Bad Poetry?

Awesome discussion. I'm going to admit i didn't read half the comments on here, no offense to anyone, so if i cover anything someone else already covered blame my ADD.

But i must say there is bad poetry. There is exemplary, good, mediocre, amatuer and then there is just plain bad. My definition of bad is thus: it is the writer's inability to be better and to want to be better. We all start out at the bottom. Most of us here are amatuers (i.e. unpublished and not famous). There are different degrees of amatuers as well: exemplary, good and mediocre. Most of that is subjective to the reader, but at least most of us poets try to write good poetry.

On Pathetic i saw a lot of bad poetry. Not just one poem from person, but many poems from one person. I wrote said person a comment saying everything that was bad with one particular poem (which was, suffice it to say, everything). I was harsh, but i was concise, and i stated that i hoped the author would be open to discussion and to try harder (perhaps i maybe was too harsh). I got a message from that person asking why i was so mean and why i was a big meanie poopie head and to go jump in a lake. Not verbatim, but you get my drift.

That is when i realized that there is poetry and then there is bad poetry.

If you write, "I love you like the sun and the moon and the sky and the flowers and teddy bears because they make me warm and fuzzy inside just like you!" and call it honest-to-goodness Shakespeare grade A+ poetry, you have just written a bad poem. It is not a different type of poetry. It is bad; it is your inability to see that it is bad poetry, that makes everything you write bad. Lacking elements that make up good poetry in your poems doesn't mean it is bad, but lacking elements that make up good petry and the inability to strive for perfection is what makes bad poetry, bad poetry.