Writing Homework Help

Go back and review Chapter 5 in Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand. This is your chance to have fun and work on your bad poetry writing. Choose a loved one (or former loved one) you’d like to write a Valentine poem to. Perhaps this poem is a love poem or just a good occasion to write a love-turned-to-something-worse poem. Using as many of Kowit’s cautionary points as possible, write the worst Valentine’s poem possible. Include, for example, generalizations, clichés, abstractions, awful rhymes, archaic diction, stilted language, inappropriate tone, wordiness, and poor line-breaks. Be as goo-ily sentimental or as irrationally angry as you want. Have fun with this assignment! Be a BAD poet!

To get you further primed for this assignment, consider, for example, these lines from Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall (once described as the “worst poet in the history of the English language”) as he remembers those lost in the 1879 Tay Bridge disaster:

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last sabbath day of 1879

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

Or these lines, also from McGonagall:

On yonder hill there stood a coo

It’s no’ there noo

It must’a shif’ted.