There's a Bad Poetry Explosion!
The Bad Poetry Seminar
There is a Bad Poetry Explosion, and you can be part of it. Consider: right now there are creative writing classes in over 41,378 schools. And creative writing degrees are offered by 1,119 colleges. More bad poetry is being written now than at any time in history.
Actually, I made up those figures. But that's part of the problem. One of the reasons no one writes good poetry anymore is that poets don't do painstaking research, the way they used to. When Longfellow wrote “The Village Smithy,” for example, he interviewed 19 village smithies, and spent 2 weeks living and working with a smithy in Lowell, Massachusetts, pretending to be his apprentice, though Longfellow was a 51-year-old university professor at the time. Who's willing to do that now? Actually I made that up, too. But we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you, and your future as a bad poet.
But first, let us examine the philosophy of Bad Poetry. Here it is:
- All the great poems have been written. (When was the last time you remember a great poem being written? Did you ever open a newspaper and see the headline NEW GREAT POEM WRITTEN? No. This is proof that all the great poems have been written.)
- Most of the good poems have been written. (If it's impossible to write a Great Poem, it must be very hard to write a Good Poem. That's just logical. Think of all the people you know. How many of them have written a good poem? And it's getting harder. This is because the world is getting more unpoetic. How can you write a good about digital clocks, or about Twister? The only way to write a good poem is to stand by a stream and pretend you're still in the 19th Century. And most of those poems come out awful.)
- The number of bad poems that can be written is infinite (or nearly infinite).
So let's get to work and write bad poetry.
home introduction to bad poetry a brief history case in point practice makes perfect 