Bad Poetry Quotes

“Borderline means you're one of those girls ...
... who walk around wearing long sleeves in the summer because you've carved up your forearms over your boyfriend. You make pathetic suicidal gestures and write bad poetry about them, listen to Ani DiFranco albums on endless repeat, end up in the emergency room for overdoses, scare off boyfriends by insisting they tell you that they love you five hundred times a day and hacking into their email to make sure they're not lying, have a police record for shoplifting, and your tooth enamel is eroded from purging. You've had five addresses and eight jobs in three years, your friends are avoiding your phone calls, you're questioning your sexuality, and the credit card companies are after you. It took a lot of years to admit that I was exactly that girl, and that the diagnostic criteria for the disorder were essentially an outline of my life.”

— Stacy Pershall

“There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look.”

— Ali Smith

“He's probably out there in the hallway right now, composing bad poetry in his head." Michi cleared her throat, her voice taking on a breathless lilt:
"Pale Fox's Daughter,
Her cherry lips haunt my dreams.
Something, something, breasts ...”

— Jay Kristoff

“I stopped going to therapy
because I knew my therapist was right
and I wanted to keep being wrong.
I wanted to keep my bad habits
like charms on a bracelet.
I did not want to be brave.
I think I like my brain best
in a bar fight with my heart.
I think I like myself a little broken.
I'm ok if that makes me less loved.
I like poetry better than therapy anyway.
The poems never judge me
for healing wrong.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“Summer in the trees! "It is time to strangle several bad poets." /
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead "poet" they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. /
Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor.”

— Kenneth Koch

“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

— Umberto Eco

“Reading the very best writers-let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy-is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”

— Harold Bloom

“What did you expect? That he'd send you flowers and write you bad poetry? That dead Nemean prowler is pretty much as close to a stuffed animal as you're ever going to get from a Spartan like Logan Quinn.”

— Jennifer Estep

“My Heart
I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind.
I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”

— Frank O'Hara

“See
it was like this when
we waltz into this place.
A couple of papish cats
is doing an Aztec two-step
And I says
Dad let's cut
but then this dame
comes up behind me see
and says
you and me could really exist
Wow I says
Only the next day
she has bad teeth
and really hates
poetry.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Do good works or commission an opera house or just take it out and gaze at it longingly when you think of the handsome prince you might have made your own. For the record, I favor the latter option, preferably paired with copious tears and the recitation of bad poetry.”

— Leigh Bardugo

“The Major wished young men wouldn't think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.”

— Helen Simonson

“The Bostonians are very well in their way. Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good. Their Common is no common thing - and the duck pond might answer - if its answer could be heard for the frogs.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“Modern evangelicals like to compare holy things to soft drinks, designer clothes, [and other products in] our modern consumerist culture. The problem with this is not ... the comparison to a created thing. The problem is that it is ... bad poetry. The Bible compares God to very mundane things, but does so with poetic wonder. God shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth.”

— Douglas Wilson

“The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

“But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.”

— StanisÅ‚aw Lem

“When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example:
I love you
You love me
Thank God for that
I'm so happy
And Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on):
Otter! Otter! Otter!
Don't lead cows to slaughter
I love you and I know
I should've told you soon-a
But you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna!
TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear.”

— T.J. Klune

“I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.”

— Marilyn Hacker

“I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.”

— Jacques Derrida

“As I read my poems aloud, I paid still more attention to sound in my writing. One morning as I revised, I set down a word that I knew was not right, and I heard myself think: But I can say it so that it's right. Immediately, I knew that I had understood one of the hazards of reading aloud. Performance can paper over bad writing, or substitute for the best language. Performance is a problem, and most performance poets or slammers are actors or standup comedians and not poets; we never hear a line break and seldom a new metaphor. There are other problems with the popularity of the poetry reading, but largely the reading has been good for poetry because poets watch their own poems come back to them on the faces of listeners. One addresses not only the Muse but actual people.”

— Donald Hall

“If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre
the poems, the poems!
in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.”

— Sarah Vowell

“I'd also heard that humans were a life-form of, at best, middling intelligence and prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry, and walking around in circles.”

— Matt Haig

“It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.”

— Peter Steele

“The reason so much bad poetry is written is that it is written as poetry instead of concept. And the reason the public doesn't understand poetry is that there is nothing to understand, and the reason most poets write it is that they think they understand. Nothing is to be understood or "regained." It is simply to be written. By someone. Sometime. And not too often.”

— Charles Bukowski

“My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.”

— Harold Bloom

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”

— Oscar Wilde

“There are few things in this life more bamboo-under-fingernails than good poetry read aloud badly-unless it is bad poetry read aloud badly.”

— Josh Lanyon

“You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.”

— Lena Dunham

“Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.”

— David Sedaris

“I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.”

— Jesmyn Ward

“If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom
there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that.”

— Anton Chekhov

“I often tell people to stop being afraid of writing bad poetry, or bad anything. I think that a lot of times, when people claim that they have writer's block, or that they get stuck, it's just because they're scared of writing bad things.”

— Sarah Kay

“Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.”

— Miroslav Tichy

“Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet.”

— Charles Bukowski

“Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry”

— William Empson

“I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.”

— Jonas Mekas

“Poetry
even bad poetry
may be our final hope.”

— Edward Abbey

“One can be well-bred and write bad poetry”

— Moliere

“I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.”

— Bertrand Russell

“The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“If you find that the reader of popular romances
however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances
goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.”

— Charles Bukowski

“Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

“A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.”

— Randall Jarrell

“When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.”

— M. Ward

“For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti