[James Brancheau]

Every now and then we get a is this a poem thread. It doesn't strike me as one because it's not ironic enough to be this boring. And long. And my god, it is boring. Funny in that I read the whole thing. Andy Kaufman has the answer I'm sure. But I get suspicious of group outrage, esp with relatively conservative poets.

[Ann Drysdale]

Oh, Lordy. I hadn't realised that my cryptic question (post#15) had actually been posted. I was away from home, working on a tiny netbook, celebrating the fact that I can now connect to the Sphere on it and I was actually querying Jayne's spelling of the name. She'd called it Wergel Flump.

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post going on about whether one should respect gobbledegook and Edwin Morgan and the Loch Ness Monster came into it, but it disappeared into the æther - plink! - just like that. Like Nessie, it was as if it never was, if it ever was, so to speak.

I was going to type it all out again, then wondered if Jayne had done it on purpose, the way my mother always referred to pizza as "pizzer" because foreign food made her cross. I decided to let it be, life being short and art being forever, and didn't notice that a vestige had been immortalised, like a Sapphic fragment.

I also see that Jayne has changed her "Flump" to a Flomp, though her Wergel persists.

It amuses me hugely that as much earnestness can be expended on the definition of "Bad" as of "Good". Let us continue to pursue Excellence along the couloirs interminables of poetic endeavour and see where we end up. Snap judgements are so Last Year.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hey John,

Weird coincidence! I'm still in Spain and was also at the Barcelona Picasso museum a few days ago. It is amazing to see the progression. No poem about it, but I am working on one about getting my wallet nicked on the metro near the Sagrada Familia, which kind of added unwanted stress to the beginning of the holiday. It's all fine though. On a beach now (literally right now) — 12 year olds can only take so much culture.

Haven't read the Wergle poem. Sorry!

Mark.

(splash...)

Edit: Ok, so I've read the winning entry. Erm…nope I don't think it's a poem. And I don't think that's a poetically conservative opinion. I'm happy with all kinds of strangeness in poetry, but this has nothing in terms of engagement with language or structure to make it poetry. It's not experimental poetry, or even prose poetry or free verse. It's a 'tall tale', a shaggy dog story in randomly chopped up prose. That's not a judgement on it as a piece of writing, it just seems a category error to call it a poem, like an oil painting winning a stop-motion animation competition. Whatever it is, I don't like it. It feels like someone too in love with the sound of their own voice boring you in a bar with tales of their 'wacky' life.

[John Isbell]

Hi Mark,

That is a weird coincidence! And weirder that we may have walked right by each other, since we have no idea of our respective appearances. Sorry about your wallet - there’s I think a permanent crowd at the Sagrada Familia. I have a poem to my Paris pickpocket, and I think James Wright has one to his in Rome. The beach sounds more fun, for kids in particular, but we did love Barcelona.
I also agree with your take on the poem. It’s rather tedious.

Cheers,
John

[Max Goodman]

I'm baffled and intrigued.

To parody poetry contests seems an odd thing for Winning Writers to do; running contests and promoting others' contests seem big parts of their services. Is the idea to show that they understand how bad contests can be, so poets can trust them to promote only good ones?

Wouldn't that point be made more clearly if Wergle Flomp were straightforwardly promoted as a contest for the worst possible poems? (I think the contest used to be promoted that way, but even if that memory is accurate, there's still the mystery of why it's less straightforward now.) The chance that potential customers will think the contest evidence of the group's incompetence seems high, as illustrated by some of the reactions in this thread.

And the prizes. I get that the $1,000 first prize makes a splash. Does the additional $1,250 in prizes help make the parody more accurate?

[Chris O'Carroll]

Now in its 19th year, this contest seeks today's best humor poems.

That's from the Wergle Flomp page at the Winning Writers website.

https://winningwriters.com/our-conte...y-contest-free

If you spend some time delving into the contest, you'll find that they're quite earnest about that "best humor poems" stuff. Exposing poetry.com via that Wergle Flomp submission must have struck somebody as such a good joke that the pseudonym involved seemed like the perfect eponym for a serious comic verse contest.

[James Brancheau]

Just to be clear, Mark, I wasn't necessarily using the term conservative pejoratively. You know, whatever gets you there. I would probably fall on the conservative side of things, poetically speaking. I would, however, argue that it's important to be aware of that and that here, more than some other circles, we'd be more likely to judge something as not being a poem because it doesn't meet certain criteria. In this case, I completely agree that this doesn't qualify as a poem. Whether intended to be bad or humorous or whatever. I wouldn't even consider it to be good writing, however you want to categorize it.

I got my wallet stolen a little over a year ago. Completely my fault too. Really stupid. My hands were full and I left it on the convenience store counter (bad habit to let go of your wallet). And I realized it three minutes after leaving, but it was already too late. They got it on camera and the guy who stole it was pretty sly about the whole thing. He was one or two people behind me and after he pays and leaves, he comes back and acts as if he left his wallet on the counter. Fortunately, I didn't lose a lot of money, but replacing all the ID cards etc was a real pain.

[Mark McDonnell]

Cheers John,

I like imagining what various Sphereans look like, those I don't know. It's a fun game.

Hey James,

No, no worries! Yeah, I'm still in Spain and faced with replacing driving licence etc when I get back. I'd been warned about Barcelona, but there ya go. Silly tourist Brit haha. I'll try to wave the flag for non-met when I get back!