There are a few outstanding examples of this genre, among them Janis Ian's At Seventeen, although she wrote it about her life from ages about 12 to 14.
I know about teen angst poems because I wrote a few dozen. The subject could be social interaction or familial dysfunction or zits or shyness or clumsiness or ... but the most abysmal of these poems must surely deal with love. Here is how I see it: there are four types of teen angst love poems, and two concepts comprise every one:
| I love you | |||
| I am sad | |||
| You don't know me | The world keeps us apart | You don't love me | |
| yet/ever. | anymore. | ||
We've put a lot of angst into our poems, but the time comes to decide whether any should be preserved. If one doesn't throw any away, one's descendants will have to, or maybe they'll just be dumpstered. So I've come up with some
Good Reasons to destroy any teen-angst poetry that:All bets are off if humour is at play. Humour is not part of teen angst poetry, though it is part of parody. Here's something I just whipped up:
You were my belleUsing the Good Reasons above, I'm not left with much poetry to preserve. Maybe I'll salt it away in a disk file somewhere. But for parody value, hmmm, lots of potential!
There's more to come. I do have a 9-page poem, written at about the right time (well, maybe I was 20), and it hits most of the Good Reasons. It would be a pretty good parody. But there are parts of it I like. It's--dare I?--even poetic in some reaches. So do I publish it as is, a parody, or try to rework it into a good poem, over three decades later? And the more general question, that you can write words and actions that you could or would not speak or do, in life. No, that should not stop anybody, but when the conduit is teen angst poetry??
URL: This web page is: http://members.shaw.ca/berry5868/tangst.htm Last modified February 8, 2010