"...seeds of sin, / Which every goodly feeling does destroy / And more or less his afterlife annoy"

[larryhammer]

So last weekend, my local science fiction convention allowed me to host another round-robin bad poetry reading, and you can tell the programming person is a genius because he's the one who decided to call it "Vogon Poetry." I wish I'd thought of that, and will henceforth steal use it when I propose this to other cons.

A good, or at least hilarity-filled, time was had by all. On the menu this year:

• "Tay Bridge Disaster," William McGonagall
  
• "A New Temperance Poem, in Memory of My Departed Parents, Who Were Sober Living & God Fearing People," William McGonagall
  
• "The Dundee Flower Show," William McGonagall
  
• "A Tragedy," Theophile Marzials
  
• a selection from The Insect Hunters, Edward Newman (via The Worst English Poets)
  
• a selection of Proverbial Philosophy, Martin Tupper (via The Stuffed Owl)
  
• "Ode on the Giant Cheese," James McIntyre
  
• "The Oxford Cheese Ode," James McIntyre
  
• "To the Very Great Victory Against the Traitor Counter-Revolutionaries Betraying the Workers of Hungary, 4 November 1956!," Larry Hammer

The McGonagall, Marzials, and McIntyre poems were all suitably disasterous, usually taking 4-5 people to get through each one. The Newman and Tupper were bad, but not bad in the right way.

As for my own effort, I now have empirical evidence that it is nowhere near as bad as the true masters before it. It isn't anything approaching good, but it's not wretched in that painful-to-recite sort of way. I am, it seems, simply not that skilled at misfiring language. Sorry, stevendj.

Comments

[larryhammer]

He makes a good audience warm-up, though. But yes, I agree -- I walked away from this year planning in the future to limit the menu to only one of his, to start with.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

By the way, and only marginally related to poetry. I went to Xerxes (aka Serse or if you're a little immature and down on the title character, as I was afterward, Jerkses) last night, and very quickly began thinking that this work, this libretto at least, offers rich material for you. It has:

-Xerxes, kind of a jerk, and the king
-Arsamenes, not such a jerk most of the time, his brother, who is in love with
-Romilda, who is in love with Arasamenes, who is presented as a bit of a flirt, and who flirts a bit with Xerxes in Act 1 Sc i, so that he resolves to marry her, which suits
-Atalanta, Romilda's sister, just fine, as she wants Arsamenes for herself.

The sisters' father is Ariodate[s], Xerxes' number one general, a baritone in curled wig, scarlet coat, and riding boots. [Emphatically NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH ARIODANTE, a different character altogether in another Handel opera.]

Oh, and Xerxes already has a fiancée, Amastris (or Amastre in some versions), a mezzo who is cross-dressed first as the Quaker Oats Man (they costumed it in a nebulous 18c style for male characters) and as a red-coated soldier later on, and who is not too happy about his carryings-on in pursuit of Romilda.

Oh, and Arsamenes' servant, Elviro, cross-dresses as Poor Little Buttercup A Flower Girl to deliver a letter from Arsamenes to Romilda, which is intercepted by Atalanta, who tells the king that Arsamenes wrote it to her.

Oh, and Xerxes is sung by a woman (traditionally, a castrato). A countertenor does Arsamenes.

Oh, and as the opera opens, Xerxes is singing a love song (the justly famous "Ombra mai fu...") to his current beloved, a tree. He dumps the tree without a second thought when he hears Romilda sing, though.


At the very least, it ought be a fantastic manga.

[larryhammer]

Or a Takarazuka show ...

---L.