Atrocious poetry celebrated in Michigan

DETROIT - Rudy Espinoza is a bad poet - a really bad poet - and that's a good thing.

Putting pen to paper recently, Espinoza churned out a wrenched parody of renowned poet T.S. Eliot and managed to beat 60 other terrible poets to be crowned the worst of the worst.

''It's one thing to write, but to be known as a bad poet - I guess someone's got to have that title,'' said Espinoza, 28, whose ''Love Song of A. Gino Angelo'' earned first prize in this year's Julia A. Moore Poetry Parody.

''I guess that's me now,'' said a laughing Espinoza, who received a garish, pink and red iridescent trophy topped with an ear of corn.

The prize's namesake wrote serious poetry, badly. She often dealt with untimely death, such as a drowned child or people being crushed, and critics roundly denounced her writing as horrible.

Sponsored by the Flint Public Library, the contest is in its 10th year, the brainchild of a librarian who saw Moore's poetry and decided there had to be a contest.

The library held a festival a week ago to honor the winners and Moore's memory. Organizer Renee Nixon said each year a woman dresses up like Moore (1847-1920) and gives a dramatic reading before the finalists read their work.

''Some of them were truly terrible and some of them were very funny, and that's the intent - to shed some humor ... into an art form that can be stuffy sometimes,'' she said.

Simply being funny isn't the only way to win, since Moore herself never meant to be humorous. She made readers laugh because of her poems' forced rhymes, awkward phrasing and mostly morbid themes.

Take her poem ''Willie and Nellie,'' for example. It begins: ''Willie and Nellie, one evening sat/ By their own little cottage door/ They saw a man go staggering by/ Says Willie, 'that's Mr. Lanore'/ He is just going home from town, where/ He has been in a saloon.''

In fairness, not everyone thinks Moore's work is laughable. A Web site dedicated to her work includes full-text versions of many of her poems and invites reviews rather than parodies.

The festival isn't the only contest to highlight goofy writing. The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to write the worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel while the International Imitation Hemingway Competition asks participants to sound like and read like Ernest Hemingway.

Espinoza's winning poem worked off Eliot's ''Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,'' a poem about a man who feels isolated and timid in middle age. Espinoza, who said he's been writing poetry for 15 years, said he just changed the words and the context to create his prize-winning piece.

An excerpt from Espinoza's poem reads: ''Lets go through the broken streets, the gutters/ trampled under our feets,/ meet restless women in the dirt motels of Dort Highway/ go get greasy spoon food, eat and not pay/ down the streets that open up to discontent/ so we look at each other and ask/ what the hell is this?/ hey, what's that smell?''

He said the words just came to him.

Danny Rendleman, one of the two Moore contest judges, said he looked for poems that made light of everyday occurrences and parodies that are easily recognizable. Rendleman, a poet and lecturer at the University of Michigan at Flint, said poems that make off-color references to bodily functions just don't work.

''We're looking for something a little more subtle,'' he said.

On the Net:

The contest: http://www.flint.lib.mi.us/about/programs/jmoore/juliahome.html

On Moore: http://www.wmich.edu/english/txt/Moore