As seen on the Royal Canterlot Library · 11:41pm Jul 12th, 2014
Many years ago, two poets named James McAuley and Harold Stewart set out to embarrass the world of modernist poetry. They felt that, while early modernist poetry had been a wonderful thing, it had later become hopelessly self-indulgent, with many modernist poems being nothing more than an incoherent mess. So, like many people in subsequent years, they decided to highlight the ridiculousness of modernist poetry - and a single publication of modernist poetry in particular, Angry Penguins - by creating a fake modernist poet named Ern Malley, a 25-year old Australian who had "died" the previous year, and whose "sister" (in fact, McAuley and Stewart themselves) sent in "his" poems to Angry Penguins.
Naturally, these poems had been conceived by the pair specifically to highlight the ridiculousness of modernist poetry - they had flipped through various books and dictionaries to find words, supposedly at random, and used Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary to create intentionally awkward rhymes. They even sampled from their own poems and pulled out lines to use in their new collection of poetry. And to sell the whole thing, the first poem in the collection was an actual, serious attempt at poetry by McAuley.
Of course, the fact that I'm telling you this story means that it worked - the magazine ate it up and published a special edition devoted soley to the works of this hithero-unknown poet. The editor of the magazine was publicly humiliated and there was a rather large backlash against them, which, sadly, was not enough to actually kill off the modernist poetry movement, which in later years eventually actually embraced many of the "Ern Malley" poems on the grounds that they were genuinely good and in attempting to write drivel they accidentally wrote some poems which were actually good, by letting go of their preconceptions of what good poetry should be like.
As a final irony, according to Wikipedia, their "Ern Malley" poems are much more widely read than the serious works of either of his creators.
So what does that have to do with me?
The Collected Poems of Maud Pie was something I wrote on a lark. I have very little respect for modernist poetry, considering much of it, like McAuley and Stewart, to be self-indulgent nonsense. Unlike them, however, who were writing in order to embarrass others, I wrote to entertain - I felt that Maud Pie's take on modernist poetry was the perfect use of the schema of modernist poetry. It highlighted the ridiculousness of it, and it made it work. And so I decided that I, too, would try my hand at writing modernist rock poetry, having barely ever written poetry, and the vast majority of that being school assignments back in high school. But it couldn't just be funny poems about rocks - it had to be more than that, had to play a game with the reader, had to do something interesting. After all, while a couple modernist poems about rocks would be funny, twenty in a row wouldn't be. I wanted to bring a smile to people's faces, and, perhaps, to make them think a little bit more about Maud Pie, all via the medium of modernist (or should that be Maudernist?) poems about rocks.
It turned out to be one of my most popular works, and now, it has earned me an interview with the Royal Canterlot Library. And unlike McAuley and Stewart, I'm glad - I'm glad that what I produced was enjoyed by people, and I hope that if any of you haven't read it yet and do so as a result of this blog post, that you find it an enjoyable read and get a laugh out of it.
If any of you are at all interested in reading the interview I did for them, it is up on their website now, though it won't actually appear on this one until they've caught up.
I think you fell victim to a similar consequence as those two poets. I went in thinking it was going to be a bunch of "joke poems," then I start reading them and... wow... I think I was close to crying after a while...
In my opinion, though, I don't think "Farming Rocks" is the "turning point" in the series, as opposed to what the curators seem to think. The poems all collectively build up a mood that's both beautiful and insanely depressing, but if I had to pick out the "best", then I'd say the most expressive ones are the shorter and more subtle ones. "Farming Rocks" is fairly blatant in comparison, though still decent...
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Farming Rocks is, as I noted in the interview, intentionally blatant - I actually went back and revised it after I wrote it to make it even more blatant.
As far as making you come close to crying... well, you're not the only one who found some of the poems to be sad; a couple people even commented on the collection that it should have the sad tag. I try not to comment too much publicly on what the poems actually mean, if anything, because part of the beauty of poetry is such exploration, and also because part of the point of the collection is the readers figuring out whether the poems actually have some deeper meaning to them. I also believe in the Death of the Author to some extent, in that a work should stand on its own and be interpreted on its own, apart from authorial intent.
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I didn't say any of it was sad, or at least not "sad" in the usual sense of the word (i.e tearjerker). As I mentioned in that comment I left on the story itself, I happened to be listening to an Offertory chant while I was reading it, and I guess the music managed to combine with the contents of the poems and my mood at the time and... I don't know...
The point is: I came to the conclusion that Maud's poems, as silly as they may have sounded at first, express how insignificant a mortal life is when compared to something as eternal as the rocks she is writing about. Though they may crumble over time, they still exist relatively unscathed for countless centuries, where our own lives are akin to a fraction of an instant from their perspective.
The thought of all that got to me a little, I suppose. That's all...
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Also, they have rocks.
static.tumblr.com/0ffb0249dcb3640e9a182e87498d7305/eizwe4l/650n6i7wg/tumblr_static_s2nfjomb1e8c4cc8os4g8cc8.gif
They couldn't have picked a better rock poet
My own 'on a lark' story is also one my most popular
Success, even by accident, is still success in my book!
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I think there's a difference between accidental and unexpected success. Accidental success suggests that the thing succeeded through not its own merits, but the vagaries of chance, whereas unexpected success is something which succeeded by its own merits but which was not expected to do so.
I'd like to think this falls into the latter category.
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I had a look at that essay you referenced. From that perspective, I suppose it makes sense not to add additional tags. The only thing worse than the readers putting limits on the meaning of a text is if the authors themselves do it (I have a story here that has no tags whatsoever...
)
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Agreed; poor choice of words on my part.
This is the reason:
Why your collection is just about my favorite thing on FimFiction. In the show, they went for the easy joke with Maud's poetry. You went for the hard joke with it and pulled the whole thing off quite well.
Mike