Ummm, Tupac Shakur. My girlfriend and I went to the help desk at the local Borders Book Shop looking for a particular title. A young lady shows up and asks “Where can I find the lost poetry of Tupac Shakur?”. No joke, the guy behind the desk says it’s right after the Shakespeare section.
What did I say about Poets Laureate… I don’t think Dryden ever wrote any utterly awful verse, at least outside his hideous plays (his plays are mostly very period-bound, awful stuff–try the ghastly Aurung-Zebe for instance). That said, his poetry is nowadays very much an acquired taste, & I can’t say I think it worth acquiring, beyond reading his two great satires “Mac Flecknoe” & “Absalom & Achitophel”. I say this having read such meisterwerks as “Religio Laici” & “The Hind & the Panther”…snore.
I’ve no idea who these “critics” are, as the answer is certainly not, to judge by any serious writing on WCW I’ve read (say Mariani). Take a look at say the useful paperback casebook edited by Charles Tomlnson for an example of criticism on WCW up to the 1960s. I think you’re misled by the fact that such poems are popular for teaching high school students because they’re short & seem easily graspable. I should point out that “The Red Wheelbarrow” is much best read in the original context, which is the long mixed-genre text Spring and All; it was only later severed from this volume as a free-standing poem (& the title was added at this point–a mistake, I think, as it slightly short-circuits the internal movement of the poem).
Before I saw this was about FAMOUS horrible poets, I started a google search for ‘horrible goth poetry’. I know it doesn’t apply to this thread, but I had to share what I found on one of the first pages that came up.
globes of flesh
meet in the middle
black butterfly
hemorrhoid of doom
swirling meaty flesh of the night
vampire
BITE BITE BITE MOTHERFUCKER
hemorrhoid of doom?
HEMORRHOID?
i’d understand hemorrhage, maybe.
Years ago, a friend of mine wrote a book called Rasputin Fish, the World’s Worst Poet:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0951507303/qid%3D1019473415/202-7588070-9029458
Unfortunately, the book is out of print. But if enough people request it, perhaps they can bring it back. And confound Amazon.com .
Seriously, the author, Michael Lea, was a professor of Optics (!), with a wicked sense of humor that he concealed beneath a deadpan demeanor. He kept an enormous stack of unsold skits, built “nothing” machines (kinetic sculptures), and, while in grad school, produced one of the funniest student films I’ve ever seen – “The Optics Film”, which I would love to own a copy of.
I can’t believe that no one has mentioned Jim Morrison yet.
In “Felton and Fowler’s Best, Worst, and Most Unusual” they mention Edgar Guest, along with a couplet that someone coined referring to his oeuvre:
“I’d rather fail the Wasserman test
Than read the poems of Edgar Guest.”
Thanks for remembering–I miss that one too.
The cheese guy’s poems are so over the top–are we sure he was serious? Isn’t everybody a critic? Wouldn’t these guys have shown their poems to their friends? I don’t think even my mother would pat my knee and say, “That’s nice dear,” if I showed her something like the Queen of Cheese poem.
You’ve already given my answer. Walt Whitman’s popularity completely baffles me, and I can’t see what any one likes about his pompous style. (" I speak for…" everyone. More than a little presumptuous that you’d speak better for them than they can themselves, Walt old buddy) It took four years of being forced to read his drivel before I read one of his poems that didn’t immediately rub me the wrong way- “the astronomer.” I consider myself lucky that I’ll never need to read another of his poems.
I have to put in a vote for Gerard Manley Hopkins. My high school English teacher thought he was, quite literally, God’s gift to literature, so I admit there may be some teenage neuroses speaking here, but I don’t care. I still say his work was remarkably bad.
In my cynical opinion, English teachers (and students) like his short poems because they’re easy to teach (short), easy to read (short) and easy to understand (did I mention that they’re short?). They’re, if I recall the name correctly, “Imagist” poems that are designed to crystalize one specific object or scene. So complaining that “it’s just what this stupid wheelbarrow looks like” isn’t really useful, since that’s exactly what it’s trying to do. (Though the question of whether it’s worth doing is always open.)
Williams, to me, is primarily the author of Paterson, one of the great long poems in the English language and the best book-length poem ever written by an American. (So an insult to Williams is fightin’ words to me…)
Lewis Carroll.
Oh God how I hate Jabberwocky. But of course that is just my opinion.
Here is the list of the 10 Worst-Ever Published Poets in the English Language from my book entitled The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists by Karl Shaw.
- William McGonagall (1825-1902)
- King Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786-1868)
- Alfred Austin (1835-1913)
- Joseph Gwyer (1835-90?)
- Julia A. Moore (1847-1920)
- J. Gordon Coogler (1865-1901)
- Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939)
- The Reverend Cornelius Whur (1782-1953)
- Henry James Pye (1745-1913)
- Carmen Sylva (1843-1916) [Romania’s first Queen Consort, Elisabeth of Wied]
I’ve hated Hopkins ever since he used the word “stippled” in a poem. Just that one word was enough.
Exactly what were King Ludwig I of Bavaria & Carmen Sylva doing writing poems in English?
Incidentally, the list above is entirely confined to dead poets, presumably out of tact. If you want to see a good instance of absolutely terrible poetry by a living poet, you could sample Douglas Clark, a man who lives in Bath. He has a website online. He’s a nice man (I’ve corresponded with him) but a truly awful writer.
G.B.H. Hornswoggler: Williams’ early work is clearly comparable to the Imagists, but to my knowledge the term is usually applied to a different set of authors, of which the most notable are (the early) Ezra Pound & H.D. – Paterson is indeed a major long poem. Like many or all major long poems of the 20th century (e.g. Pound’s Cantos, Eliot’s Four Quartets, Crane’s The Bridge, Olson’s Maximus, Zukofsky’s “A”), it’s also deeply problematic, & my own sympathies are with those (e.g. Randall Jarrell, Charles Tomlinson) who consider it extremely uneven. Book One is extraordinary; thereafter it becomes less consistently successful, & I must confess that elements like the “C.” letters (large quantities of WCW’s correspondence spatchcocked into the text) seem to me hard to justify. Like a lot of long modernist poems composed over a lengthy period of time, it suffers from gradually loosening over time, so that just about anything that comes into the author’s mind can go in.
Why? This has got to be the silliest reason for disliking a poem I’ve ever come across.
I would have to nominate an old classmate of mine who wrote the following:
Before you ask… no, we weren’t six years old at the time. We were both high school juniors. He even submitted the poem to our school literary magazine, of which I was the editor.
He was really upset when I kept refusing to publish the danged thing.
What about Pam Ayres? try http://www.monologues.co.uk/My_Teeth.htm
It has to be read in the corect accent to appreciate the full awfulness.
Let’s not forget that immortal couplet:
I’d rather fail my Wasserman test
Than read the poetry of Sir Edgar Guest.
TheWasserman test was for syphllis. Guest wrote incredible bad poetry, including “The Man in the Glass.”
In my opinion - all of them - all over the world - don’t limit it to the United States.