Bad High School Poetry is my favorite phrase for describing the junk the creative kids in high school came up with when either forced, or on their own. BHSP is actually better than what the majority of high school students can come up with. It's just that the majority of high school students don't go around trying to actually show it to other people or node it. It usually has a goth flair to it:

Alone
the blood drips
from his arm
darkness
who am I?

etc., etc. I guess the correct word is simply pretentious. Now, what's really annoying is that I can't write anything better than Bad High School Poetry. It seems so easy when you read an Emily Dickinson or e.e. cummings poem or even a Cure song. I should be able to do that, you think. But nope, whatever you write simply falls short. In some Dostoyevsky novel he describes a class of people who have the ability to know what good writing is and be moved by it, but can neither describe why, completely understand it and, most importantly, write it themselves. That's the class of people purveyors of Bad High School Poetry are.


Heh, thanks to whoever linked Bad Teenage Poetry below. There's a writeup there with a good example of what I'm talking about.

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