Unspeakably Bad Poetry Contest

OK, poetry lovers, poetry haters, and the poetically indifferent, I am throwing down the glove and challenging you all to a bad poem contest.

The rules: Post the worst poem you can think of (either yours or someone else’s) in the comments or by email to yours truly (independent clause) at the gmail. It can be a Tennyson poem or a poem written by your Great Aunt Matilda under the influence of absinthe while she was a teenager. You could have made it up on the spot. I don’t fucking care; as long as you think it’s bad, I’ll read it.

Eligibility: All submitters and poets are eligible except the contest judge, so don’t find any of my poems and post them. (Anyway, that would be rude.) Multiple submissions encouraged.

Judging process: The poem that causes the greatest volume of coffee to be projected from my nasal cavity while reading will be the winner.

The prize?: A book by Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, or another comic genius of my choosing.

When does it start? Now.

Creativity in the Trenches

Back in my bookselling days, I used to write poetry by reprinting out the title stickers for the back of the books, cutting out words, and sticking them together in a new order. The poetry was hard-hitting stuff, a genre born of boredom, a frustrated libido, and a chronic lack of sunlight. Sometimes my coworkers and I wrote poetry together, which resulted in killer lines such as “My fuzzy thoughts: we are in big trouble, / and quiet flows the vodka born of death / we have been caught in a box of symbolic quantum dinosaurs.”

At my first office job, I challenged one of my friends (who worked in an office across town) to a bad poetry contest. We would give each other words such as “kitten,” “rainbow,” and “pink ribbons.” After we wrote the most hackneyed poems possible (this is harder than you think, people), we wrote pretentious reviews of each other’s work.

The other day I found myself 400 words into the worst fantasy novel ever, one that cheerfully embodied the very worst cliche and sexism of the genre, just as an escape from the craft book I was editing.

How do you amuse yourself?

In Praise of the Minuscule

As a copyeditor, I am paid to notice details that no one else but retired English teachers with too much time on their hands will notice. Sometimes this is boring, but I know that it is important. Not save-your-life important, but have-a-professional-publication important.

And so, what did I do Wednesday afternoon? Did I send money to starving children in Africa? Did I make great strides in cancer research? Did I write the Great American Novel? Nope. I went through and looked at every step in my step-by-step craft book to make sure no step numbers were repeated.

After that, I made sure that all bead sizes were hyphenated (8-mm) and that every tip was set as <TIP> rather than <VARIATION>. There are more significant ways I could spend my time. But I don’t fucking care (today). I am the professional gloss of your manuscript. Checking one more time is how I roll.

How do you roll?

Autoformat Must Die

Long before I was a copyeditor, I learned to make Word do my bidding while writing poetry. Have you noticed that Word lives in the time of Tennyson and likes to capitalize every new line of poetry? I did.

And so I went on a rampage. I unchecked boxes like nobody’s business, and still Word thought I was Wordsworth. Every line of poetry was capitalized. Flattering, Word, but you’re still a pain in the ass. In poetry workshops, the one being workshopped usually is silent. One day we were debating the capitalization of a line and how it changed the meaning of a poem, until finally the workshoppee spoke up (which never ever happened). “Guys, sorry to interrupt, but that was a typo. Word capitalized the line.” Oh. We all laughed.

Finally I figured out you have to uncheck every bloody thing to keep Word from reformatting your prose. Want to keep Word from writing your manuscripts for you? Go to Tools, click on Autocorrect, and then get to Options. (You can also get to the box by clicking on Preferences and then Autocorrect.) Unclick EVERYTHING under “Autoformat when you type,” “Autocorrect,” and “Autotext”. Get rid of “Smart” tags. We are all a lot smarter than Word thinks we are.

My favorite thing about Word? Sometimes when I forget to turn off all those little buttons, I have a new document where I type out the newest revision to my manuscript, which is largely about losing my mother and my father, and if I type the word “Dear” it comes up as “Dear Mom and Dad”. Fuck you, Word, fuck you very much.

And for your amusement (really, click on this, it is fall-down funny, in my humble opinion; skip to 2.41 minutes if you are short on time): Clippy Must Die

 

I think I wrote a poem, now what?

Throw a party, you just wrote a poem! Once you sober up, go back and revise. Maybe you’ve heard people say “first thought, best thought”? The idea is that your initial inspiration is the very best expression. I honor the first thought. It’s always good to go back to the original thought, that’s where the initial energy of your poem is. However, I’m firmly in the revising camp.

There are a thousand ways to revise a poem. Whole books have been written on the subject, but here are a few beginner ideas.

Did you start in the right place?

So many times, the last line should be the first one. Or maybe your first three lines are the poem version of clearing your throat before you really begin. Cut them.

Did you end in the right place?

Did you end with a bang or a whimper? Was the bang or whimper appropriate to the poem you are trying to write?

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE RIGHT PLACE.

See, you just drove me to all caps.

Read it out loud.

Does it trip nicely off the tongue? Great. Do you stumble? Change it, otherwise your readers will stumble there too.

Think about your line breaks.

Do your line break in unexpected places? If so, does that add to the meaning of your poem or do you want more sedate line breaks that break with the grammar of the sentence?

Are your words strong enough?

You can almost always choose better words, words that do more, words that are more precise. There are always better words. That’s the hell of it.

Do I want stanzas or, dare I say it, a form?

One great revision technique is to make your short lyric poem into a prose poem. Or dialogue. Or a sonnet. You may not keep it in these new forms, but I guarantee it will teach you something about your poem.

What are your revision techniques?

 

Nothing Left

I heard Joan Didion speak about her book “Blue Nights” last year. Someone from the audience asked her whether she had any stories about the death of her daughter than she didn’t write about. He clearly wanted the dirt, rather than reading what she had written and deemed fit for publication. She stared at him, possibly in hatred, and possibly in defeat and said

“That’s all I have.”

I find that I understand better what she meant now that I have a draft of the Fucker. Someone asked me a question about my mother and I had to visualize the little outline to the left of my manuscript in the Scrivener file to see if I had anything else to say about it that I hadn’t already said.

Yep, I have written it all out. There may be more there, but I can’t remember it at the moment. There is nothing left for me to say about grief or my past. I’ve written it all. Except, of course, that there is a ton more; and I remember more of it every time I have a conversation and sit down to write something new.

I kept a lot of self-important diaries when I was a late teenager. I remember writing in one “I don’t know what I think until I write about it” and unfortunately that’s still true.

I write so I know what the hell is going on. Why do you write?

Goals

Here’s my little list of writerly goals.

1. A certain reader and I have decided to up the ante. We’re going to exchange the Whole Damn Thing, the big, honking, disobedient manuscript. We started with five pages a few months ago and then I got all cocky and sent her a triple dog dare. She said one of the best things anyone has ever said about my writing: “I got chills when I read that line.” My goal? Give her chills at least once a chapter. Better buy a sweater, my friend.

2. I am going to understand one of my father’s scientific articles if it goddamned kills me. And it might. I’ve had years of this, people. Listening to him rattle on over dinner when I was a kid; he talked to me as if I got a grade above B- in math in my whole high school career (which, let me assure you, I did not).

3. I’m going to somehow balance my editing (work) time and my writing time. I have no idea how this is going to happen.

4. I’m going to catalog my dad’s papers and create a master list of people, places, events, and science issues, so I know what the hell is going on. Has anyone ever written a biography? (I’m not going to, but those are the skills I’m drawing on. Wait, did I say skills? I meant lack of skills.)

5. I’m going to have a beer on my porch sometime within the next four hours.

What are your goals?

In Praise of Writing Buddies

When I was twenty-two, my writing buddies saved my life. I was alone in a new town, my father was dying, and pretty much the only positive thing in my life was my weekly meeting at the tea shop with a bunch of poets. Two of them were undergraduates, the other was a copyeditor in her thirties. She wrote great poems and taught me how to use a semi colon properly. We argued about word choice, drew pictures on each other’s poems, and encouraged each other. Three of us now have MFAs, and the fourth is clergy.

I’ve had other much-loved writing buddies since then. It’s an intense relationship. I was talking to one writing buddy’s husband and he said “Yeah, I really haven’t read much of [WB]‘s poetry.” Now this is a man who will go to poetry readings when his wife isn’t even reading, so you know he’s the rare nonpoet who likes poetry. I got silent and thought about all the poems I had read that WB had written about Husband. “Hm,” I said nonchalantly. I know my Writing Buddies in a way that no one else does. We have just about read every thing worthwhile that we’ve ever written.

You gotta have someone to show your writing to or to email when you get yet another tiny writing epiphany that your significant other is tired of hearing about. Sometimes those writing buddies are you guys. I can vent here about all the little writerly details that no one else will care about until I become The Next Big Thing, and then everyone will want to know what I eat for breakfast. (Today it’s granola.)

What minor epiphanies have you had this week?

Um, I want write poems, but where do I start?

People come to poetry from a lot of different angles. It’s like driving in the urban Northeast. One of my sisters wrote poems in her journal. One of my friends wrote shorter and shorter prose until she had poems. I wrote a poem about the rain for my father’s birthday when I was ten. It seemed the right thing to do, the best thing I had to give him.

You can begin anywhere. Have you seen erasures? Take a book (or a copied portion of a book) and black out everything but a few words. Bam. A poem you can write with your kids.

Parody. My husband does this in the shower every day. Take a song you can’t get out of your head and start substituting random words in. One of the favorites in our house is “Kitty the Revelator“. Keep working with it and you might get a poem.

Haiku. There’s a lot of shitty haiku out there, but I stand by the idea that the haiku boils down the poetic impulse to its very bones. Two images, one turn. Bam, it’s a poem. Are haiku too short to say what you want to say? Try a haiku journal.

Read, read, read.

Random epiphanies

I use the word “random” all the time. So, too, does everyone else. It’s great in informal language, but it’s beginning to piss me off in a recent manuscript. Observe the following:

Thread random blue and purple beads onto the string

No. The beads themselves are not random. They are strung in a random pattern.

God, that was so random!

In this usage, random has become the new “ironic,” used to mean many things that it doesn’t actually mean. In writing, take a close look at the word “random” and see if you can’t describe an event using more precise words.

She asked a random question

Sometimes a question is random, but more often, it is connected to something in the asker’s mind and preoccupations. Telling the reader about them will make for a better characterization.

What words do you hate today?