dr_pretentious: (Default)
Sarah Avery ([personal profile] dr_pretentious) wrote2006-02-28 12:12 am

Here He Comes, The Queen of Chee-ee-eese!

The Bad Poetry Party was a spectacular success. Good food, good wine, good company, appalling verse--a perfect combination. We adorned [livejournal.com profile] vgnwtch's husband T with the Cheese Crown for his discovery and performance of a trove of truly abysmal poetry by a kid who wishes, rather desperately, to be Poe. Oh, the misplaced modifiers! I knew, when [livejournal.com profile] mischievouspie's wails of horror at the syntax turned to mock threats of vengeance, that T had found something extraordinary. [livejournal.com profile] aristeros gave a fine performance of a 19th century ode to a train wreck. [livejournal.com profile] newroticgirl dredged up her high school notebooks--brave, brave woman! From [livejournal.com profile] jeneralist, we had anagrammatic poetry galore. [livejournal.com profile] tracyandrook composed new odes just for the occasion, and [livejournal.com profile] jaime_sama was represented in absentia when her husband performed a poem she'd crafted from spam subject lines. One measure of true bad craftsmanship and the true craftsmanship of bad: can the poem make [livejournal.com profile] aspenwolf squeak involuntarily? [livejournal.com profile] tracyandrook declared that she could not wait to break out "The Eye of Argon" until the crowd had thinned and only the die-hards were left, so we spent a prose interlude with the worst work of short fiction in the entirety of Anglophone literature, and then came back for another round of Enjambments Man Was Not Meant to Know.

T and [livejournal.com profile] vgnwtch are well stocked now to make Bad Poetry Day an international phenomenon when they move across the pond--she was the second Queen of Cheese, and may still have the jalapeno cheddar crown. After all, if International Talk Like a Pirate Day can become a massive phenomenon, why not bad poetry, too?

International Bad Poetry Day, by the way, is really January 22nd, my actual birthday. Sometimes we have to settle for celebrating on Bad Poetry Day (observed), but we do aim for the real thing. It's kind of a race now: which will I manage to establish first--a goofy pseudoholiday, or a writing career? What if Bad Poetry Day turns out to be the whole of my literary legacy?

Sunday, Dan and I languished among the party dishes with our likewise tuckered out houseguests, [livejournal.com profile] twoeleven, [livejournal.com profile] radiotelescope, and [livejournal.com profile] gregoradon, who had crossed state lines to be here and were able to stay through most of a second day. Today, we seem to be recovered from the party, and mostly recovered from the dishes, but what on earth are we going to do with this refrigeratorful of cheese? Stilton with candied lemon peel, anyone?

Thanks to all of you who came out for the occasion. And those of you who couldn't be here--well, next year in South River. Have I mentioned recently how grateful I am to the universe for my good friend-karma? Not recently enough? I don't know how I got so lucky. You all make my life sweet.

[identity profile] sleepymaggie.livejournal.com 2006-02-28 06:11 am (UTC)(link)
Another birthday that week, wow!

Any chance we could take a look at some of that poetry? Or maybe some links or names? I'd love the chance to chuckle at the kid who would be Poe.

[identity profile] vgnwtch.livejournal.com 2006-02-28 07:19 am (UTC)(link)
By all accounts, he is on LJ and is prone to aggressive posts in the journals of people who've referenced his work, so if you have an email address you feel Ok about putting here, I'll email you the url privately.

[identity profile] sleepymaggie.livejournal.com 2006-02-28 07:32 am (UTC)(link)
applesticker at gmail dot com

[identity profile] vgnwtch.livejournal.com 2006-02-28 06:39 pm (UTC)(link)
You're on.

[identity profile] dr-pretentious.livejournal.com 2006-02-28 08:02 pm (UTC)(link)
There's an anthology called Very Bad Poetry that has the perennial gems. You can count on Ogden Nash and Edward Lear for deliberately bad poetry, and Gertrude Stein for bad poetry with delusions of grandeur. The gem I could not find is an art book with poems by an often-good poet with by the unlikely name of Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge--it's called Endocrinology, and it takes itself way, way more seriously than its merits allow.