I just recently posted a new book review at World Class Poetry. As you’ll see, I have a mixed reaction to Bradley Lastname’s brand of Dada verse. Some of it is quite good, actually, for word play. And if you know anything about me, I like word play almost as much as I like foreplay. But if you are prone to puns then you have to really knock my socks off or I’ll mohel ya.

Bradley Lastname does make me laugh at times. And it’s not all just puns. But one thing that I find really irksome in poets is laziness. There is no excuse for it. Kurt Vonnegut said writers should spend the time of a stranger in such a way that he doesn’t feel the time is wasted. That’s good advice even if the amount of time your reader will spend is a few seconds.

While I found a few bad poems in Bradley Lastname’s Bela Tarr Has Feathered His Nest, the most bothersome thing to me was (and I didn’t mention this in my book review) a poem that followed the same pattern, and even in places were word for word, as a previous poem. Granted, there was likely a point. Lastname often does unconventional things in his poems for no apparent reason – like write seemingly realistic recipes as poems with oddball titles (and I really like his titles). But what I don’t like is to read two poems that look and sound just alike. The following two excerpts will give you an idea of what I mean:

The Museum In A Tree

You are about to be a recipient of information they hide in things called books. The information concerns the museum in a tube.

Those are the first two lines of the poem, and I’ve got to be honest and say that I enjoyed the poem upon first reading. The idea of a museum being open just one minute a day – from 4:20 p.m. to 4:21 p.m. – was quirky and the poem was a fun little twist as poems go. But he ruined it for me when later in the book I read “The Postmortem Audio Library”, which starts like this:

You are about to be the recipient of information that is hidden in things called books. The information pertains to the postmortem audio library.

The poem follows the exact same template as the first poem about the museum in a tube, which I liked better than the audio library poem. The length, stanza breaks, prose style, and verbiage throughout the poem was almost identical except for the references to the audio library and its contents. The library is even open from 4:20 to 4:21 every day, just like the museum in a tube. I hated it. To me, it was an act of laziness. Instead of writing a completely different poem, the poet decided to just copy and paste his new creation onto a different page and change a few words to make it a different poem. Was there a reason for that beyond the mere act of laziness? Is it a metaphor itself for the slothfulness and easy-come-easy-go nature of our McDonald’s drive-thru mentality? Perhaps. I found it annoying nonetheless.