CANYON, Texas — Shocking sonnets, lame limericks and odious odes all are welcome at the 2024 West Texas A&M University Bad Poetry Contest, presented by Brick & Elm magazine.
The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. March 1 in the Sybil B. Harrington Fine Arts Complex Recital Hall on WT’s Canyon campus.
“Good poetry is an acquired taste, but bad poetry can appeal to everyone,” said Matthew Harrison, WT’s Wendy and Stanley Marsh 3 Professor of Shakespeare. “But bad poetry is open to everyone. We all love an unexpected rhyme, a goofy lyric, a metaphor that makes you laugh. We want to celebrate the fun of playing with words that animates everything from hallmark cards to country songs, rap battles to knock-knock jokes. We always talk about how great our community is, but once a year we get to celebrate that we’re terrible.”
Participants—either WT-affiliated or from the general public—should bring two or three original poems. Audience members also are welcome to simply enjoy, to use that word loosely, the readings.
Submissions in the past have ranged from cowboy poetry to off-kilter rants, perfectly metrical gems to a barely rhyming list of diseases found in cattle. Poets are asked to keep their material in the PG-13 range.
“Not everyone can be a good poet, but it turns out that most of us can be bad poets. And ‘bad’ is a really broad category. It can be related to subject matter, or rhyme scheme, or delivery, or phrasing,” said Brick & Elm publisher Jason Boyett. “We know bad poetry when we hear it, and when we hear it, we want to celebrate it.”
The event is held by the Department of English, Philosophy and Modern Languages in WT’s Sybil B. Harrington College of Fine Arts and Humanities.
Fostering an appreciation of the arts is a key mission of the University’s long-range plan, WT 125: From the Panhandle to the World.
That plan is fueled by the historic One West comprehensive fundraising campaign, which reached its initial $125 million goal 18 months after publicly launching in September 2021. The campaign’s new goal is to reach $175 million by 2025; currently, it has raised more than $150 million.
