Bad poetry becomes avenue to good poetry

Don't criticize Peter Suruda's 10th-grade students for their bad poetry.

It's what they were supposed to write.

The students spent much of last week studying whom Suruda terms "the worst poets of all time": beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, hippie darling Richard Brautigan and jokester Ogden Nash.

Then, in a can-you-top-this competition, the students at Seattle's Summit K-12 school have sought to commit the worst poetic crimes they can: mangled meters, tortured rhymes, nonsensical pairings of dissimilar words, random division of lines.

Today, one sophomore will be honored - or, if you prefer, dishonored - with the Sophomoric Poetry trophy, given annually to the student who writes the worst of the bad poems.

Intended to help students understand the structure of poetry by studying the bad as well as the good, the unusual contest makes poetry fun.

Summit, an alternative school, provides fertile soil for this sort of lesson. Students address most teachers by their first names. Suruda, who has published several poems in literary journals, wears a T-shirt to class. Guitars lean against the wall for his afternoon guitar classes. Posters commemorate Bob Dylan, blues master John Lee Hooker and the Grateful Dead.

This is the third year Suruda's two sophomore language-arts classes have studied bad poetry and, in a Roman-inspired fertility ritual, planted a garden. In the first year the class used bad poems as fertilizer but found they were a poor substitute for manure.

Suruda chose the ides of March for the outdoor celebration because it was the day when the Roman emperor was killed in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The students studied the play before taking on bad poetry.

The bard's play features a minor character named Cinna, who is mistaken by a vengeful mob for a conspirator of the same name. When the hapless man protests he shouldn't be torn to pieces because he's Cinna the poet, a member of the crowd responds, "Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses."

The bad-poetry contest was inspired by San Jose State University's popular Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. That contest, recognizing the worst prose entries, is named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel "Paul Clifford" begins with the now-familiar line, "It was a dark and stormy night."

There's a serious purpose behind the fun at the Summit school.

In poetry, Suruda explains, "There are all the traps you can fall into: over-wrung emotions, too much of this and too much of that. I like doing the bad before they tackle the good. They see some of the common traps in poems that are cliched."

Not everyone would agree that Suruda's "worst" poets are all that bad, notes Steve Quig, the North Seattle Community College English-department coordinator who judges Suruda's bad-poetry contest each year.

But Quig is impressed with the students' work. "It's fun to see these writers make fun of themselves, parodying the kind of poetry that is often taken very seriously at that level. They seem to have a lot of sophistication about that."

Keith Ervin's phone message number is 206-464-2105. His e-mail address is kervin@seattletimes.com

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Examples of bad poetry

Here are some of the deliberately bad entries submitted by Peter Suruda's students in the Sophomoric Poetry contest.

Untitled

Oh, lamentable penguin

of black

of white

The love of emotions

overwhelms you

Your heart can't fly

and your wings can't either

The ice, sat upon by you,

is hard

- Trini Carrasquel, 2000

Temperamental truths

I love you like a temperamental duck

waddling through the tall grass

or swimming through the

blue temperamental waterWhen you are mad at me

I can almost hear you yell:

"Quack! Quack!"When you are mad at me

I go down to our pond

and watch

soggy bread sink

into the

murky water

when you are mad

- Hannah Todd, 1999 winner

Smokin Joe

Smoke Joe Smoke,

Smoke like . . .

. . . like you've never

. . . never smoked . . .

. . . before.

Jump Joe Jump

Jump over . . .

. . . over and . . .

. . . through . . .

. . . through the trees.

Smoke Joe.

- Jesse Hoffman,

1999 runner-up