Very Bad Poetry by Kathryn Petras

Introduction
    I seemed to feel as it were a strange kind of feeling stealing over me, and remained so for about five minutes. A flame, as Lord Byron has said, seemed to kindle up my entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry…
    It was so strong I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, “Write Write!” So I said to myself, ruminating, let me see; what shall I write? then all at once a bright idea struck me.
    S o did William McGonagall, probably one of the worst poets of the English language, describe his first session with the poetic Muse.
    A compulsion to write verse, and a happy delusion regarding talent—that is the beginning of a very bad poet. Very bad poets are perpetrators of a unique and fascinating type of writing. Unlike the plainly bad or the merely mediocre, very bad poetry is powerful stuff. Like great literature, it moves us emotionally, but, of course, it often does so in ways the writer never intended: usually we laugh.
    This is no simple task. “Literary is a work very difficult to do,” wrote very bad poet Julia Moore in the preface to
A Few Choice Words to the Public.
And she is absolutely correct. To continue her point, very good literary is a work very difficult to do—and so is very bad literary.
    Writing very bad poetry requires talent—inverse talent, to be sure, but talent nonetheless. It also helps to have awooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, a bullheaded inclination to stuff too many syllables or words into a line or a phrase, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence.
    Some poets are granted these qualities by the Muse only temporarily—and then they go on to write good poems. Others are blessed, if that is the word, for their entire career.
    So what is a very bad poem? Usually it is testimony to a poet’s well-honed sense of the anticlimactic. A poet must be immeasurably moved by some grandiose emotion or event—say, a horrific catastrophe—commit it to paper, then veer from the sublime to the pedestrian at precisely the right—which is to say, the wrong—moment. One minute the poet is describing the sinking of a ferry, the next mentioning how much the fare was.
    Often it is a matter of using inappropriate words. The poet, eager to keep up a rhyme or meter, shoves in the only word that will do—and, of course, it is the wrong word. (“Fear not, grand eagle, the bay of the beagle” comes to mind.) Or the ever-optimistic poet seems to think that he or she can slip in a word that
almost
rhymes, thus creating exciting and certainly unique not-quite-rhymes such as
Havana
and
manner, pygmies
and
enigmas, mud
and
God.
    And typically very bad poetry bears the weight of overenthusiastic use of literary devices—alliteration, footnotes, and most commonly, bad metaphors—not to mention bizarre, if excited, imagery, as in the following, by Amanda McKittrick Ros, a bad novelist turned worse poet. (Should the reader wonder, this is a somewhat
different
description of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.)
    Holy Moses! Take a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook,
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer.
    But ultimately a very bad poem is more than one that violates literary conventions, poetic meter, and grammatical rules. It contains an element of art—that certain something that marks the poem as a masterpiece. As with great art, we can’t exactly define a very bad poem except to say we know one when we see one.
    And so we are blessed with poems such as “The Spleen,” “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese,” “A Pindaricque on the Grunting of a Hog,” and “An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy.” For, as the very bad poet James McIntyre noted, all poets, good and bad,
     … pursue each theme
Under a gentle head of steam.
    This book celebrates these chugging poets.

JOHN ARMSTRONG
(1709-1779)
    N ot the most compelling personality (a brief biographical