An item in the New York Times on November 19 brought our attention to the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest at Columbia University. The contest is named for the famed author of the 12-line poem “Trees,” first published in 1913: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” and so on.
We are heartily in favor of bad poetry contests, but we discern a problem: In order to write really effective bad poetry—good bad poetry, let’s say—you have to understand what makes great poetry great, and ours is an unpoetic age in which few know or care the first thing about poetry. The items reported in the Times were bad, but they were just dumb bad, if we may put it that way, not truly, effectively bad. One, titled “An Ode to the Quality of Orange,” ran as follows:
only $9.99 for 10 liters at Costco
a flavor so piercing
like true love’s gaze
like a tattoo needle orange flavor dances across my tongue
it is raw and I must wait 2-3 weeks for it to heal
Meh.
To taste the joys of truly awful poetry, we urge readers to consider the Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902). McGonagall’s nearly 200 poems, almost all of which commemorate some great event or tragedy, are unsparingly insipid. They don’t scan, their imagery and metaphors are clumsy beyond belief, and they rhyme in sublimely awful ways. We open our edition of the Collected Poems at random and offer the first two stanzas of “General Gordon, the Hero of Khartoum”:
For brave General Gordon, that was killed in Khartoum;
He was a Christian hero, and a soldier of the Cross,
And to England his death will be a very great loss.
He was very cool in temper, generous and brave,
The friend of the poor, the sick, and the slave;
And many a poor boy he did educate,
And laboured hard to do so early and late.
McGonagall was a weaver from the industrial town of Dundee. He didn’t attend university, and it’s unknown if he meant to write well or badly. Maybe the populist fever has impaired our judgment, too, but the lesson appears undeniable: America’s Ivy-educated elites can’t even do bad things as well as the working-class nobodies of long ago.
