The joys of bad poetry

Good poetry is not easily written, taking skill, discipline, lots of practice and so forth. Bad poetry on the other hand, is available to all of us. We might be naturally bad, or we might hone it deliberately. Bad poetry has the potential for being really funny, especially in a context where the whole point of the exercise is having a giggle. To this end, I am going forth and perpetrating workshops in how to right atrocious poetry, with a view to having a bit of a slam afterwards, and a lot of laughter.

I’ve long been interested in facilitating creativity. One of the biggest blocks to being creative is disbelief. People are often so convinced that they’re going to be rubbish, that they won’t even try. They are going to be rubbish. We all start out rubbish, and no one gets to be good at anything, much less brilliant, without going through the being useless at it stage first. If no one shouldered their innate inability and tried to do things anyway, very little would happen. However, being crap is a demoralising business. Airing your ineptitude publically is intimidating, and that too is a barrier to learning and progressing. So, the aim of doing a bad poetry workshop is in part to give permission to be useless. Here is a space in which, the more awful you are, the better. You cannot possibly fail. All that remains is exactly how awfully funny your dreadful poetry turns out to be.

There’s safety in comedy. When the aim is to make people laugh at you, then whatever it takes you there is going to do it. I’m confident enough that I can give enough pointers that everyone involved has a shot at eliciting a giggle or two.

By going through and picking out lots of different ways to deliberately make poetry awful, we’ll also be doing a thing. Anyone who comes along will at least end up with plenty of features to avoid, which also gives them a better shot at writing some good poetry, if they get the urge. It’s not easy teaching people how to be good poets, but by teaching how to be dreadful, I can at the same time teach how not to be dreadful.

The first airing of my Bad Poetry workshop will be at Steampunk Doncaster next Sunday (16th June). It’s something I’m very happy to roll out other places, too. Playful, inclusive, entertaining, participatory, I think bad poetry workshops and bad poetry slams have a great deal of potential. If you fancy a bit of this kind of silliness at an event, do let me know. If I can get to you and fit it all in, then I will.