Love it or hate it – it is what it is by T.M. Wright
Hey, some of us actually like Rod McKuen, Barbara Cartland, Kahlil Gibran, L. Ron Hubbard, John Updike, Erika Jong, Truman Capote, John Saul, Esto Banga. An interesting selection, you say? Sure it is. It’s reflective of several areas of literary taste—from the sublime to the unforgivable. Take your pick on who on the list is sublime and who’s unforgivable.
But hey, you say, we all know bad literature when we read it. Of course we do. Bad literature is literature that doesn’t appeal to us, that makes us cringe, tremble and guffaw. Bad literature is what slush piles are made of, what L. Bulwer-Lytton wrote (“It was a dark and stormy night”), and Snoopy, too. Bad literature simply doesn’t communicate what it wants to communicate. Bad literature dances naked and unashamed around the edges of good literature.
Is this good literature?
Whose woods are these? I think I know. His house is in the village, though. He will not see me stopping here, To watch his woods fill up with snow.
If you love rhyme, it’s good. If you’re a diehard free or blank verser, maybe you make a face when you read it. “Rhyme is such a crutch,” you might say. For you, it’s bad because it uses a crutch. It rhymes.
Okay, you sigh, shake your head– everyone knows bad literature when they read it. There’s nothing subjective about it. And sure, bad literature can find an audience. So can cigarettes, cheap wine, and sugar syrup (as opposed to real maple). But, hey, there are plenty of folks who prefer that cheap wine to the 50-dollar-a-bottle stuff, and you can’t get a kid to put real maple syrup on his pancakes when the fake stuff is available.
What’s my point? Simply this: taste is subjective. Even though someone may KNOW that Mickey Spillane or Rod McKuen are…uh…not to someone else’s tastes, it doesn’t matter. Spillane and McKuen and Cartland and Bulwer-Lytton and Banga may speak to him just fine, thank you. In fact, they may speak to him as well, though in different ways, as Frost, or Kinnell, Oates and Updike.
