Bad Poetry Day is a day where you can unashamedly tap into your cheesy side and celebrate the glory of truly bad verse.

Bad Poetry day is observed annually on 18 August, and it’s the perfect opportunity to hark back to when you were a tortured teenager putting all your dark thoughts into (let’s admit it now) truly terrible poems. Or, you can spend the day reading awful poetry by the masters of the art form.  

Look up Willian Topaz McGonagall to get an idea of how dark (and terrible) poetry can get. McGonagall’s work focused on but was not limited to disasters and catastrophes. He wrote about railway disasters, disasters at sea, fire disasters, natural disasters and other tragedies. He was so famously bad that readings are still staged of his work more than a century after his death.

Listen, just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.  If you’re not into reading other people’s bad poems, you can use this day to tap into your inner bad poet – and in this technological age, you don’t need to open a book to read or write bad poetry. Generating bad poetry is only a few clicks away.  

One particularly fun website is The Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator which lets you create all sorts of bad ‘darkly gothic’ poems with topics ranging from ‘Supernatural Violence and Horror’ to the ‘Eternal Love of Vampires’. See our effort, created about the  ‘Fear of Religious Persecution’. I think you’ll agree it’s really, really awful.

Losing Faith
Slender beams of moonlight enter
this darkened chamber as I kneel,
always lost, always cold,
frozen here,
waiting.

Tortured forms wrought in panes of glass loom as
dust dances in the air,
forming an image in my mind,
penetrating my naked flesh.
Blood on a deathless face.

I raise my head, now crying out for
this callous darkness.

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Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash