The Dreadful Poet’s Society

Admittedly, I do not write a great deal of poetry, but I know what I hate, and I hate teenage poetry. A law really should be passed to prevent the mis-expression of adolescent feelings. Normally, I am all for expression and the releasing of emotions, but for all of you budding poets out there, please, bottle up that angst and pop the cork in your thirties. All things get better with age, and why should emotional trauma be any different?

I can’t give you the exact reason for it, but teenage poetry is just incredibly bad. Ninety percent of the works are “Untitled”, which generally means the person has no focus, and mentally vomited on the page after listening to a particularly gripping Smashing Pumpkins song. My other favourite type of teenage poem is the cry for a lost love. I often wonder if the subjects of these whiny diatribes actually exist, because that means that the world is even more screwed up than I thought, and that’s tough to do. Most of the poems consist of lines and stanzas such as “Why do you hurt me? I bleed tears as I fall into this void you created. Silence. Darkness. The laughter is gone. Stop laughing.” What is the adolescent obsession with cutting and hurting? The wonderful thing about the English vernacular is the device known as a metaphor, which allows us to create exceptional phrases to express emotion without resorting to things like “I cut myself, but I don’t feel it!” It’s poems like these that make me want to point out that we live in the suburbs, things are not that bad! How do these people continue to function in society? I no longer have any faith in science because if the equations were true than these folks would have spontaneously combusted long ago! Here’s a bit of advice: The next time you think that the world is about to urinate on your head, remember that you are still breathing, and that the oblivion of death is far out of your life at the moment. “But sometimes I wish I was dead, then I couldn’t feel anymore pain.” Alright. Fair enough, Edgar Allan. If the affirmation of life does not stir you from your CFNY-listening, acoustical guitar-playing, Daddy-didn’t-get-me-a-pony stupor, try this: Instead of burning yourself with candle wax this weekend, get yourself a garbage bag full of popcorn and some old Fat Albert episodes and laugh for once in your life. Life is supposed to be fun. If you haven’t heard, infinity is a long time to be buried in the ground, and if you’re religious, you should be spending most of your time earning brownie points for the deity of your choice.

Another aspect of the puberty-inspired ink-wasting industry is the unnecessary use of profanity. Fortunately, I have never had to resort to the use of swearing in writing. (Who am I kidding? My old articles were worse than the script of “House Party”) Nonetheless, as I have begun to realize, swearing is okay if you’re talking to small children or your clergyman, but it just won’t cut it in the world of creative writing. The English language is over twice the size of any of its nearest competitors, which means that there are words that contain more than four letters in which to describe anger with. Let’s keep it clean and come out writing, people. Of course, there are exceptions, but I’m just saying that to cover my own ass. (Oh fooey!)

In summation, stop whining, lighten up, and if you have to purge your brain, do it on the internet, where crap is welcomed with open arms, and I don’t have to tear a page out of my yearbook every year.