Confessions of a Bad Poet

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

So says G K Chesterton, who did many things but rarely did them badly. He isn’t saying that we should not strive to do things well, but only that if something worth doing, then it should be done regardless of our capacity to do it well or not.

However, I have found that there is something to be said for doing something deliberately badly. Writing poetry is a natural compulsion for me, but I have rarely enjoyed it so much as when I deliberately wrote bad poetry. The poetic artform is in a bad position at the moment, enlarged and glutted on its own importance, swelled with hot air as the stream of consciousness and the unstaunched flow of mere surface thought has replaced artistic constraint and rigorous reworking. Generations of children in schools have been drilled in poetic appreciation — and this is exactly where the trouble originates. They are taught everything about poetry except how to say ‘I don’t like this one’. Individual taste is denegrated — if you don’t like it, then you don’t understand it. Personal opinion is obliterated, and without prefence there can be no true appreciation.

What’s the remedy? Bad poetry. Only by writing truly awful verse can we rectify this situation. Hold up poetry that is indisputably awful for everyone to ridicule and revile, and the balance may be reset. The tools used to recognise bad poetry are a good many of the ones to recognise good poetry. And so it was with this aim that my writing partner Russell Thompson and I began to write The Colour Papers, almost four years ago now. And we created the characters of David White and Horace Greene in order to bring not just humour and satire, but also a light of objective sanity into the world of poetry. Bad poetry, unlike good, must be completely indiscriminate and we found ourselves lampooning the poets we admire as much as the ones that we don’t, and found a greater appreciation for both.

Volume 1

We published the first Colour Papers book ourselves, at the end of 2009. We had a big launch, sold a couple hundred copies, and actually managed to break even on the costs, which would have been beyond the dreams of our fictional alter egos. We then immediately started writing book two, and while we did we decided that such complete artless awfulness could not only be kept between the two of us and some few hundred of our nearest friends — its true home was the internet! And so, we’ve decided to serialise volume two on its own dedicated webpage, posting the letters at two week intervals, all of them for free to read online. Volume one is now available to buy as a hardcopy and for the first time also to download as an ebook. A preview of the first two chapters can be found here.

Please read our bad poetry and the absurd correspondences that attempt to justify it, and seriously consider passing what you read on. You can join the facebook fan page through this link, and get updates through twitter by following this one.

Not all poetry is good. Much of it is very, very bad. And it has been sobering to find that a great deal of poetry is even worse than we can intentionally write it, but that will not stop us from trying even harder, and going to even greater lengths, to write the very worst poetry possible.