Poets and idiots

Poets are idiots, and that's an irrevocable truth. However, poem writing, is one of the oldest hobbies around. Ever since, the first cave man learnt to write, man has been wasting billions of tonnes of paper and cutting millions of trees to write 'poems'. Who knows, this wasteful hobby could be the cause of global warming? Wait, there's more, poem writing also leads to massive wastage of time, pen, ink and brain cells. What's infinitely worse, is the fact that it wastes tonnes of my time, reading poems of a best-friend who happens to be the biggest poet around school. Can't complain against my best friend, can I?

Apart from the outrageous economic costs of poem writing, is the fact that poems have no meaning at all! Poems are written mainly by idiots, who cannot think long, think straight and make logical connections. Thus, they write down a few lines which come to their mind and put them down in any random order they feel and proclaim "look I have written a poem…
I am so cultured!"

When we poor souls who are forced to read these awful mess of diction, complain we cannot comprehend what the lines are supposed to mean, we are either branded as 'stupid,' or if we our interpretations aren't 'cultured' enough for the wannabe poets, we are called insensitive. So, because of their actions we are being branded into a caste of inferior things! Can't you see….all you non-poets out there?

What is worse about poems nowadays, is everyone and anyone who falls in love wants to become Shakespeare.

I know this guy, who wrote this poem about a calculator his 'crush' touched! Which started something like, "She touched the calculator with her golden hands…..blah…blah…blah" Pathetic, right? The outcome is thus, a fall in quality of poems, (if there ever was any quality).

Another thematic problems of a poem, is a lack of happiness in a poem. In fact, whenever you read a poem, you feel as if a Dementor is sucking life out of you. Okay, so maybe this doesn't apply to all the poems, but the wannabe poets of the modern-era, seem to thrive on this perpetual depression theme. To them, life is either never worth living, or completely meaningless or like a big black hole which creates an eternal void in their souls…or something!

Nowadays poems also have neither rhyme nor meter, nor any length. In fact all sort of grammatical rules and orders are completely disregarded. But if we ask the 'poets', "Hey this stuff doesn't rhyme?"- they reply "Modern poem…aro emotion ache…bujhba na"! This further reinforces my point, that poems nowadays are just a bunch of random lines. To prove it, I have told eight people to write a 'poetic' line or any line they want about something. I fixed them in order or at least tried to and came up with this.

My life is a complete mess,
And I am just a big, big pest
Maths physics and the ends of the earth,
I feel no pain neither sorrow,
The ideal state of life
Where eternity starts, and darkness ends
And the grass is blue and the skies are red
Oh…god please help me in SAT
Or I will end up as a complete rat
Pretty good poem, right?

In fact this incoherence in poems stretches back to even ancient times. For example I read this Shakespearean sonnet about apple trees and red lips or something. After reading this, I racked my brains…
for about 20 minutes trying to come up with some sort of an explanation. Then my teacher tells me, the poem is about the conflicts of spiritual love or something! And then there was the time, I read this poem about Mosquito- all you literature student would know about it, which seemed to be a pretty ordinary poem about well….a mosquito. It turned out that the poem was about "mans' inferiority in the modern world!" The mosquito was supposed to symbolically represent man or something! Now, I may be very stupid or crazy but come on; do poets really think all those stuff and then write down poems? I thought poems were 'supposed to come extempore from the heart or something"

Yeah, I hate poems, and my best friend is according to me my most hated poet. So, before sending this article to the RS, I gave it to him and his muttering 'apprentice' for review and comments. On the question of incoherence they replied that poets deliberately do that, to show the incoherence and meaninglessness of creation!

Okay, a disclaimer: All this isn't endorsed by RS…it will be a miracle if RS publishes this at all. But, that's the way I feel about poems…but I am not really a clever guy, so anybody wiser than me who's got a different opinion, drop a line.

By Rezwan

a BIG boy did it and ran away

Christopher Brookmyre couldn't have named it any better! A big boy did it and ran away (oh man! Just saying the name makes me laugh!) This book is a perfect combination of outrageous comedy, total adrenaline rush, excitement, suspense, violence, computer games…just name it, and this book has it. This is a must read for anybody who has an interest in, well, anything because honestly speaking, this book has it all!

The story revolves around two men, Raymond Ash and Simon Darcourt who used to be friends once upon a time. Back then they thought they would end up living the rock star lives, with platinum albums, crazy fans, and world wide fame. Things turned out very different for both of them. In his thirties, a nervous new father and an even more nervous new English teacher, Ray realizes that unlike all those computer games he plays the whole day, Real Life has no Esc key. His only solace, him being the loser that he is, lies in his virtual existence online. Simon on the other hand is living a life not far from the rock star dreams- big payments, international travel, adrenaline rush, and above all, world wide fame! Notoriety, to be more exact. For Simon, serial murder, mass slaughter and professional assassination are quite the same as the rock star life! He is one performer guaranteed to blow you away (literally speaking!).

The story begins when Ray accidentally catches a glimpse of old pal Simon in the Glasgow Airport and gets uneasy. For one thing, they hadn't really parted on good notes, and more importantly, Simon has been dead for three years. Naturally Ray assumes he's seeing things, until Real Life starts getting weirder and more violent than any computer game.

So, who's the big boy, and what did he do and why on earth did he run away?? If you want to know, then go ahead and read A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away! This book is not only funny enough to make your eyes water, you'll definitely learn a lot from it. If you believe in keeping an international level of knowledge on slangs and all sorts of other foul language, then this is the book for you! Did you know British people pronounce the most commonly used slangs of all times as shite and arse? Hmmm…I'm a true sage right now!

Since I got this book from British Council, I can't say where you can buy it, but definitely check out Words n Pages. If any bookshop in Dhaka has it, it's got to be them. If you can't find it there, you can always order it online, or, better still, get some sense and join British Council. If you buy it, it'll cost you something equivalent to 10 pounds plus shipping price. So get ready to go on a roller coaster ride with the big boy who did something and ran away!!

By Fahmina Rahman