Thursdays with Amanda: Bad Poetry Contest
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.
7 Comments
Okay Amanda, I took the plunge and entered a little poem I wrote over 30 years ago. I read it now and I swear I don’t want to acknowledge I even KNOW me back then…lol…
Donna L Martin
Musician Billy Joel once said it was his high school English teacher forcing them to do limericks that got him to push forward in his song writing. So look at his first hit:
Jon at the bar is a friend of mine,
He gets me my drinks for free,
And he’s good for a joke,
Or to light up your smoke,
But there’s someplace that he’d rather be.
Bob is a real estate novelist,
Who never had time for a wife.
And he’s talking to Davy,
Who’s still in the Navy,
And probably will be for life.
OK, never stopped to realize that! 🙂
There once was a man from Nantucket… oh, wait.
If I’m going to be honest with you…uh…No.
Very good bad poetry indeed.
Compared to the other limericks I’ve read, that one would be considered great in my book. hahaha
That’s pretty genius. *giggles* At least it rhymes 😛