The Poet Laureate of Reddit meets the Artist Laureate

I hate bad poetry.

It makes me almost physically twitchy to have to read or listen to doggerel. The worst crime is when the poet pays no attention to rhythm or natural sentence structure, and does whatever is needed to force every two lines to match. You see this kind of thing on birthday cards, and you hear it at weddings, funerals and company events.

I don't mind blank verse when it's done well, with one of my key requirements being that if you just take out all the linebreaks, something of value has to have been lost, otherwise it's just pretentious formatting. I have a particular liking for well-done structured poetry, though.

The last place you'd expect to see good poetry is on reddit. Reddit is a discussion site where people vote each other's content up and down: content that tickles the "hive-mind" is given more exposure. It's essentially a rather ephemeral, and not particularly literary environment, but significantly better than most web-forums, because the worst stupidity gets filtered out.

There are certain Reddit users who are on a mission, however. Called "novelty accounts", most are stupid, and some are useful. One of Reddit's favourite novelty accounts is the user who goes by the name "Shitty_Watercolour". This user illustrates other Reddit users' comments whenever the whim strikes. Over the years the watercolours have become significantly less shitty, though. Reddit users consider being the subject of a "shitty watercolour" to be one of the highest honours available on the site. Another redditor with a mission is the topic of this article: Poem_for_your_sprog.

Poem for your sprog is actually a really good wordsmith. In response to a simple or profound comment sprog will produce an expertly crafted poem. Sometimes long, sometimes short. Sometimes coarse, sometimes decent. Almost always witty and brilliant, but sometimes just, well, good.  Here are two samples:

I sometimes think I see his face -
The man without a voice.
The man who walks another place,
Divided by a choice.

Perhaps he never made the same
Mistakes across the years -
He never felt an addict's shame
In broken pride and tears.

Perhaps he wed the perfect wife,
And sailed across the sea.
Perhaps he led a better life.
Who cares?

He isn't me.

That's better than most of the poetry I studied at school, and in fact it would not be out of place as assigned reading in a school classroom. This one probably would be, though:

I still recall our perfect start -
That single, precious line.
The moment that I had your heart,
And you, my dear, had mine.

You cupped my cheek and turned my head -
You whispered, 'darling, look.'
You leant in close and softly said...
'ey bb wan sum fuk?'

I try to limit my Reddit usage: I got badly addicted a while back, and have since deleted my account, so that I can only read, and not upvote, downvote or comment. This helps somewhat, but I still read now and again, and every time I see one of these poems, it brings a smile to my face.

Today I became aware that Shitty Watercolour illustrated the same comment that sprog had morphed into verse. The comment in question was this one:

Poverty stricken Uni student, at a supermarket, opened my handbag to pay at the register and a huge fucking moth flew out.

I swear the wing span on that bastard made a "thwock" "thwock" sound as it flew off

Not deeply profound, but it inspired this watercolour:

and this poem:

'Good day!' said I, as pleased as pie,
With overjoyed contented sigh -
'Oh what a shop! Oh what a store!
You've everything I need and more!

You've knicks and knacks and tricks and toys,
And souvenirs for girls and boys,
With gifts and games and trinkets too!
Just look! I filled my basket through!'

The shop-keep sighed: 'Whatever. Fine.
It's yours for $19.99.'
'I see,' said I, and shook my head...
'But all I've got is moths,' I said.

Not actually sprog's best poem, but still way above the normal level of web discourse. The main thing here was that two artists had met. Was it for the first time? I'm not sure - I haven't really investigated deeply enough, but I did find this in Shitty Watercolour's history:

In case that's too small to read, the poem is:

'Hey Mother Nature - what's the deal?
You know, it seems with every meal
I take a bite, then take a breath -
And always almost choke to death!'

Between the fallen leaves from trees
That spun upon a summer's breeze,
Her answer came - a sigh instead.
'Just try to fucking chew,' she said.

I think it's cool, well-written and funny, and yet written in an almost classical style. And the illustration is perfect.

In summary, those two should make a book.

I forgot to mention that Poem for your sprog has now started putting non-Reddit poems onto a blog: http://poemforyoursprog.wordpress.com/author/poemforyoursprog/