It was a gloomy, dreary day in the marshes of South Carolina where my uncle and I were living on a 42-foot-long boat. I was bored beyond compare, telling my uncle I couldn't think of a thing to do. The water was too muddy to jump in. The shore was too marshy to row the dinghy ashore. So my uncle looked at me and said, 'There's always something to do. Why don't you write a poem?' Write a poem. Right. That's what I used to do as a teenager, and I was always considered strange to prefer this hobby over learning an instrument, watching TV, calling a friend, or doing one of the many other activities that normal kids do on rainy days. It's strange that most people don't write poems, or if they do it's strange that they don't share them. It's not true that there's no such thing as bad poetry. There surely is such a thing. The truth is I should not be afraid to write a bad poem. Maybe that's why people think there's no use in writing any poem at all, because they figure whatever they write is bound to be abysmally horrible and everyone will just laugh at them. Well, consider Rambling Spirit's website to be the place where writers aren't afraid of being laughed at. Give us your bad poetry. We're all about bad poetry. That would be a good name for a blog or a band, in fact, if it isn't taken already: Bad Poetry. The truth is we're so far from having a vibrant culture in our society that we don't even see a place for most of the fine arts, so we leave them completely alone and don't even bother being bad at them. To me, bad art is just as important as good art as long as the artist sees where it can be better; because every artist must start somewhere, and the very qualities that make an artist's style bad may one day mature into the best, most unique qualities of that artist's work. So bad art is just fine in its own way. When we think fine arts we think of the posh, stuck up high class, upper echelon type. Perhaps that's true too in some ways, but if it means that I'll be labeled as such I still don't mind giving the arts their place.
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