Sept. 5th, Ugh - Poetry

First off, I don't mean to offend anybody with this post.
That said, I hate poetry. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
I DO enjoy Dr. Seuss and funny poems like the kind by Lewis Carroll and the like, but basically everything else is torture for me.
When I say that I hate poetry, I don't mean that I hate poems, necessarily, but I hate that they can be SOOO pretentious. I had a poetry unit in some of my lit classes in college, and some of my assignments were supposed to be done as a poem.
I did like the poetry units in school because they were really easy to do: the homework wasn't 200 pages of [insert literary tome here], the homework was 3 - 5 pages of poems that were usually not more than 30 lines long.
One of my assignments was to write about some life experience as a poem (this is in college, remember). I had no idea what I was doing, so I literally typed up my experience like a regular paragraph, then hit the Enter key every few words to make it look like a poem. Here's an example:

I go to work almost every day,
And normally, I enjoy it.
But as soon as a customer gets an attitude
With me or is rude to one of my co-workers,
I get super pissed. I'm pretty good
At holding my tongue,
But one of these times,
I
Just
Might
Snap.

Isn't it great?! With the Enter key, anyone can be a poet!
I just have a hard time feeling moved or touched from poetry - I think that prose can be far more effective and touching than what lots of poetry aims for.
I like poems that rhyme, which is apparently the lowest kind of low when it comes to poetry. I googled "best poetry" and found a site that had the ten best poems, and only one, by Sylvia Plath, had any sort of rhyme at all. Why is rhyming so terrible? Why is having a beat that is recognizable such a shame? I guess I like stuff that could sound like music, or be set to music, where the end of the line has a pause.

So, all of this leads me to a poem that I love, only because it is so viciously hated by basically everyone. It has literally been voted as the worst poem in the English language. I present to you an excerpt from "A Trajedy" by Theophile Marzials:

Death! 
Plop. 
The barges down in the river flop. 
Flop, plop, 
Above, beneath. 
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop… 
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop… 
And my head shrieks - “Stop”
And my heart shrieks - “Die.”…

I once read this aloud to a friend and we were both laughing so hard I could hardly finish my oration. All the flopping and plopping makes me think of a slimy black nearly-dead creature crawling towards me in hunched heaves and stuff. It's beautiful.

If you internet people are aghast at my snobbery/low-brow-ness when it comes to poetry, feel free to comment below if you think there's a poem I might like. I'll try my best not to hate it, but I'm not making any promises. Bring it on!