"On the last Sabbath day of 1879 / Which will be remember'd for a very long time"

[larryhammer]

Yanno, I forgot to report back on the round-robin bad poetry reading at TusCon. My bad. In more ways than one. It was indeed hillarious fun. Hardly anyone managed to make it through an entire poem with a straight face, and some poems required rounding through the entire room to complete. The bill of fare, as best I can reconstruct:


Appetizer:
Jottings of New York, William McGonagall

First Course:
McGonagall's Tay Bridge Trilogy:
The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay
The Tay Bridge Disaster (the hardest to get through)
An Address to the New Tay Bridge

Second Course:
Sketch of Lord Byron's Life, Julia Moore (it is difficult to read aloud the quotation marks, which are essential to the poem's effect, without getting self-conscious and so losing it)
A Posset for Nature's Breakfast, Margaret Cavendish (if you make it past the unfortunate first line, not all that bad)
"While Anna's peers and early playmates tread," William Wordsworth (not, alas, bad enough to read well aloud)
A Tragedy, Theophile Marzials
On Time, Death, and Eternity (extract), Robert Peters (full text)

Third Course:
Random selections from Teen Angst: A Celebration of Really Bad Poetry

Desert:
Ode on the Mammoth Cheese: Weight over seven thousand pounds, James McIntyre


The number of poems where someone broke down on the final line ... ah ... it gives me warm fuzzies, remembering.

ObLinky: Poet McGonagall's World, a blog of his poems about places and events, illustrated with photos and other collateral.

---L.