No more Roses

Just sharing some personal views about poems, or at least trying to get you to laugh a little.

 

No More Roses

The informative, yet humorless, truth about the poetry epidemic on the Internet

 

            Imagine if you will a writer sitting at his computer tabbing away on the keyboard and has been doing so for a good five hours. Let's call this mysterious writer, oh I don't know, Phil. Let’s say this Phil character has been working on a project for a while now. He's spent many sleepless nights staring into the computer screen trying to fish for the write words in his new short story. Phil has put a major amount of effort and time into his most beloved story that he's sure everyone will love or at least enjoy reading. Now let’s say that this Phil person has an account on some random writing website (*cough* *cough* Writerscafe *cough*) and uploads his masterpiece, or whatever the hell he considers it, and waits for reviews to see how he did. Days begin to go by and Phil hasn't gotten a single review. Even worse, he's only gotten a handful of views. Confused, Phil begins to browse the site to see what's been popular. After a few clicks of his mouse, he finds a submission that's gotten almost a hundreds of views in the last hour! Clicking on the link to the piece, he realizes that it's a poem. “Goodness,” Phil might think, “This has to be good with all of these views and positive reviews.” Upon reading, he finds that he was horribly mistaken. Since I can't use a real example, I've basically come up with a replica of what it might look like....

 

I woke up this morning

Life is so terrible

I went and took a s**t

I felt so much better

Then I went to eat a bagel

That was really good too

It made me think about life

And how it's gone in seconds

Like eating a bagel

 

            All of the online writers know what I'm talking about, except you Fan-Fiction writers, nobody even reads your disturbing and yet somewhat erotic version of little red riding hood. Online writers know the feeling of busting their humps over a project only to get unnoticed due to some hipster scribbling his thoughts down about how terrible life is and labels it 'poetry.' Look, I'm not saying that poetry online is something that should be avoided (A lot of it is rather good), but what I am saying is that each day more and more people ignore the short story writers and praise the 'poets' that explain what they did with their scout master last summer. It seems the more effort we online writers put into our works the less credit we receive. In my opinion, there are three main reasons why we're the underdogs in this war on online literature.

            1. Poetry Is Simple

            I think we can agree that poetry is a lot shorter to read and spend time on rather than a short story (but then again that depends on how long that short story is). Let's face it, the majority of internet users are there for either three things: pornography, trending videos (mostly of cats), and social networking. If they do stubble across a short story on the internet, they'll probably end up reading a few sentences, then go back to watching rednecks blow s**t up on Youtube or to go update their post on Facebook about how hard life is. But online poetry on the other hand usually is only a few lines and only takes a few seconds to read, regardless how terrible it might be.        

            2. They're Just Plain Bad

            A majority of the time the only reason bad online poems get so popular is because they're just plain bad. It's kind of hard not to forward a poem you found online about how some seventh grader's life is so horrible because they broke up with their boyfriend/girlfriend that they only dated for a week. The only explanation that they didn't forward it would probably be because they were laughing so hard at their computer they passed out on the floor from loss of air. Honestly, if you saw a poem about some kid gluing their cat to the ceiling, wouldn't you forward it even if it was terrible?

            3. Poems Are Easy to Write

            Poems are easy to write, especially a free verse poem. Don't get me wrong, free verse is fine, but can we honestly say it has major artistic value? I've learned that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. What I mean to say is, do you really need to write about how that girl that sits at your table is such a w***e in a free verse? Do you really need to talk about what you room smells like by indenting every few words, calling it a poem?

            Here, I'm going to make this easy for you to understand, because I know your dying to click on the tab that says “fat people falling” on it. Spread the love; review both poems and short stories. Okay, go ahead and click the next tab. Go on. I know you want to, but you could demonstrate what you've learned by reviewing this if you'd- wait, you clicked on the next tab, didn't you....

Author's Note

There really isn't much I can say if you've already clicked on your other tab. Are you even reading this?

Reviews

[unspokenguilt]

LMAO! Sorry it took me so long to read this, but I haven't been on here in quite some time. (Mostly because I haven't wrote much of anything lately and been leaning more toward drawing recently) I found this piece hilarious, even though I'm most likely one of those ridiculous poem writers >__< and yes I did enjoy and read it all the way through. Your pieces as always amaze me...so thanks for sharing!

best wishes,
elyssa