Wish List 0 Wish List 0
Download high-resolution image Look inside

Very Bad Poetry

Author Kathryn Petras, Ross Petras
Look inside
$13.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
48 per carton
On sale Mar 25, 1997 | 978-0-679-77622-2
Sales rights: World
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies
See Additional Formats
Writing very bad poetry requires talent.  It helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence.

The 131 poems collected in this first-of-its-kind anthology are so glaringly awful that they embody a kind of genius.  From Fred Emerson Brooks' "The Stuttering Lover" to Matthew Green's "The Spleen" to Georgia Bailey Parrington's misguided "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy", they mangle meter, run rampant over rhyme, and bludgeon us into insensibility with their grandiosity, anticlimax, and malapropism.

Guaranteed to move even the most stoic reader to tears (of laughter), Very Bad Poetry is sure to become a favorite of the poetically inclined (and disinclined).
From "The Stuttering Lover" by Emerson Brooks (1894):

I lu-love you very well,
Much mu-more than I can tell,
With a lu-lu-lu-lu-love I cannot utter;
I kn-know just what to say
But my tongue gets in the way,
And af-fe-fe-fe-fe-fection's bound to stutter!
        

"The Potato" by Eliza Cook (1818-1839):

The useful and the beautiful
Are not far apart we know.
And thus the beautiful are glad to have,
The homely looking Potato.
On the land, or on the sea,
Wherever we may go,
We are always glad to welcome
The homely Potato.
A practical and moral lesson
This may plainly show,
That though homely, our heart can be
Like that of the homely Potato.
Copyright © 1997 by Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About

Writing very bad poetry requires talent.  It helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence.

The 131 poems collected in this first-of-its-kind anthology are so glaringly awful that they embody a kind of genius.  From Fred Emerson Brooks' "The Stuttering Lover" to Matthew Green's "The Spleen" to Georgia Bailey Parrington's misguided "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy", they mangle meter, run rampant over rhyme, and bludgeon us into insensibility with their grandiosity, anticlimax, and malapropism.

Guaranteed to move even the most stoic reader to tears (of laughter), Very Bad Poetry is sure to become a favorite of the poetically inclined (and disinclined).

Excerpt

From "The Stuttering Lover" by Emerson Brooks (1894):

I lu-love you very well,
Much mu-more than I can tell,
With a lu-lu-lu-lu-love I cannot utter;
I kn-know just what to say
But my tongue gets in the way,
And af-fe-fe-fe-fe-fection's bound to stutter!
        

"The Potato" by Eliza Cook (1818-1839):

The useful and the beautiful
Are not far apart we know.
And thus the beautiful are glad to have,
The homely looking Potato.
On the land, or on the sea,
Wherever we may go,
We are always glad to welcome
The homely Potato.
A practical and moral lesson
This may plainly show,
That though homely, our heart can be
Like that of the homely Potato.
Copyright © 1997 by Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Additional formats

Other Books by this Author

Penguin Random House Backlist Vault

Penguin Random House Sales

Penguin Random House

Legal

Back to Top
0
    • 0
    Wish List (0)