call for submissions: teen angst poetry collection

[helenic]

'Nobody Understands Me' - Call out for atrocious teenage poetry

Calling all ex-teens,

Part public-service, part anti-vanity project; we are putting together the most wonderfully, desperately, earnestly poor collection of teenage poetry we can source and are hoping that you can help us.

We will accept work from anyone over 20 but the work has to be your own, the subject something you can look back and laugh about now, and the quality unmitigatingly terrible!

The glory will be non-existent as the poems will be printed anonymously, so this isn't a good option for anyone who is secretly hoping that someone will think their poetry is really rather good and offer them a massive publishing deal. Similarly, comedians need not apply, we're only interested in work which is unintentionally humorous.

Unfortunately we can't pay you; this enterprise is purely for fun and to celebrate a shared pubescent talent-deficit, however a lovely copy of the anthology can be sent to you for the meagre cost of home-printing and postage.

Please have a good root through your old journals and select us some thrilling oddities!

Poems should be sent to mailto:chickenwire_woman@hotmail.com

Please feel free to forward this onto anyone you suspect may have written poetry every bit as bad as yours.

I'm definitely going to send them stuff, if I can find any of it in the depths of my hard drive. Anyone else? :)

Comments

[tephramancy.livejournal.com]

Oh my. I have an entire book somewhere. I'll go looking :D

[libellum.livejournal.com]

The depressing thing is that I'm fairly sure I put most of mine on the internet, back in the day... and a lot of it is probably still there. I don't dare look :)

[simont]

I almost wish you hadn't posted this; it's reminded me of a "rock song" I wrote in my early teens while hopelessly hung up over a girl, which I had mercifully forgotten for quite a few years and am cringing all over again now I remember it. Being a song, it scores extra points for having an unmitigatedly terrible tune as well as terrible words. That tune has been stuck in my head all afternoon :-/

(And it doesn't even qualify, owing to the "something you can look back and laugh about now" criterion. I've long since got over my unrequited longing for the girl in question, of course, but I doubt I'll ever be able to think of her without getting cross about the entire episode...)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

If it's a tune *capable* of being stuck in your head, doesn't that mean it must have *something* to it?

Unfortunately, *I*, seem to go through stages of (1) thinking what I wrote was great (2) about one to twelve months later cringing (3) after that, thinking it was quite good, considering. I can sometimes tell what's objectively awful and what's objectively worthwhile, but it never lines up to my feelings... :)

[simont]

A tune can be catchy without being good. My standard example of this used to be "Wannabe", which I tend to describe as musical napalm: it's not just annoying, it's catchy and annoying, which is worse because it sticks to you and carries on annoying you long after it's stopped playing.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

In retrospect, going out and asking people to give me a list of annoying and catchy songs wasn't my smartest move ever :)

I guess you're right. Being catchy is a good thing to have for an otherwise good song, but isn't good in itself, and is bad if the tune is annoying.

But I think people tend to say "catchy" if the tune is nice, and "ear-wormy" or something else if it isn't, so though they have the same meaning it misled me.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Haha, I've found a couple of songs as well. Oh dear god. I have actually found a couple of poems I think are quite good; the rest are very, very definitely in the "cringe" territory.

[(Anonymous)]

My life is a black box.
Black walls.
Black ceiling.
Black floor.

My pain is awesome.

Black...

[libellum.livejournal.com]

... like your soul?

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I think a quick review of Tanita Tikaram's lyrics would be more than sufficient for the purpose.

[tar0r.livejournal.com]

:(:(

I CAN'T PLAY.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

You could lie! It's anonymous. No-one would notice.