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      Category : Bad Poetry

      • May 14, 2013

        All Bad Things Must Come to an End…

        by

        Now that I’ve hit the speed limit (55), eaten my cake, and generally had a riotous time with friends celebrating my birthday, it’s time we wrap up our annual Bad Poetry Contest and get down to the very difficult business of choosing one member for our Hall of Shame.

        Our annual contest always gives us great lines, such as Travis Campbell’s, “You can’t roll with the punches with a busted wheel under the office chair of your soul,” or famed crime writer Steve Jackson’s “…like the water in the toilet swirling down into lead-piped emptiness carrying with me the byproducts of my broken life…”  It’s exactly that sort of depth and insight that marks this contest. The judges also liked the work of Michele Simmons’ Sibling Rivalry, roller derby star Kathleen Christian’s A Worm, and Rachel Niehaus’ fabulous Untitled #3, as well as Andrew Winch’s A Cacophony of Discordant Sounds Shining Dissonantly: 

        The shining moon shines on my heart,
        With shining rays of anguish.
        She doesn’t know the hidden art,
        Which breathes my cries of languish.

        The mausoleum wastes away,
        With crumbling greys and greens.
        The crickets scream and cry and bray
        Which ‘wakens timeless fiends.

        Curs-ed wolves howl at the moon,
        Making damsels faint and gasp and swoon,
        And I, I… howl with them.

        We hope YOU are howling, since those are just the honorable mentions. In fact, one of the best entries wasn’t even a poem — the actual poem sucked, but the intro was fabulous:

        My poem has a deepness that many won’t be able to apreciate. The skeptics shall veiw it as total nonsence, and shall condenscendingly turn up their noses, inflated with their own facitiosness. But the open-minded, the inspired, the beautiful, the wise, the creative, the good – they shall find infinate layers of meaning, which they will peel away like a banana which has multiple peels, one on another (so that when

        Continue Reading "All Bad Things Must Come to an End…"

      • May 10, 2013

        You must hurry if you want to be Bad!

        by

        Our 7th Annual Bad Poetry Contest ends tomorrow, on my birthday. The winner will be chosen by an experienced panel of judges (probably me and my best friend Mike, after consuming a couple birthday margaritas, just to make sure our poetic skills are razor sharp), and we’re still looking for the one knock-it-out-of-the-park putrid poem. So don’t wait — start yakking those deep thoughts now.

        The Grand Prize Winner of this year’s Bad Poetry Contest will receive a copy of the text that has been called “The Worst Self-Published Book of All Time.” The title is How to Good-bye Depression: If you constrict anus 100 times everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?  by Hiroyki Nishigaki. (If you don’t believe me, check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/d588msb

        You may not be completely familiar with Mr. Nishigaki’s book, but he starts off with a bang by offering this tip: “Take advantage of this at your peril.” Much of the book consists of random emails he has apparently sent to friends, but he does offer such sound advice as “Erase your bad stickiness” and “stare, shoot out immaterial fiber, ucceed in concentrating, behave with abandon-largess-humor and beckon the spirit.” I’ve been erasing my own bad stickiness through this very method (though Holly has refused to clean up when I shoot out my immaterial fiber at the office). No, I really don’t have any idea what the book is about (other than, you know, constricting your anus 100 times every day), but as a writer I find I can pretty much open it up to any page, read it aloud, and start to laugh. It’s THAT bad.

        I know the excitement that comes with a fabulous, potentially life-changing book like this. So the winner of our Bad Poetry contest DESERVES this book. It’s even autographed. (Not by the author. By the person who gave me a copy. But still… it’s autographed.) So smack that muse; wake

        Continue Reading "You must hurry if you want to be Bad!"

      • May 9, 2013

        Thursdays with Amanda: Bad Poetry Contest

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        Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon andBarnes & Noble.

        Emily Dickinson once said “To write good, you have to learn to write bad.”

        Okay, so she didn’t say that. She probably never even thought it. But, what I HAVE heard respected authors say is something to the effect of “First you must learn the rules so that then you know how to break them.”

        Deep stuff, eh?

        This week on the blog, we’re all about breaking the rules. We’re running our annual Bad Poetry Contest, so if you haven’t already, get out your pen and paper, rouse up that teenage angst that still lurks behind your Toyota Corolla, nine-to-five, everything’s-perfect facade, and start writing.

        Badly.

        To get the juices flowing, here’s a bad limerick I wrote in high school:

        There once was a servant named Jasper,

        Who wanted to marry his master.

        So he grabbed her and fled to the church to be wed

        And was painfully forced to first ask her.

         

        Your turn. Submit your entries here.

        Continue Reading "Thursdays with Amanda: Bad Poetry Contest"

      • May 6, 2013

        The Badness Continues… Bad Poetry Continues at the Blog

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        Yes, it’s Bad Poetry week, here at the blog, where we take my birthday week and enjoy sharing with one another the worst poems we can create. If you’re a sensitive, deep, and misunderstood soul, then we WANT your crappy poem gracing the blog! All you need to do is go to the “comments” section and type in your  words. Share your deepfulness and reflectiveosity with others. The badder the better. Have a look at some of the rotten stuff that was written in the previous day’s blog, just to get a feel for the mood. For example…

        Tom Threadgill gets us going with this truly terrible  opener:

        “Knock,” he said to no one.
        Since he was alone in the room, so alone.

        (Unless you count the other people in the room, which he
        didn’t. Sometimes he did, but not this time.)

        Deep. Meaningful. Bad. And crime writer Steve Jackson shares this:

        I was there
        Then I wasn’t
        like the water in the toilet
        swirling down into lead-piped emptiness
        carrying with me the byproducts
        of my broken life…

        So… dare I say it? Truly crappy, Steve! I’m sure everyone will like the fabulously bad images Neal Worle shares with these wretched words,

        My love for you fills me,
        a flooded basement.
        I must not drown,
        I bail out my heart.
        This poem I write,
        a sump pump of love.

         

        And we are immediately thrown into both brightness and badness! Becca Jackson takes a thoughtful tone with:

        I was walking on the streets
        bare and rusty, like someone’s
        half-drank bottle of underwear

        Who can resist an image like that?  Then Gwen Faulkenberry gets her Bard on with:
        But sweet Rose protested muchly:
        ”Am I a play thing?
        Have you no conscience? 
        I say, Who died and made you king?
        There’s LOTS more, just as bad as these, and we need to hear from YOU. So don’t delay. The Bad Poetry
        Continue Reading "The Badness Continues… Bad Poetry Continues at the Blog"

      • May 4, 2013

        Come join our 7th Annual Bad Poetry Contest

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        Okay, the time has come… My birthday is coming up soon, and that means it’s time for our Annual Bad Poetry Contest! Yes, try not to wet your pants in excitement as you think about coming up with some deep and meaningful tripe. For those of you not in the know, there is a longstanding tradition with British novelists for turning out truly bad poetry, and the cool kids in publishing take a few minutes each year to participate in my annual contest. (Don’t be left out.) So this is your chance to create something truly bad and get away with it. I want you to send it in — your rotten rhymes, your horrible haiku, your crappy couplets. This isn’t just a chance for you to churn out some doggerel that will make others nod politely while thinking, “geez — was he drinking heavily when he wrote this?” No, this is your chance to give us something truly awful — a piece of crud that make others run screaming from the room. A bit o’ deep thinking that will show the world just how deep and sensitive you really aren’t. A chance to create a poem that will stick like a stone in the kidney of your mind.

        We do this every year, and if you go to the categories (over there –>) you can check out all the bad poetry others have sent in over the years. They include bad imagery, faux depth, and LOTS of terrible word choices. Just consider some sample bad poems…

        The bad opening lines from Ben Erlichman’s A Fruit Soliloquy:

        Alas, the moose, she has taken my bananas

        And I can hear the sound of the wailing wind no longer.

        The bad comparisons, such as this from Damian Farnworth: “I’m spicy like taco meat”

        The bad imagery, including Kay Day’s thoughtful, “Someday I will once again walk in the brightness

        of happiness
        I
        Continue Reading "Come join our 7th Annual Bad Poetry Contest"

      • May 14, 2012

        And the winner is…

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        We’ve been working diligently (translation: “occasionally looking up from my glass of Guinness and my P.G. Wodehouse novel”)  to study the entrants in this year’s Bad Poetry Contest. As usual, it’s tough to pick a winner because, in the immortal words of Mark Twain, “badness is a state of mind.” (Okay, that wasn’t really Mark Twain. I think it was a British rapper who goes by the genuinely stupid moniker “Badness.” But it sounds better if I quote someone literary.)

        Anyway, we read through all that badness. We got things like “The Arab Sprummer” and someone named Longbottom talking about holding hands with Shakespeare while the daffodils became “a candy shop for bumblebees.” We even got a rapper offering us this gentle bit o’ badness:

        i finna shoot somebody
        i finna pull the trigga
        and snigga
        and turn to my homies and say
        hey how you doin
        is it gonna rain 

        That’s right — there’s no bad rhyme like a rappin’ bad rhyme! But not a winner. Coming in second place (which, as I’m sure you know from watching beauty pageants, is important because if our champion is unable to uphold the Official Standards of Badness, the second place guy has to buy drinks for everyone) is Ben, who offered this total stinker:

        A Fruit Soliloquy

        by Ben Erlichman

        Alas, the moose, she has taken my bananas
        And I can hear the sound of the wailing wind no longer.
        Whatever shall I do? How can I reclaim
        What has been taken from me?
        It is as if my very soul cries out
        In hopes for some relief, some comfort, 
        Some fresh produce to make me regular once again.

        I beseech you; a mere kiwi would suffice to fill my needs!
        Even a raisin would do more good than harm!
        And yet, If I had but one raisin, 
        I would surely turn to madness
        Because I would have but one raisin––no

        Continue Reading "And the winner is…"

      • May 11, 2012

        Final Bad Poetry Entries Due TODAY

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        All good things must come to an end, and the Bad Poetry Contest is no exception. Please submit your sonnet, Haiku, Limerick, or free-form verse TODAY as a comment to this blog. We await your weeping feelings and wrenching observations.

        Tune in tomorrow for a post announcing the much-anticipated winner of the Lady Gaga style Bible. As today is Chip’s birthday, he is away from the office and not likely to comment on any entries, especially rhyming birthday ones.

        Next week the blog will return to publishing topics. Keep the questions coming, everyone!

         

         

        Continue Reading "Final Bad Poetry Entries Due TODAY"

      • May 11, 2012

        Final Bad Poetry Entries Due TODAY

        by

        All good things must come to an end, and the Bad Poetry Contest is no exception. Please submit your sonnet, Haiku, Limerick, or free-form verse TODAY as a comment to this blog. We await your weeping feelings and wrenching observations.

        Tune in tomorrow for a post announcing the much-anticipated winner of the Lady Gaga style Bible. As today is Chip’s birthday, he is away from the office and not likely to comment on any entries, especially rhyming birthday ones.

        Next week the blog will return to publishing topics. Keep the questions coming, everyone!

         

         

        Continue Reading "Final Bad Poetry Entries Due TODAY"

      • May 9, 2012

        We welcome your bad poetry…

        by

        If you’ve not checked out this year’s Bad Poetry contestants (in the “comments” section), you’ve missed such good work as Cimex Lecularis, The Arab Sprummer, and A Fruit Soliloquy. All of them awful.

        If you’re really into bad poetry, check out this guy’s song on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=njrmL1y3ul8

        We need more bad poetry like this! So click on “comments” and offer up your own bit o’ Badness!

        Continue Reading "We welcome your bad poetry…"

      • May 8, 2012

        The 2012 Bad Poetry Contest continues…

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        That’s right. Put down that Amanda Hocking novel and start thinking “bad” — as in, “bad poetry.” Every year during my birthday week we take some time away from talking writing and marketing and books, in order to focus on what’s really important — crappy poetic license. You’re free to let your imaginations run wild. For example, yesterday, we got this stinker submitted by the deep and meaningful Ben Erlichman…

        A Fruit Soliloquy

        Alas, the moose, she has taken my bananas

        And I can hear the sound of the wailing wind no longer.
        Whatever shall I do? How can I reclaim
        What has been taken from me?
        It is as if my very soul cries out
        In hopes for some relief, some comfort, 
        Some fresh produce to make me regular once again.

         Let’s face it, a paean to irregularity is the perfect sort of set-up to bad poetry. This one is lodged like a chunk of cheese in the digestive tract of my mind. So thanks, Ben. And now I invite YOU to participate. Just hit “comment” down below and post your worst work.
        Yours in digestive artistry,
        Chip MacGregor
        Continue Reading "The 2012 Bad Poetry Contest continues…"