to an amateurs-only poetry contest that is frequently advertised in the Sunday color supplements to U.S. newspapers. The deal is, if you submit a poem of 20 lines or fewer you can win a cash prize, but even if you don't win your poem might still get included in an actual book of such poems that the contest sponsor publishes every so often. Then they will be happy to sell you that very expensive book full of poetry written by people whose only qualification to write a poem is that they can afford to buy the book with their poem in it. OK, here's the deal with the poem.
I made the first words of several of the lines odd and inexplicable just to draw attention to their initial letters. Beyond that I mostly tried to make the poem as bad as I could, so that it would be that much funnier if the "National Library of Poetry" decided to publish it. The poem also contains all sorts of silly self-indulgences that I never expected anyone to get.
There're a bunch more such self-indulgences like that sprinkled yonder and there, but the point is that I wanted to write the worst poem I could. Feel free to let me know how I did. Update of Janaury 2005: Jane Harris of Perth, Australia, brought to my attention a scandal in that country from back in the early 1940s that I had never heard of: the case of the poet Ern Malley. She says, "Your creation, 'Journeys On Kansas Earth', reminded me to some degree of an Ern Malley effort titled 'Culture as Exhibit', a rather spectacular load of balderdash. There are still many living who remain silent to this day when Ern Malley is mentioned." Perhaps I'm not the most objective one to make this comparison, but Ern's poetry and mine seen remarkably similar, certainly in purpose but also in style. Here are a few of the 10,000 links about Ern Malley that Google scrounged up: ERN 1, ERN 2, ERN 3, and ERN 5.
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Apparently I'm not the only person to have figured out the "National Library of Poetry's" arrangement with poets they decide to publish in their anthologies. Dave Barry did a hilarious piece on it in late 1998.
The magazine Consumer Reports
figured it out too, and they published an illustrated article about it in the
"Selling It" department on the inside back cover of their March 1998
edition.
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