The Spearhead on Lady Lit, Part 2: Poetry Slam!

The fellows at The Spearhead are still talking about lady literature — by which I mean, why ladies totally can’t write for shit. This time, they’re taking on the lady poets.

Contrasting a poem by former US poet laureate Kay Ryan with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, The Spearhead’s W.F. Price proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that men are the best poets. And then Price takes it one step further, contrasting a video of Kay Ryan’s reading of another of her poems with Dylan Thomas’ passionate (if slightly overripe) reading of his “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.”

While I can’t take issue with Price’s methodology here – comparing a couple of random poems by a female poet most people have never heard of (but who apparently represents all female poets ever)  with legendary poems by two of the world’s most famous poets – I wonder about his choice of male poets here.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Dylan Thomas? Sure, they wrote some awesome dude poems, for their time. But they’re long dead, Daddy-O, and we men of today demand poetry that speaks to our lives. Who better speaks to men today than the tag-team of Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J from the Insane Clown Posse? And which of their poems speaks to men today better than their most famous work, “Miracles?”

Here are some selections from this fine piece of work — and because, by Price’s rules, any poem by a person of a particular gender obviously represents all poetry from people of that gender, this wonderful little poem represents all male poetry. (Not to mention all poetry written by insane clowns.)

We don’t have to be high to look in the sky

And know that’s a miracle opened wide

Look at the mountains, trees, the seven seas

And everything chilling underwater, please …

Pure magic is the birth of my kids

I’ve seen shit that’ll shock your eyelids

The sun and the moon, and even Mars

The Milky Way and fucking shooting stars

UFOs, a river flows

Plant a little seed and nature grows

Niagara falls and the pyramids

Everything you believed in as kids

Fucking rainbows after it rains

There’s enough miracles here to blow your brains

I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco bay

It tried to eat my cell phone, he ran away

And then, in this poem’s most famous lines, Shaggy 2 Dope (or perhaps Violent J, I can’t remember which is which), takes on the miracle of magnetism:

I see miracles all around me

Stop and look around, it’s all astounding

Water, fire, air and dirt

Fucking magnets, how do they work?

And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist

Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed

But as wonderfully as these lines read on the printed page, it is Insane Clown Posse’s performance of this poem (which they have set to music) that really brings home how motherfuckingly miraculous these two poets, and by extension all men who have ever written poetry, really are. So here is that performance:

As yet another great male poet, MC Hammer, once put it: “You can’t touch this!”

But, just to be fair, here’s some chick reading her dumb poem:

Picture of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Jason Towers, from here.