Good and bad poetry and the in between

Original illustrations by Paul Killebrew.

What are we to do with lines like these?

We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you’ll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

We might grow slightly nauseated. We might (who knows?) get hungry. We might gleefully illuminate the poetic palsies that weaken the frame of this work, James McIntyre’s “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese”: the clanging rhymes, the collapsing meter, the misguided coronation of a Canadian dairy queen.

Alternatively—as we reread in delight, as we probably just did—we might note the workings of a mysterious alchemy. Just as milk ferments into cheese, so can bad poetry, in this and other cases, transform into something rather enjoyable. Like a pungent Roquefort, bad poetry can stink in marvelously complex ways.

Yet just as cheese sometimes gets too moldy—to plunge forward with my metaphor in the blithe manner of James McIntyre—so can bad poetry rot beyond possible appreciation. Charles Lee and D.B. Wyndham Lewis discussed this problem in their famed anthology The Stuffed Owl (1930), a collection of bad poetry that has served as a model for many such volumes to follow. They outlined distinctions between “good Bad Verse,” which they sought for their book, and “bad Bad Verse,” which they avoided. “The field of bad Bad Verse is vast, and confusing in its tropical luxuriance,” they opined, before launching into a description of its authors (“the illiterate, the semi-literate, the Babu, the nature-loving contributor to the county newspaper, the retired station-master, the spinster lady coyly attuned to Life and Spring”). When it came to explaining their preference for the elusive “good Bad” variety, however, Lewis and Lee grew cagey:

It would, indeed, be a permissible exercise in dialectic to prove here conclusively and inclusively, if we had the time, that good Bad Verse has an eerie, supernal beauty comparable in its accidents with the beauty of Good Verse. . . . We will merely assert here that good Bad verse . . . is devilish pleasing.

To what do we owe the devilish pleasure—and how has it grown powerful enough to prompt the succession of bad-poetry anthologies that followed The Stuffed Owl? These works include, but are not limited to, The Worst English Poets (1958), Pegasus Descending: A Book of the Best Bad Verse (1971), The Joy of Bad Verse (1988), In Search of the World’s Worst Writers (2000), and Very Bad Poetry (1997), edited by a brother-and-sister team who also published The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said (1993) and The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said(1994). In 2009, according to Nielsen BookScan, Very Bad Poetry has sold as many copies as Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Book of Verse, suggesting that the anthology-worshiping public values the good Bad as much as the good Good. But why?

Is it because lovers of bad verse are bad people?”