The 25th Annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest is calling out to all Columbians to put the midterm stress behind them and embrace the silliness of horribly clever poetry—no experience required.
The Bad Poetry Contest, hosted by Columbia’s Philolexian Society, will be held on Thursday at 8 p.m. in Barnard’s Held Auditorium. The bad poetry contest is easily Philo’s most popular event, even though most of the society’s other events—Professor Tea several times a semester and Beat Night, held in honor of Philo alum Allen Ginsberg—are open to the public.
Why is that so? According to last year’s winner, Philo alum Edward Rueda, CC ’05, “I think Columbia is severely lacking in school pride, but a strong sense of sarcasm is one of the few things that brings all the students together.”
Rueda, like many Philo alums, is returning to Columbia for the event and will open the contest with his winning poem. “I’m very excited for that,” he said. “My girlfriend, my mother, and many close friends of mine will be in the audience to see me do my winning piece.”
Christopher Travis, CC ’11 and the moderator of Philo, attributes the buzz of the event to its ability to encourage participation from the whole student body. “It’s really fun because it’s something everybody can do,” Travis said. “Everybody can write a bad poem.”
As moderator, Travis runs all of Philo’s weekly meetings, which usually consist of literary debates. He will be emceeing the contest. Travis had hoped to win the contest last year with a poem about Literature Humanities but still plans to return with another bid for the title this year.
Most Philo members do choose to participate, but they leave plenty of space for attendees who simply sign up at the event. Philo encourages anybody to enter as long as the material is not too offensive or so good that it cannot be classified as bad poetry.
In fact, Philo has been known to target new members for recruitment after strong contest entries. Rueda was recruited by Philo his sophomore year after performing at the contest and has competed every year since. “My favorite part of the contest is when somebody I don’t know … gets up and just wows me with how terribly funny his poem is,” Travis said.
“Poems that win are poems that demonstrate that you know what makes a good poem … without letting the slightest traits of good meaningful poetry to invade your lines,” Daniel Walden, CC ’11, said when asked what a poem needed to win. As the Impresario of Philo, Walden coordinates all of Philo’s events, the biggest being the contest.
As a model for bad poetry, Philo follows in the footsteps of Alfred Joyce Kilmer, a Philo alum and former vice president of the society. Kilmer’s poem “Trees” is, according to Walden, “a stinker of a poem.” Kilmer wrote a lot of deliberately-bad poetry that Walden described as “very tongue-in-cheek … a real kick in the face to the modernist poets.” It is his legacy of bad poetry that is honored each year by Philo.
Philo is more than happy to carry on the tradition of bad poetry, encouraging poetic disasters in the name of humor. In fact, both Travis and Walden were quick to attribute the contest’s popularity to its humor. “It’s a very peculiar kind of mix of highbrow intellect and lowbrow humor that I think many Columbia students enjoy,” Walden said.
And, at least for him, that’s very much the case: “At last year’s Kilmer, my stomach had been actually hurting because I’d been laughing so much,” he admitted.
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