Bad Poetry Day: Why Writing Terrible Verse Makes You a Better Writer

The Vogons write the third-worst poetry in the universe. According to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Vogon poetry is so monumentally awful that the Vogons have used it as a form of torture. Audiences have been known to gnaw their own legs off instead of endure a full reading. Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex wrote the second-worst poetry, and the very worst perished along with its creator in the destruction of the planet Earth. For more, see how strong verbs sharpen any writing.

Bad Poetry Day, celebrated August 18th, invites you to aim somewhere in that range.

I’m not a poet. I’ve written 113+ books and none of them are poetry collections. But Bad Poetry Day is one of my favorite minor holidays because it gets at something most writing advice ignores: the value of writing badly on purpose.

Why Bad Writing on Purpose Is Good Practice

Every writer carries a mental editor that evaluates sentences as they’re being written. That editor is useful during revision. It’s devastating during drafting. The editor says this sentence isn’t good enough before the sentence is finished, and the result is paralysis. The cursor blinks. The page stays empty. The writer stares.

Bad Poetry Day kills the editor. You can’t write a bad poem while worrying about quality because quality is explicitly not the point. The assignment is to write something terrible, and that permission unlocks the part of your brain that produces words without judgment.

This is the same principle behind freewriting, morning pages, and every other exercise designed to separate generation from evaluation. (See The Write-Brain Workbook) But Bad Poetry Day adds something those exercises lack: an audience. You’re not just writing badly in private. You’re sharing it. Reading it out loud. Letting other people hear the worst thing you’ve ever committed to language. And surviving.

For writers who struggle with perfectionism, who can’t finish drafts because nothing meets their standards, who revise the first chapter forty times and never write the second, that survival is therapeutic.

The world doesn’t end when you write something bad. Nobody dies. The only consequence is laughter, and laughter is the opposite of the paralysis that perfectionism produces.

Watch: William McGonagall - Worst Poet Ever, eugenecheese

What Makes Poetry Bad

Knowing what makes poetry bad is useful for any writer, poet or not. Bad poetry fails for the same reasons bad prose fails, and studying the failure patterns sharpens your ability to recognize them in your own work.

Forced rhyme is the most obvious. When the writer contorts meaning to land on a rhyme, the reader feels the strain. “The moon was bright that fateful night / and everything was quite all right” tells you nothing except that the writer needed something to rhyme with “night.” The rhyme is driving the content instead of the content driving the rhyme.

Cliché is the second killer. “My heart soared like an eagle” was effective exactly once. Every use after that’s borrowed emotion. Bad poetry relies on phrases that overuse has drained of meaning. Good writing, in any form, finds the image that writers haven’t used a thousand times.

Sentimentality without specificity is the third. “Love is the most beautiful feeling in the world” is bad poetry because it’s abstract and universal in a way that connects with nobody. “She left her coffee on the counter and I drank it cold at noon because throwing it out felt like admitting she was gone” is specific in a way that connects with everyone. The principle is the same one that drives good fiction: concrete detail creates emotional impact. Abstract declaration doesn’t.

Sentimentality is the most dishonest failure, because it pretends to feel something while refusing to look at anything. The cold coffee line works because somebody noticed a cup on a counter. Abstract grief leaves the reader all the work and gives nothing back.

These problems show up in all writing, poetry included. My Showing and Telling Handbook covers the difference between abstract statement and concrete detail across all forms of fiction. The lesson applies whether you’re writing a sonnet or a thriller.

Famous Bad Poetry

Many readers consider William McGonagall the worst poet in the English language, and he’s more famous than most good poets. His “The Tay Bridge Disaster” is a masterpiece of unintentional comedy. The rhymes are forced, the meter lurches, and the emotional manipulation is so clumsy that it produces the opposite of its intended effect. He’s been in print continuously since the 1800s. Quality isn’t the only path to immortality.

I’ve got real affection for McGonagall. He meant every word, and there’s something almost admirable in a man that sincere and that wrong for that long. I’d take him over a careful, competent poet who never risked anything.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton gave us “It was a dark and stormy night,” a sentence so overwrought that an entire bad writing contest bears his name. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has awarded prizes for the worst opening sentence since 1982. The entries are deliberately terrible, crafted with the same attention to structure and rhythm that good writing requires, just pointed in the opposite direction.

And of course the Vogons. Adams understood that bad poetry requires commitment. The Vogon poet doesn’t know his poetry is bad. He believes it’s magnificent. That gap between the creator’s perception and the audience’s experience is comedy, but it’s also a warning: every writer has blind spots, and the conviction that your work is brilliant doesn’t make it so. Beta readers exist for a reason. My Beta Reader Handbook covers how to get honest feedback that reveals what you can’t see yourself.

The writer I worry about most is the one who’s certain the work is wonderful and won’t show it to anybody who might disagree. A doubtful writer can be coached. A certain one usually has to be humbled first, and the market does that job far less kindly than a beta reader would.

How do you celebrate Bad Poetry Day?

Write a poem. Make it terrible. Read it to someone.

If you want structure, try these approaches. Write a love poem using only corporate jargon. Write a nature poem where every rhyme is forced. Write an epic poem about something mundane like doing laundry or waiting in line at the DMV. Write a poem in the style of a Vogon: pompous, bloated, and completely certain of its own genius.

The corporate jargon love poem is my pick of that list. Put circle back and synergy into a declaration of devotion and you’ll learn more about tone in ten minutes than a semester of lectures would teach you.

The exercise works because it requires the same skills good writing requires, just deployed differently. You still need rhythm, word choice, structure, and an awareness of audience expectation. You’re just aiming to miss the target instead of hit it, and aiming to miss requires knowing exactly where the target is.

Bad Poetry Day is August 18th. Write something awful. Share it with someone. Let the inner editor take the day off. Then go back to your real work tomorrow with the knowledge that writing badly didn’t destroy you, and the freedom that comes from knowing that.

The writers who can’t bring themselves to write badly on purpose are usually the ones who need it most. Give yourself one day of permission to be awful. Nothing gets damaged, and I’d bet it loosens something that a year of careful drafting never touched.

For writers developing their craft, my writing handbooks cover every element of fiction and nonfiction. For one-on-one guidance, book coaching is available. Start with a conversation.

Bad Poetry Day FAQ