Tonight: "Alice in the Wasteland"

Have you ever read “The Wasteland,” and thought, this poem would be a lot better if T.S. Eliot had put in a crazy rabbit and a caterpillar smoking hookah?

Look no farther than poet Ann Lauterbach’s “Alice in the Wasteland.” That’s right, Lewis Carroll’s little blonde heroine wanders into Modernist verse.

Lauterbach will be lecturing tonight at 6 p.m. in the Thompson Room of the Barker Center. Preview her verse—and analysis of what makes bad poetry bad— after the jump.

From a Boston Review essay:

Bad poetry, I would submit, asks questions, raises issues, makes complaints, marks territories. Bad poetry does not take on the more difficult task, where the question and its answer are as one… Or put it this way: the poem is an answer to a question or questions no one, including the poet, had thought to ask.

Hum

The days are beautiful

The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.

The other is weather.

I know what weather is.

The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.

Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.

The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?

Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

Today is weather.

The sound of the weather

Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.

Everyone weeps.

The tears of today

Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.

The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.

The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.

The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.

The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.

The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?

The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.

The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.

What are these ashes?

Here is the hate

That does not travel.

Here is the robe

That smells of the night

Here are the words

Retired to their books

Here are the stones

Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge

Over the water

Here is the place

Where the sun came up

Here is a season

Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.

The days are beautiful.

Source: The Academy of American Poets