Bad Poet’s Society

’Pon the night of November 21st

There was an event where we heard bad verse.

Seven people onstage read some poems—

Most were outrageous, none were ho-hum.

It was at the Blacksmith House, beside Hi-Rise Bakery.

And the poems were awful; there was no fakery.



It was called the Bad Poets’ Society

And this was the eighth time for such impropriety.

Once there was a show shortly after 9/11,

They’d decided to hold it, although the humor is irreveren’.

That show, a success, was the first time Gene Doucette read,

“A lot of people really needed a great laugh,” he said.



This year, as usual, the poems were in groups.

From “Travel” to “Blazing Western Action,” they varied.

Most of the poems were not bad on purpose

But “Orlando’s Declaration of Love to Rosalind,” by William Shakespeare, to take one example, was.

Some of the poems were about celebrities

Like fans’ odes to Batman and Miley and Britney.

In the field of bad poetry Randall Johnson’s name is big:

He’s the proud author of “You Raped My Pig.”



John Galligan, one of the event’s co-curators;

Said there were two types bad enough to be read in theaters.

One type, he said, toward ambitious themes crept,

But was “crippled by the fact that the execution was so technically inept.”

The other bad poetry type is all

About topics that are “inane” or “banal.”



Galligan and Jon Haber, the other co-curato’

Are former hosts of the oddball TV show “Channel Zero.”

Where the two men presented movie clips obscure.

It’s similar to finding strange poems, for sure.

A decade ago, the challenge was to find

Anything bad—it was like searching for a mine.

Haber says it’s different, with the Internet’s ease:

Now it’s “a question of honing down a feast.”

But Galligan says it’s still hard to get poems that are really not good:

“You gotta know how to find it, dude.”



The Bad Poets’ Society will be back next year,

To once again share some bad verse and good cheer.