Today’s Po’try URL–Vogon Division

I was unaware of the vanity poem scam, which consist of a publisher accepting all poems submitted to it for an anthology, and charging the authors for a copy of the book ($49.95). Of course, this is just a scam–if a publisher chooses a poem you write for an anthology, s/he should give you one copy of the book (at least) for free. Here is a cogent article about literary scame for background reading.

There is a organisation which takes advantage of this to submit the worst poetry possible to the anthology in the hopes that somehow, some day, the anthology will reject a poem. It runs a contest called the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest.

An example of a poem so bad that you might want to chew your own arm off rather than hear it is this one, Nicky Nacky Noo, by Stephen Abutlol.

Tum tum tum de tum
This is apoem I sings a lot
to make me very vary hapy.
I fink it will look good on a poster two.
and a cofey mug to shows my frineds
at work so they no i am an internashunal
poet who mite even winz a prise!
Then i wuld be vary famus
and hav lotz of muney
wich wuld be vary funny
coz some of them sayd I was
eliterite wich sucks
(I hopes I can say sucks, if not
please put a defferent word instead.)
and also I just sore the poem
has to be 20 lines long so
I am counting the lynes again.
This is line nienteen
and this in number twenty. Thanx. The End

I suspect that even a Vogon would be trying to escape from a reading of this one. Fortunately for Stephen, however, the poem was accepted by the publisher for their anthology.

Perhaps I should enter…

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