"...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]

It would take a very good bad poet indeed to match matchless McGonagall. I've yet to see a pastiche that convinced.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Still, McGonagall's 9/11 poem would be a thing worth the attempting.

Though I expect his true genuis would come out in a tribute to the Space Shuttle Challenger.

(One could even riff off Tay Bridge Disaster, for the latter.)

I expect his Pearl Harbor poem is justly lost amid the general glurge though, and unable to stand out within same. Ditto his ode to the Apollo astronauts.