Fred's Book Club: Good to Be Bad.

It's the return of the Humpback Writers, the weekly feature that has nothing to do with the unfortunate condition of kyphosis and everything to do with the fact that it appears on Hump Day.  And this bad name for a literature series is perfectly suited for today's wonderfully bad book, B Is for Bad Poetry by Pamela August Russell.

Published in 2009, this book sets out to be bad and succeeds. Its voice is that of a frustrated and irresponsible female-type person who is not so much yearning for love as desperate and disgusted by it, and by life, in equal measures. The poetry is mostly modern free-form, which is lazy and thus a little worse than structured poetry, and yet it is so much beautifully the worse for it. Here are a couple of the many gems in the book, reproduced by scan so you get the feel for the texture of this high-class production.

 

This is some good bad stuff right here. I love it. Fans of the old SCTV will know that to be this bad you have to be very good.

And to be honest, it's not really bad. The poems are mostly very short, which requires a mastery of brevity, potency in a handful of words, albeit for comedy's sake. And many of them display a great use of imagery, even if it is swamped by maudlin self-pity. These are poetic qualities and not easy. But all of them lead to laughs, either of the wry grin sort, the SMH and smile variety, or the burst-out laughing type.

Other non-inspirational poems in the book include "Film Noir Haiku," "Showdown at the I'm Not OK Yet Corral," "Recipe for Disaster," and "Betty Crocker's Oven-Free Cookbook Tops the Bestseller List in Hell." I feel enlightened just reading the titles.

So who is Pamela August Russell? Beats me. She's still around, but her blog went extinct eight years ago. Since I discovered this book I hoped that there might be a sequel, maybe C Is for More Crap, but no luck yet.

Well, we're blessed to have the current treasury. The poems, numbering well over a hundred and running the emotional gamut from pathos to bathos, would be a little much to take all at once. For that matter, no one reads all 44 Sonnets from the Portuguese all in one sitting, do they, smart guy? No, it's best just to leave the book somewhere and dip in when the spirit moves you. You will appreciate the craft involved.

Yes, sometimes you must be cruel to be kind, and sometimes you must be bad to be good. Or good to be bad. Or something.