i have stopped by woods on a snowy evening.
it’s a sublime slanting sun, and,
camera in hand,
i come upon the hoped-for scene.

the reaching trees, silhouettes of bareness.
the furnace of the sun,
a smudge of burnt orange behind the ridge,
imparts the hue, the twilight blue
to the mile long shadows
these striations in the crunchy glitter.

i click and click with frantic abandon,
not wanting to lose this singular zenith of beauty.
how many shots? a hundred? a thousand?
i will take them home
enhance them, adobe them, candy coat them
until they look, they look…
like those coffee table books that no one reads.

so, i turn to go, my anticipation tempered now.
i look back once more, in regret.
the deep blue shadows slowly lengthen
as the sun pours dark red lava down the hillside.

i stop. upon a stump i sit.
there is…

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys some good bad poetry courtesy of The Joy of Bad Verse

I’ve long been a fan of Nicholas Parsons. No, not that one – although who could fail to appreciate the sharp wit of the Just a Minute host? – but Nicholas T. Parsons, the author of one of the best books of literary trivia out there (The Book of Literary Lists), an enjoyable history of the guidebook (Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook), and what I’d consider his Magnificent Octopus, The Joy of Bad Verse. This book was published in 1988, so you can consider this ‘review’ a sort of 30-year retrospective. It’s well worth tracking down.

Parsons’ The Joy of Bad Verse is a scholarly and readable study of the history of ‘bad verse’ down the age. What…