|
||||
|
|
||||
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
As bad as it gets
Wretched writers take poetic license
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
There's honor in penning putrid prose and poetry. A number of contests reward lengthy lines of sour sentences full of flowery phrases, awkward analogies, silly similes and annoying alliteration.
But these atrocious writers don't aspire to just prizes or big money advances. They pursue their craft for the infamy and fun of it, often injecting a little humor in the staid world of literature.
Winners receive "a pittance," said Scott Rice, an English professor who started the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. "I don't like to announce the amount. It's a small check and the notoriety."
The popular contest began at California's San Jose State University in 1982. Entries in the competition have increased from three the first year to several thousand in recent years. Entrants compete to write the worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel.
There are no minimum age requirements for the competition. "We have entries from grade school, middle school and high school," Rice said.
Ode to a pimple
The Web site for that contest lists previous winners and their victorious introductions. In 1989, Ray Gainey won for his entry that included a reference to a large pimple. It read:
Professor Frobisher couldn't believe he had missed seeing it for so long -- it was, after all, right there under his nose -- but in all his years of research into the intricate and mysterious ways of the universe, he had never noticed that the freckles on his upper lip, just below and to the left of the nostril, partially hidden until now by a hairy mole he had just removed a week before, exactly matched the pattern of the stars in the Pleides, down to the angry red zit that had just popped up where he and his colleagues had only today discovered an exploding nova. |
And the year before that, it was Rachel Sheeley's sports car metaphor that took home the grand prize:
Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven -- fueled by a single accelerant -- and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo. |
Another contest, the International Imitation Hemingway Competition, lets participants poke fun at Papa. It's unlikely any entries will surpass "A Farewell to Arms" or "The Sun Also Rises," but the parodies of Ernest Hemingway's macho posturings come with their own pleasures.
Merriment in morbidity
These writers intentionally create sentences that would provoke teachers and editors the world over to whip out their red pens. But there's a Michigan contest honoring a woman who wrote rotten rhymes accidentally.
|
QUICK VOTE | |
|
|
||
The Julia A. Moore Poetry Parody pays tribute to a woman who wrote serious poetry, badly. Often dealing with untimely death, such as a drowned child or people being crushed, her writing earned a reputation for being horrible.
The Flint Public Library sponsors the contest, which is in its 10th year. The library held a festival in May in honor of the winners and Moore's memory. Organizer and librarian Renee Nixon said each year a woman dresses up like Moore (1847-1920) and gives a dramatic reading before the finalists read their work.
"Some of them were truly terrible, and some of them were very funny," she said. "That's the intent -- to shed some humor ... into an art form that can be stuffy sometimes."
Simply being funny isn't the only way to win, since Moore herself never meant to be humorous. She made readers laugh because of her poems' forced rhymes, awkward phrasing and mostly morbid themes.
Take her poem "Willie and Nellie," for example. It begins:
Willie and Nellie, one evening sat |
Danny Rendleman, one of the two Moore contest judges, said he looked for poems that made light of everyday occurrences and parodies that are easily recognizable.
Rendleman, a poet and lecturer at the University of Michigan at Flint, said poems that make off-color references to bodily functions just don't work.
"We're looking for something a little more subtle," he said.
'Love Song' for a new age
This year's winner, Rudy Espinoza, churned out a wrenched parody of renowned poet T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Eliot's poem is about a man who feels isolated and timid in middle age. Espinoza, who said he's been writing poetry for 15 years, said he just changed the words and the context to create his prize-winning piece.
Espinoza's "Love Song of A. Gino Angelo" begins:
Lets go man, you know, you and I |
He said the words just came to him.
"It's one thing to write, but to be known as a bad poet -- I guess someone's got to have that title," said Espinoza, 28.
Espinoza received a garish, pink and red iridescent trophy topped with an ear of corn.
"What we try to do is find the tackiest trophy each year," Nixon said. "And that trophy seemed perfect since it's such a corny event."
CNNfyi's Christy Oglesby and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
RELATED SITES
Elements of poetry
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
T.S. Eliot
Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.
|
|
||||||||||
