This will be the thread for all things bad poetry. Write your in here, link to bad poems you find online, etc. etc. etc. Here is my favorite "bad" poem by Harold Pinter. It gets a nice reaction at readings.
Were it the twinkling red breast of Lucifer hisself, That designed this suffering; it would offend the Lord sufficiently, And cosmic games for the soul of man, would be then discontinued, Only could this naked pain have come as a prayer by the righteous man, What silver saint, What glossy sinless ape, Carried across like a beacon of black and shattered hope That befouled exhortation of your holy heart O’Lord? Too many times do harlots lie with family men, Too many times were hollow stomachs kicked and not fed? Ears deaf to wailing innocents across black gulfs of time Eyes not blind, simply immune to being beseeched by those of filthy orphans Crawling, forever crawling over our walls to fall and bleed. This is the most poorly run International House of Pancakes, That I have ever been to.
I'm not sure if it counts if it's deliberately terrible, but since it didn't rhyme in the first place, here's a poem a domestic standupper made up to show all he hated in ordinary poetry. Grey sails the moon Heavy is the mud that is me I bellow I cry And Mother smiles although she is dead But the smile is rotten And my scream is all Hilariously my brother did a dramatic reading of that to a substitute teacher when he was 13 who thought he had to be an amazingly gifted child... So... mission accomplished, I guess?
Allow me to introduce to you the best bad poet in the English language, William Topaz McGonagall. He was to poetry what Birdemic is to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He had an almost preternatural ability to eschew the quotidian elements of poetry - rhyme schemes, meter, rhythm - in order to follow his own horrible, horrible muse. He specialized in disaster poems, and when he performed audiences would literally throw rotten fish at him. That site I linked above is awesome, and a fitting tribute to a man of nearly no talent whatsoever. Here's a taste of today's Gem Of The Day, titled "The Burning Of The Steamer 'The City Of Montreal'."
As an unintentional author of bad poetry (I know enough now to have stopped writing ) I heartily endorse this thread and all its awfulness.
That rules. My favorite part is this: The bolded words make no sense at all, and were clearly included to fit rhyme and meter, already a real stretch. Except that there isn't any consistent rhyme or meter in this thing. Pretty funny even if it's a put-on, as I suspect it is.
Subtle mountaintops testify in my favor, Like so many crystals stolen from the air, By gravity and her unrelenting and lewd demands. Tomorrow, After my shift at Steak n’ Shake turns her final gear, I am coming to your house on my bike, And I am going to beat the shit out of you and your dad. Hours of Innocence, days spent laughing through spring fields, Gifts of mystery and the naïve belief the sun made us strong, These things are over, As of four thirty central time tomorrow, Because that is when I am coming to your house on my bike, And I am going whip you fucking senseless with this chain I have in my backpack A secret highway for you and I, Slicing through the forest and seducing us with stink and visions of the unknown, We made the path our prize and as the day’s green melted to a deceitful blue-black. Like a director gives an actor his motivation, Like a winter bride, you instructed me to save the date, To come to your house on older brother’s Schwinn Predator bicycle, Where you erased my pride I will erase your face. Spend your hours adoring beasts, Make a whore of your grip which serves you drink enough to sleep, It shall not last, for as the sun must rise, so it is for damned souls. Let neither thirst nor hunger trouble your day, For tomorrow holds enough perils of its own. Like a dream that is neither here nor there, Be standing outside with my copy of Star Tropics 2, If you do not want to die. I am coming to your house on my bike tomorrow, Your dad has polio and I know I can take him.
If it's a put-on, it would count as one of the most elaborate and long-running hoaxes in history. I first heard about him through old Spike Milligan records - he made a thinly-veiled fictionalized movie about McGonagall back in the 70s - and in 2008 there was an auction of some of McGonagall's broadsheet poems.
Here's my submission, scanned in from the original typewritten page. I wrote this as part of a creative writing class I took in 1989 but this particular piece was never officially submitted. Because it is awful. The room it was written in is now a computer lab. Back then it was filled with typewriters and was soundproofed because it adjoined the library. When assignments were close to due and the room was fully occupied entering it was like opening a door to gunfire.
I don't mean that he's not a real guy, just that he was bad on purpose. That's what I take away from the idea of him performing his awful poetry live and getting fish thrown at him. IIRC there was a famously awful opera singer performing around the same time whose shtick was to show up and get booed, so maybe that was just something people liked to do in those days.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your meaning. I sort of love the idea of him being a turn-of-the-century Andy Kaufman.
I like the way that was written on a typewriter but uses some kind of software versioning. Also, I do kind of legitimately like "The End and I ain't kidding."
This is just my favorite poem. In college I had a couple aspiring poet friends. They would bring their copies of poems that were being workshopped in class and we would recite the awful ones every night. It wasn't very nice but I wish I had some of the copies still.
So true. If I have any advice to students in creative writing classes in high school or college now, it is this: never throw away the copies of the truly godawful poems, the sort that everyone in the class sits flummoxed trying to think of anything at all nice to say about.
