World's worst poem

For years the poem by William Topaz McGonagall about the December 1879 train disaster in Scotland, The Tay Bridge Disaster, was regarded as the world's worst poem. Two lines from it were judged as the worst ever written.

And the cry rang out all o'er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down

But now they are saying they have a new champion. The poem: A Tragedy by Theophile Marzials, contained in a 1973 collection called The Gallery of Pigeons has been described as '... the absolute epitome of awfulness'. Here it is:

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop,
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop ...
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop...
And my head shrieks - "Stop"
And my heart shrieks - "Die."...
Ugh! yet I knew - I knew
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end--
My Devil - My "friend."...
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air -
I can do,
I can dare
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip, drop.)
I can dare, I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop
Dead.
Plop, flop,
Plop.

If you think it is easy to write awful poetry, please visit the Bad Poetry website by Seamus Cooney, according to whom, 'There is a huge amount of bad poetry in the world. Although new bad poems are being written by the hundreds every day (many of them in university creative writing classes), most bad poetry is simply weak and ineffectual and lacking in interest and (fortunately) is soon forgotten. To achieve memorable badness is not so easy. It has to be done innocently, by a poet unaware of his or her defects. The right combination of lofty ambition, humorless self-confidence, and crass incompetence is rare and precious...'

Visit the website to read some of the worlds worst poems. You will be surprised at some of the names you will see there.

Website: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bad/index.html