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Why Are So Many Poems Boring?

By Paul Dickey

____________________

 

i.

Poems with nothing but clev-

er line breaks are bor-

ing. Poems with no metaphor,

freshness, passion, or

images, but sort of rhyme are

              boring.  

ii. 

Poems with nothing going

      for them but

      white space

    are boring. 

iii. 

Minimalist poems remove

all redundant, implied,

leave only all that is

                  boring.

Poems like this poem are: 

well yes, boring. So are

poems that don’t listen

           to

themselves or can’t walk a beat. Work-chopped

poems, you ask? Yeah, boring,

like chopped liver.

iv. 

Clichés and bad tropes are boring.

Poems with too many adverbs are

excru-

              ciat-

                          ingly boring. 

I guess some poems don’t even try to rhyme

be fresh make us see

anything poems that don’t use

punctuation properly are

boring. Too.

 ____________________

Paul Dickey is a stuffy, cantankerous old man who has published in Kansas Quarterly, Quartet, Poet Lore, Karamu, and Nimrod before he got old. He recently has published online at ForPoetry.com, 3rd Muse Poetry Journal, and Dicey Brown. He has new work forthcoming in The Avatar Review, Rattle, and Sentence, a Journal of Prose Poetics. Look him up if you can handle it at http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/dickey.htm. The author of this poem stole Mr. Dickey's personal identity on the Internet. Shhh. Don’t say a word. Mr. Dickey has no idea that his work is appearing here.