Heart, Home, and Hard Hats

Sue Doro

Especially since I consciously increased the number of pages of poetry I read per year in 2000, I have read, and reviewed, some incorrigibly awful books. I have read things that would (and probably did) make magazine editors groan aloud in pain that only found their way into print via self-publishing. I have read published work that contains nary a shred of redeeming value to qualify it as “poetry” and not nearly enough substance to qualify it as “prose.” I truly believed I had, if not taken in all the bad poetry there is (because Lord knows there is far more than enough bad poetry to go around, and were the whole Barn to do nothing but read 100 pages of awful verse per day, we would not cover a tenth of all the awful verse extant in the world in our lifetimes, to be sure), at least plumbed the inarguable depths. I had hoped I would never see another book as bad as those by Roger Lewin, Rod McKuen, Jim Morrison, Susan Polis Schutz, Brandon Watt, or many other equally painful writers of mind-numbing, ear-shattering elephant dung that passes for poetry.

Adding more hard evidence to the old saw that no matter how far down you go, there's always another step, this month I encountered the writings of Sue Doro. And realized that even on his worst days, Roger Lewin couldn't be this bad if he tried.

(Warning: examples follow. Those of weak stomach may want to stop reading now.)

It's not enough that there is no sense of language or word choice here. Not enough that there is no sense of grammar, no idea where line breaks should go, not a single line that looked as if it either underwent any revision at all or that the author does any revising in her head before setting this stuff down on paper. Not enough that it all comes out sounding like (bad) essay writing chopped up into lines to make it look artistic (here's a tip: chopping it up into little lines doesn't make it SOUND any more like poetry).

“i begin to feel responsible
i can't help feeling responsible,
not for the storm,
but for the fact that I AM NOT [sic]
having difficulty flying…”
(“Motherdream”)

But no, dear reader, that is not all. Of course not. The title should have tipped you off. No, despite all that, we have not yet delved into the true core of what makes this so awful. (As if the above weren't enough to put you off a couple of meals.) No, this is “poetry” with a message. And were Marshall McLuhan still alive, I have little doubt he would hold this book up at speeches as the perfect, quintessential example of what happens when the message overrides the medium: art not only suffers, but gets shoved into the corner after a lifetime of drunken abuse, without the weaponry to strike back, so utterly defeated it can do nothing but commit a kind of merciful suicide as a way of deserting the premises altogether. And here we have eighty-five pages of work that art has, in fact, utterly abandoned:

“I am trying to register
as accurately as possible
trying to record this communal fever
we are burning
burning
burning
Capitalists
beware!”
(“Fever”)

I should probably add that the same domicile has also been deserted by any consistent grammar, as well.

If the material were just bad, I wouldn't be as absolutely stunned as I am with the depths to which this book sinks. But it's not just bad, it's PUBLISHED bad. There's a list of credits on the acknowledgements page that (if you changed the magazine names, I guess, because any magazine that publishes this stuff is one I'm sure quality poets stay far, far away from) most published poets would envy being able to put into a book. Twenty publications (nineteen magazines and an anthology, as far as I can tell). One assumes by the language some of them took more than one poem. If you buy this book, buying it to mark those twenty publications in your Poets' Market as places to avoid is probably worth the price you'll pay.

This is not just the worst book I have read this year—this is the strongest of candidates for the single worst book I have ever read. (A reasonable estimate would be fifteen thousand, with maybe a fifth of that being books and anthologies of poetry.) It has absolutely no artistic value, is morally and ethically ill-informed, and shows no sense of regard for, much less love of, the language used to create it. This is one of those rare books I will not donate to Goodwill nor put up on a give-away list; I will burn it, instead. I wouldn't inflict such a book on my worst enemy, let alone a total stranger shopping at Goodwill who may be discovering poetry for the first time. I give it zero, because that's as low as my scale goes, but if I had negative, this would be the first book ever to receive negative stars.