The Mad Poets Blog

It’s that day again — the day when Mad Poets throughout cyber space tune in to find out what you — yes YOU! — are doing.  So tell us!!!  New book, poem, story or article been published?  Got a featured reading coming up?  A reading or event that you’re hosting? Inquiring minds want to know.

Is anybody out there????

C’mon, let’s hear what you’re doing!  Reading?  Publishing?  Busking in the subway??   It’s an equal opportunity platform.  Get your shameless on.

I’m working on getting that calendar (yeah, that big empty one that says there are no events) off the righthand sidebar, but it takes a little finaggling.  So, please please please ignore, if you weren’t already doing so.  It’ll be gone soon enough.

If you’re looking for readings, check out the homepage & click on any of the venues in the lefthand sidebar, under the “Readings & Events” heading.

I’ll bet you thought I wasn’t gonna make it this week, right?  But here it is, just under the wire:  Your chance to share with the world — or at least our wee fraction of the interwebs — your comings & goings for the week.  Where will you be reading?  Where will you be published?  What fabulous new & exciting things can we learn from you and/or about you???  We can’t wait to find out.  We’re on the edge of our seats, seriously (although that may be only because we are quickly checking in on the blog before running off to bed!)

Bring on the shamelessness!!

Last week, I wrote this post over at my personal blog, on my personal website winterspringsummer.com, and afterwards I thought to myself, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if other people got in on this action.”

So, here’s the idea.  Take something you love — and I mean LOVE — despite its questionable poetic or artistic value, and justify it.  Poetic Justification.  We are writers, poets, artists… but we are also humans, susceptible to wiles of overly sentimental movies, cheesy pop music, or velvet wall hangings of dogs playing poker.  (As you’ll read in the first installment, I’ve got a penchant for 80s hair bands.  I just can’t get enough of that crap!)  I’m open to anything, as long as it genuinely inspires you. I personally think its more fun to dissect the written/spoken/sung word, but then again if you can make a case for why Top Gun is one of the best movies of all time, go for it.

I’ll be justifying for the first few weeks.  But feel free to add your own justifications in the comments, or you can email them to me if you’d like to be featured:  autumn (at) winterspringsummer (dot) com.

So here goes.

The other night I was wondering:  if you can’t be a good poet, is it better to be so profoundly awful or to be just mediocre. Mediocre is always mediocre.  But sometimes, and just sometimes, bad is SO bad that it almost becomes good.

I started thinking about this whilst washing dishes and listening to Monster Ballads, one of my favorite CDs to sing along with.  The CD reaches its zenith for me a little more than halfway through when Damn Yankees’ “High Enough” kicks in.  God I love that song!  LOVE it!!  It’s the kind of song that I will listen to at least 2 or 3 times any time I hear it.  And I know it’s terrible.  It doesn’t even really make any sense.  But something about it makes the blood tingle in my veins.  So, I started thinking, There’s got to be something to this.  There has to be some poetic value — and I’m going to dig right into the lyrics and find it.  So here we are.

Before we get started, you might want to familiarize yourself with the song, if you’re not a hairband fanatic like me.  You can read the lyrics here, and you can listen to it here.  I recommend listening.  As I’ll soon explain, the lyrics don’t have nearly the same impact….

(Continued)

Two weeks in a row?!?  Can you believe it???

That’s right folks, the MPS blog is comin’ back.  Keep your eyes peeled for all sorts of cool new features, including a regular “Meet a Member” spotlight, previews of upcoming Mad Poets pubs like the annual journal & the Joie De Vivre book award, poetry reviews and commentary, and another possibly funny, possibly enlightening feature called “Poetic Justification” wherein each week, I (or a guest) will write a brief commentary explaining why we love some poem, song, or piece of art that may or may not be widely considered worthy of our unending devotion (more on that soon).

But for now, here’s the drill:  You know where to find us.  We want to know where to find you.  So tell us where you’re reading and being published, where can we buy you’re book or CD.  Are you in the news?  Is somebody writing a profile of you?   We want to know how you are.  Be shameless!!