Samantha Barrow, AKA "Dr. Sammy", has been fired as a waitress (thrice), grant writer, gardener, cleaning lady and bakery counter girl. She once got hired to be a barista while wearing no shoes and boxer shorts, and has never lost work as a babysitter. Dr. Sammy is often allowed, and even encouraged financially, to teach poetry to children in schools throughout Philadelphia and NYC. She has been hired repeatedly by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The PA Council on the Arts, The Philadelphia Cultural Heritage Foundation, and other important institutions her intern is currently trying to fabricate. Her workshop, The Fine Art of Writing Bad Poetry, was initially developed for Fritz Lang’s Sundown School House installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. They talked about this workshop in the New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer published a notable photograph of her squatting next to a giant hand painted card board cut out of Hall and Oats which was also considered art in that context.
Philosophy
"In order to write the good poems, you must be willing to write the bad ones." I don’t know who said it first, but it’s true. We will be making a preemptive attack on bad poems across genres including slam, narrative, language etc. We will practice the fine art of crappy rhymes, overwrought metaphor, and confessional cliché. You will laugh at yourself and your peers. You may even leave with a couple lines worth keeping, but please don’t count on it. People with all levels of writing experience are welcome to attend.
People hate poetry. People like to hate poetry. Poets hate poetry sometimes. It can be arrogant, boring, condescending, self-aggrandizing, confusing, syrupy, unoriginal and embarrassing. Sitting through a bad reading or writing session can make you feel like you are helpless to change your own diaper and you are soaking in it. Co-opting this hatred is sitting down beside a bratty child in the middle of a tantrum and screaming along with her. It's a lot easier than trying to get her to shut up.
The underlying message here for the writers of poetry is that it's ok, and actually a good idea, to fuck up. This can get harder and harder to believe as we start producing better and better poems. Or maybe it is hardest at the beginning before you've ever written anything you liked and you just know you'll feel like you're fat and pimply in a teeny weenie bikini if you open your mouth. Regardless, it is a relief to not take your poetic self so damn seriously for a minute.
Instead of approaching poetry as a series of literary booby traps to avoid, we romp into it and detonate the don'ts on purpose. The field looks a lot cleaner when we're done.
What We Do
There are many ways to get started writing poetry badly. I usually start off by having the group read this aloud:
A By No Means Exhaustive List of Ways to Wreck a Poem
By Dr. Sammy
-
use clichés, lots of them
(refer to genitals as flowers or love as a rose, talk about weeds coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk etc.) -
employ only vague language
(I love politics and peace. They make me feel good) -
add large complicated words where you dont need them
(The tumbling curpuscus ricocheted off the adjacent unilateral.) -
use lots of adjectives
(her sparkling, drooling, effervescent eyes) -
use lots of adverbs
(his complacently wandering eyes) -
mix metaphors
(fly like a drowning bird) - choose boring verbs
-
excessive
spacing 1 -
Don't show, tell
(she was sad, so so sad) - employ a melodramatic tone, no one before you has ever experienced what you are about to tell them. You are on your way to enlightening the world.
- make sure to read it in creepy poet voice
Then we wreck some good lines written by people we don't know personally and practice the last item on the list: "make sure to read it in a creepy poet voice" by passing around Jewel's A Night Without Armor.2 She is a patron saint for the class, a supreme example of many of the ways to succeed on that list. The ensuing conversation might go something like this:
"Now class, what do you hear Jewel doing in this poem?" A hand goes up.
"I know Dr. Sammy, she is melodramatic and used a lot of clichés"
"Good Alice, can you point out a specific place in the text for us?"
"Yes. 'I am told I am adored by millions but no one calls' is melodramatic, and 'plum blossomed Love' is cliché."
"Beautiful! Anyone else?"
"Much of Jewel's work could fit in the 'excessive spacing' category, but here that is overshadowed by the way she capitalizes rampantly and unnecessarily," Sugar chimes in.
In real life I hate being called Sammy. I go by Samantha or Sam. But Dr. Sammy is willing to write the crappy poems that the seriously fancy poet in me would never deign to script. I invite them to make up names for themselves too, and during the initial intros ask them to tell some lies about who they are and where they're from. I carry a brief case and wear a stained tie.
Then we might read some Neruda. I love Neruda, but his Book of Questions is a great thing to mangle. For the following example, I brought in a promo poster for the WB recording artist Young Love as a visual. He looks like a young Kate Moss who still wants to join the White Stripes. Some wrote poem questions to the musician while others abstracted the love concept.
Poems for Young Love (after Neruda) (excerpts)
II who could you give it all up for? what can i do to make it me? will you remember my shadow? why does it wander so? young love when it's dark you make me light. when will it end? III who pulls the puppet strings, when your arms and legs dance? when your heart cries who will dab its tears? is it true that heat rises? IV when i am calling, young love do you hear me? at the dawn when will the sun rise? on the horizon whose light is that? ~ sara jane muratori
Audience
I've found this workshop to be successful as a single session. It is inviting to closet writers and other kinds of artists who may not feel compelled to express their deepest feelings or ponder great questions through metaphor, but could use a little kick in the ass to get those song lyrics done or would like to be uplifted by something other than TV and beer while the divorce happens.
But I also encourage poet teachers to incorporate this concept as part of their plans for longer ongoing sessions. I used it once to freshen up our approach in a workshop I was facilitating with survivors of sexual assault. One participant wrote this later:
"We did some bad poetry writing in our workshop, which was for me an opportunity to use humor to write about the abuse. It's very freeing to get to make fun of these really raw and 'precious' parts of yourself. I mean, I'd really love to do some sexual abuse survivor stand-up comedy."
I have found it particularly effective in after school programs or any other situation where teenagers are detained against their will and my job is make them love themselves and give a shit about prosody.
How bad can it be?
A few more examples:
from "The ICA Cycle" in my bones hollow voice of tundra chilling blood freezing marrow. i slip on a banana skin washed up by the ocean of your eyes. the sea are you, and i am sand. -V. Melvyn (my nom de plume) (notable bad poetry aspects: -ee cummings-like lack of caps and scant punctuation -The last line is meant to recall Sean Penn's role in I am Sam) I transcend all the chaos of this world, for it is not mine; Living outside the borders of reason and inside the boundaries of rhyme. ~Anon
Workshop Offerings
Bad poetry workshops are available for kids and adults. Contact poet@samanthabarrow.com.
Footnotes
[1] Jamie-Lee Josselyn came up with this one.
[2] Beau Sia is an inspiration to mocking Jewel with his book A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge