Emily Dickinson on Yelp?

Robert:

Novelist and journalist Neal Pollack has put together some tweets on how great poets might sound on crowd-sourced review site Yelp.
 
My favorite:
 

"Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. He charged me $70. I'll definitely use him again."--Emily Dickinson on Yelp.

I revere Emily's work, and that is from a lovely poem. But that tweet cracks me up. I suppose I have an odd sense of humor.

Another:

 "Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. Not worth the $." --Shelley on Yelp.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819

That's from another great, classic poem that almost everyone read in high school or college; Ozymandias.


Another:

  "I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox; I was starving and the room service here sucks." -- William Carlos Williams on Yelp

William Carlos Williams Passport photo, 1921

I'm opinionated about everything it seems. I know this "poem," and for me, it is not poetry. It was intended to be a starkly modern sliver of unadorned life. Nothing wrong with that. But it does not, for me, function on any other level, or have any subtle counterpoint. It pretends to evoke sublime substance through a starkly banal style.  Hemingway could do just that, even in extended prose. His plain and direct prose has a hypnotically lovely undertone and rhythm that is deeply poetic and evocative almost beyond comprehension. For me, that's what Carlos Williams was trying for, but fails to achieve, even in a short poem. So there.

If you disagree, feel free to tell me I'm an idiot and why. It's probably nothing I haven't heard before.