Now that I’ve hit the speed limit (55), eaten my cake, and generally had a riotous time with friends celebrating my birthday, it’s time we wrap up our annual Bad Poetry Contest and get down to the very difficult business of choosing one member for our Hall of Shame.

Our annual contest always gives us great lines, such as Travis Campbell’s, “You can’t roll with the punches with a busted wheel under the office chair of your soul,” or famed crime writer Steve Jackson’s “…like the water in the toilet swirling down into lead-piped emptiness carrying with me the byproducts of my broken life…”  It’s exactly that sort of depth and insight that marks this contest. The judges also liked the work of Michele Simmons’ Sibling Rivalry, roller derby star Kathleen Christian’s A Worm, and Rachel Niehaus’ fabulous Untitled #3, as well as Andrew Winch’s A Cacophony of Discordant Sounds Shining Dissonantly: 

The shining moon shines on my heart,
With shining rays of anguish.
She doesn’t know the hidden art,
Which breathes my cries of languish.

The mausoleum wastes away,
With crumbling greys and greens.
The crickets scream and cry and bray
Which ‘wakens timeless fiends.

Curs-ed wolves howl at the moon,
Making damsels faint and gasp and swoon,
And I, I… howl with them.

We hope YOU are howling, since those are just the honorable mentions. In fact, one of the best entries wasn’t even a poem — the actual poem sucked, but the intro was fabulous:

My poem has a deepness that many won’t be able to apreciate. The skeptics shall veiw it as total nonsence, and shall condenscendingly turn up their noses, inflated with their own facitiosness. But the open-minded, the inspired, the beautiful, the wise, the creative, the good – they shall find infinate layers of meaning, which they will peel away like a banana which has multiple peels, one on another (so that when you peel off one there’s another peel undeneeth it, and you never reach the bananna.) Because of the way that you could interpet the poem in a million (no, a trillion) different ways, true poets can draw many different feeling from it. (Feeling rhymes with peeling). Each time they read through it, it will be different. They could laugh like a hynena, reminise like an old guy, sob like someone who’s sobbing, or tingle like shooken oh-so-crisp lettece with a little water on it. This is a poem that literary critics, poem-lovers, and those classes which disscuss works of writing can obsess over for weeks…

It’s the depth, the feeling, and the misspellings that draw me to that (to say nothing of the humility). But this year’s finalists are all about LOVE…

Kimberly Buckner offered this ode to love:

your love is the stuff in my refrigerator. Or, Ode from a hungry person. I couldn’t decide.

your love is milk. good for my bones.
your love is a mango. red, green, or yellow depending on how long I leave you.
your love is a zuchinni. underrated.
your love is an avocado. thick skinned, and smoother when I mash you with a fork.
your love is bread. darker on the outside, fluffy on the inside, allergy inducing to my mother. 
your love is a piece of…what is that? cheese? no…me–no, not meat….okay, well
your love is this fuzzy thing. its been there longer than I can remember and has grown over time.

Wonderfully bad. Speaking of bad love, novelist Joshua Graham rendered this:

The Beloved

Arise, oh daughter of Nero!
Come away with me to the hills of Vesuvius
As its peaks doth smolder, so my love for you doth burn
For your beauty is like no other

The Princess

My beloved is a mighty warrior
His chest is like granite, his legs powerful as the ostrich’s
Surely thou hast smote thy foes with thy mere flatulence!
Downwind, your enemies cower and flee at the mention of thy name.

If love was a plant it would be a genetically modified Venus Fly Trap fertilized through a hydroponic system while being injected with miracle grow and Prozac. People would poke it with sticks and take photos of it. It would become choleric and maniacal and would release repulsive pheromones and space monkeys. People will become afraid and wish it would just go away but instead they would become cocoons filled with knott’s jelly and consumed by wild wombats and dejected yellow bellied lemurs.

Bailax, who I’m sure is now back on his medication, has a future in bad poetry. And Jeanne Doyon became a finalist with this determinedly bad work:

Our 7th Annual Bad Poetry Contest ends tomorrow, on my birthday. The winner will be chosen by an experienced panel of judges (probably me and my best friend Mike, after consuming a couple birthday margaritas, just to make sure our poetic skills are razor sharp), and we’re still looking for the one knock-it-out-of-the-park putrid poem. So don’t wait — start yakking those deep thoughts now.

The Grand Prize Winner of this year’s Bad Poetry Contest will receive a copy of the text that has been called “The Worst Self-Published Book of All Time.” The title is How to Good-bye Depression: If you constrict anus 100 times everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?  by Hiroyki Nishigaki. (If you don’t believe me, check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/d588msb

You may not be completely familiar with Mr. Nishigaki’s book, but he starts off with a bang by offering this tip: “Take advantage of this at your peril.” Much of the book consists of random emails he has apparently sent to friends, but he does offer such sound advice as “Erase your bad stickiness” and “stare, shoot out immaterial fiber, ucceed in concentrating, behave with abandon-largess-humor and beckon the spirit.” I’ve been erasing my own bad stickiness through this very method (though Holly has refused to clean up when I shoot out my immaterial fiber at the office). No, I really don’t have any idea what the book is about (other than, you know, constricting your anus 100 times every day), but as a writer I find I can pretty much open it up to any page, read it aloud, and start to laugh. It’s THAT bad.

I know the excitement that comes with a fabulous, potentially life-changing book like this. So the winner of our Bad Poetry contest DESERVES this book. It’s even autographed. (Not by the author. By the person who gave me a copy. But still… it’s autographed.) So smack that muse; wake up your mojo and explain in no uncertain terms that you need to get writing; feed your soul or whatever other stoopid writing metaphor you need to get you going, and drop us a heapin’ hunk o’ Bad Poetry. The world awaits your contribution.

-Chip

Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon andBarnes & Noble.

Emily Dickinson once said “To write good, you have to learn to write bad.”

Okay, so she didn’t say that. She probably never even thought it. But, what I HAVE heard respected authors say is something to the effect of “First you must learn the rules so that then you know how to break them.”

Deep stuff, eh?

This week on the blog, we’re all about breaking the rules. We’re running our annual Bad Poetry Contest, so if you haven’t already, get out your pen and paper, rouse up that teenage angst that still lurks behind your Toyota Corolla, nine-to-five, everything’s-perfect facade, and start writing.

Badly.

To get the juices flowing, here’s a bad limerick I wrote in high school:

There once was a servant named Jasper,

Who wanted to marry his master.

So he grabbed her and fled to the church to be wed

And was painfully forced to first ask her.

Your turn. Submit your entries here.

Yes, it’s Bad Poetry week, here at the blog, where we take my birthday week and enjoy sharing with one another the worst poems we can create. If you’re a sensitive, deep, and misunderstood soul, then we WANT your crappy poem gracing the blog! All you need to do is go to the “comments” section and type in your  words. Share your deepfulness and reflectiveosity with others. The badder the better. Have a look at some of the rotten stuff that was written in the previous day’s blog, just to get a feel for the mood. For example…

Tom Threadgill gets us going with this truly terrible  opener:

“Knock,” he said to no one.
Since he was alone in the room, so alone.

(Unless you count the other people in the room, which he
didn’t. Sometimes he did, but not this time.)

Deep. Meaningful. Bad. And crime writer Steve Jackson shares this:

I was there
Then I wasn’t
like the water in the toilet
swirling down into lead-piped emptiness
carrying with me the byproducts
of my broken life…

So… dare I say it? Truly crappy, Steve! I’m sure everyone will like the fabulously bad images Neal Worle shares with these wretched words,

My love for you fills me,
a flooded basement.
I must not drown,
I bail out my heart.
This poem I write,
a sump pump of love.

And we are immediately thrown into both brightness and badness! Becca Jackson takes a thoughtful tone with:

I was walking on the streets
bare and rusty, like someone’s
half-drank bottle of underwear

Okay, the time has come… My birthday is coming up soon, and that means it’s time for our Annual Bad Poetry Contest! Yes, try not to wet your pants in excitement as you think about coming up with some deep and meaningful tripe. For those of you not in the know, there is a longstanding tradition with British novelists for turning out truly bad poetry, and the cool kids in publishing take a few minutes each year to participate in my annual contest. (Don’t be left out.) So this is your chance to create something truly bad and get away with it. I want you to send it in — your rotten rhymes, your horrible haiku, your crappy couplets. This isn’t just a chance for you to churn out some doggerel that will make others nod politely while thinking, “geez — was he drinking heavily when he wrote this?” No, this is your chance to give us something truly awful — a piece of crud that make others run screaming from the room. A bit o’ deep thinking that will show the world just how deep and sensitive you really aren’t. A chance to create a poem that will stick like a stone in the kidney of your mind.

We do this every year, and if you go to the categories (over there –>) you can check out all the bad poetry others have sent in over the years. They include bad imagery, faux depth, and LOTS of terrible word choices. Just consider some sample bad poems…

The bad opening lines from Ben Erlichman’s A Fruit Soliloquy:

Alas, the moose, she has taken my bananas

And I can hear the sound of the wailing wind no longer.

The bad comparisons, such as this from Damian Farnworth: “I’m spicy like taco meat”

The bad imagery, including Kay Day’s thoughtful, “Someday I will once again walk in the brightness

We’ve been working diligently (translation: “occasionally looking up from my glass of Guinness and my P.G. Wodehouse novel”)  to study the entrants in this year’s Bad Poetry Contest. As usual, it’s tough to pick a winner because, in the immortal words of Mark Twain, “badness is a state of mind.” (Okay, that wasn’t really Mark Twain. I think it was a British rapper who goes by the genuinely stupid moniker “Badness.” But it sounds better if I quote someone literary.)

Anyway, we read through all that badness. We got things like “The Arab Sprummer” and someone named Longbottom talking about holding hands with Shakespeare while the daffodils became “a candy shop for bumblebees.” We even got a rapper offering us this gentle bit o’ badness:

i finna shoot somebody
i finna pull the trigga
and snigga
and turn to my homies and say
hey how you doin
is it gonna rain 

That’s right — there’s no bad rhyme like a rappin’ bad rhyme! But not a winner. Coming in second place (which, as I’m sure you know from watching beauty pageants, is important because if our champion is unable to uphold the Official Standards of Badness, the second place guy has to buy drinks for everyone) is Ben, who offered this total stinker:

A Fruit Soliloquy

by Ben Erlichman

Alas, the moose, she has taken my bananas
And I can hear the sound of the wailing wind no longer.
Whatever shall I do? How can I reclaim
What has been taken from me?
It is as if my very soul cries out
In hopes for some relief, some comfort, 
Some fresh produce to make me regular once again.

I beseech you; a mere kiwi would suffice to fill my needs!
Even a raisin would do more good than harm!
And yet, If I had but one raisin, 
I would surely turn to madness
Because I would have but one raisin––no more, no less.

And so I die here, upon this Neanderthal, 
Whose rugged knapsack bore me some rest throughout my journey.
Alas, I am slain by the evil of the populace
And through the malice of the Dole Fruit company.

Goodbye, goodbye––

––goodbye.
To that we can only say, “Goodbye! And good riddance!”

And our champ — the 2012 Bad Poetry Wiener, who wins a copy of The Lady Gagy Style Bible, goes to Fifi McGruder for a great take on goats as a metaphor for life, so long as the goats are deep and meaningful goats (who bleat, at least in Fifi’s world o’ wackiness). Here’s the champ in all its glory — make sure to stay to the end, so you catch the jump from “thoughtful yet stupid” to “impassioned and even stupider.” Fifi, we salute you as our champion!

To waddle with the gooses,

One must wade with the whales.

To climb Mount Nevus,

One must flourish with the goats.

Ancient beasts of knowledge,

All-knowing bearers of the wisdom of the world.

Hope. Anger. Love.

Written in the soles of the mountain-dwellers themselves,

Stringent in their hairs.

Hollow lives of a hollow world.

Love love and happiness

Overtaking the masses

Overtaking the soul,

… in the breath of the hurdling beasts

… in their smacking hoofs and limber limbs.

Holiness complete on the mountain.

Contemplation complete in the whim.

Ascension assured in the gaiety.

Bleat. Bleat now! Before the day is done. Before the dawn
turns to gray. It is not too late. Huddled masses. Hoofs. Hollers. Hope. Bleat
before the clock strikes one. The tolling bell of ending desire. Doom.

Doom of the bleating ones.

It comes.

Farewell.

Now THAT, my friends, is bad poetry. Thanks to everyone who participated! Fifi, Lady Gaga is on her way. Let me know if her meat dress is made of goat.

All good things must come to an end, and the Bad Poetry Contest is no exception. Please submit your sonnet, Haiku, Limerick, or free-form verse TODAY as a comment to this blog. We await your weeping feelings and wrenching observations.

Tune in tomorrow for a post announcing the much-anticipated winner of the Lady Gaga style Bible. As today is Chip’s birthday, he is away from the office and not likely to comment on any entries, especially rhyming birthday ones.

Next week the blog will return to publishing topics. Keep the questions coming, everyone!

If you’ve not checked out this year’s Bad Poetry contestants (in the “comments” section), you’ve missed such good work as Cimex Lecularis, The Arab Sprummer, and A Fruit Soliloquy. All of them awful.

If you’re really into bad poetry, check out this guy’s song on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=njrmL1y3ul8

We need more bad poetry like this! So click on “comments” and offer up your own bit o’ Badness!

That’s right. Put down that Amanda Hocking novel and start thinking “bad” — as in, “bad poetry.” Every year during my birthday week we take some time away from talking writing and marketing and books, in order to focus on what’s really important — crappy poetic license. You’re free to let your imaginations run wild. For example, yesterday, we got this stinker submitted by the deep and meaningful Ben Erlichman…

A Fruit Soliloquy

Alas, the moose, she has taken my bananas

And I can hear the sound of the wailing wind no longer.
Whatever shall I do? How can I reclaim
What has been taken from me?
It is as if my very soul cries out
In hopes for some relief, some comfort, 
Some fresh produce to make me regular once again.

Great news: The 2012 Bad Poetry Contest is here!  

As you know, each day here on the blog we offer wisdom and thoughts on the business and careers of writing. And over the last six years, it’s proven helpful enough that Writers Digest has again named us one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers. But one week each May (the week of my birthday), we take a week off from the business to continue a wonderful longstanding tradition of creating truly awful poems. All you have to do is go to the bottom of this post, hit “comments,” and leave your bit of doggerel. The rules are simple:

1. Don’t sent me a birthday poem. That’s not the point. Anyone who sends in “Happy Birthday o’ Chip o’ mine, hope this finds you well and fine” will be banned for life.

2. Write a truly bad poem.

That’s pretty much it. We want to see your poetic soul. The rotten rhymes, the horrible haikus, the crappy couplets, the stupid cinquains, the execrable epics. We’re after flatulent free verse, sorry sonnets, putrid petrarchan, rachitis rondeau, sickly sestina — um, okay, you get the picture. A quick view back over previous winners reveal such treasures as Blind Puppy on the Freeway, Walleye Eludes Me, and Krziette, which contains this memorable line: “Krziette, your love for me was like lowing of she-goats in spring, when bald sparrows alight on budding bushes.” It’s that sort of deepfulness that will cause you to win.

And there WILL be a winner, of course. Each year, we select a truly fabulous grand prize (previous winners have included a lava lamp, a home-tattoo kit, a 45 record of Neil Diamond singing “I Am, I Said,” and a copy of the immortal self-published tome “How to Good-Bye Depression”). This year’s collectible super-prize will be THE LADY GAGA STYLE BIBLE, which should hold wide appeal to all trampy girls, as well as boys under the age of, roughly, 14. And yes, this could be yours! 

For those not in the know, this contest grows from my belief that every poet has the same message, which can be subtly summed up this way: “LOOK AT ME! I AM SENSITIVE AND REFLECTIVE AND NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME! SO I’LL SHOW THEM HOW DEEP I AM BY WRITING POETRY!” (Feel free to edit that statement if you’re truly deep and meaningful.) I want you to know that I’m here for you poets — in fact, I was once accused of being sensitive, and have occasionally been forced to reflect on something, until I could grow up and get over it. Therefore, I’ve set aside the next few days just for you. Write! Create! Sit and contemplate your navel! Do…um…whatever it is you poets do while the rest of us are out earning a living. Then send in your bad poetry!

In case you’re really a poet, and you’ve missed the point here, we’re looking for BAD poetry. The more hideous, smarmy, self-righteous, sappy, or obtuse, the better. Don’t expect me to represent it — if you’re too sensitive to notice, there’s no money to be made in poetry, so my looking at your fabulousness won’t do you any good in the market. Sorry.

But there’s a rich tradition among British novelists of creating really horrible poetry behind one another’s backs. P.G. Wodehouse, a brilliant writer and one of my lifelong heroes, used to create truly awful stuff. He once included in a book’s introduction the words, “With a hey nonny-nonny and hot cha-cha, And the sound of distant moors…” 

Um…really. And if Plum can do it, YOU can do it. So send! Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of rhyming crud yearning to breathe free. This is your chance to share your true depth and meaningfulness with the world (or at least with the group of people in publishing who read this blog). Don’t delay — start that constipating now! In fact, I’m going to give all those under the age of 25 a hint to get you started: There are only three words in the English language that rhyme with love: “Dove,” “Glove,” and “Above.” Use of the baby word “Wuv” is a federal offense. (British citizens who enter are allowed to use the word “guv,” as in “guv’nor,” but don’t push it. We Scots have been pushed around by you people long enough.)

Time for you to enter. The poetry contest runs all week…