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Contests : Wergle Flomp Free Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2005 : Judge's Comments
Thanks to everyone who entered our 2005 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest. We received 1,398 entries, up from 975 last year and a fresh record. Poets aren't usually on the cutting edge of social trends (we know some of you are still wearing plum velvet smoking jackets), so we were excited to discover last week that the ever-more-popular pastime of spoofing the vanity contests has caught the attention of Newhouse News Service (Dru Sefton, "If I'm as Bad as I Can Be, Won't You Please Not Publish Me?").
"In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove", according to Tennyson (props to anyone who can tell me what that means), and in the spring your judge must once again cloister herself in her garret with hundreds of poems. Very, very bad poems. Poems so bad...they're good.
A bad poem becomes funny by virtue of its earnestness. It's trying so hard to be a good poem, and failing. The more ambitious its original intentions, the funnier its pratfall appears. Self-conscious clowning isn't as entertaining as a pyramid of acrobats felled by an untimely sneeze. "I can't believe anyone tried to do that," you say, amusement mingling with unwilling admiration. "That" might be writing a paean to a 7,000-lb cheese, or an elegy for a "dear little angel" who "choked on a piece of beef".
What makes these poems gems of badness is that the narrative voice is utterly unaware of the incongruities of subject, tone and language that spoil the poem's effect. Yet there's enough poetic skill on display to hint at what the poem could have been, which increases the humorous effect of having those expectations frustrated.
This interplay of conflicting styles and voices creates the madcap humor of "Blaming of Parts", our first-prize poem. Dr. Farrell perfectly captures the expletive-laced patter of a drill sergeant who doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the idiocy of both his distant commanders and his hapless recruits. Bizarrely interspersed with this narrative, we hear the languid, effete voice of the Poet describing the pretty nipa palms. This poem, of course, is a parody of Henry Reed's famous war poem "Naming of Parts", which contrasts the beautiful, lively world of nature with the sterile and cramped mentality of the warmaking machine. Whereas in Reed's poem, incongruity serves a serious political purpose, Dr. Farrell comically exaggerates that incongruity to create a more affectionate portrait of the military. He also uses the f-word a lot, which means that once again, our winner gets the coveted NC-17 label. Don't forward it to granny.
We didn't want Wergle to become exclusively a parody contest, so we were excited to find Kakie Mashburn's "Phunny Pharm", our second-prize winner. The creative rhymes in this poem are worthy of Ogden Nash, and informative too. Now I know which of my spam emails to answer. "To treat those wacky spin-offs of depression - / I.e., for those who suffer from attacks/ Of panic, sleeplessness, or mild aggression/ God created something called Xanax." Ms. Mashburn is our first repeat honoree. She received an honorable mention last year for an ode to junk food.
Our third-prize winner, Courtney Siebring's "The
Tight Thong of J. Alice Prufrock", has many exquisite lines, especially in the first half. "We are ho's, then, you and I,/ With our rears spread out down to our thighs/ Like blowfish seeking darker waters". I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for T.S. Eliot parodies, not just because he's one of my major influences as a serious (too-serious) poet, but also because so many of these parodies are really funny. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he skirted the line between greatness and badness so often that it doesn't take much tweaking to turn one of his poems into a pompous, cringe-worthy mess.
Competition for our Honorable Mention slots was very tight this year, so you will be seeing some of the near-misses turn up in the newsletter critiques as next year's deadline approaches. But why wait? Click
here to read all the winning poems. The deadline for our 2006 contest, as always, is April Fool's Day. We have a fresh $1,609 to give away and entry is free. Enter
the new Wergle Flomp contest now.
Jendi Reiter
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