Mark your calendars and lower your literary standards: August 18th is National Bad Poetry Day, a holiday that celebrates the messy, cringey, deeply confusing art of really, really bad verse. This is ...

NEW YORK — There was expectation in the room that someone would deliver a poem as lovely as a tree. Or not. The expectation was about choosing the worst of the worst — the worst bad poem of the year.

Chances are you had to study Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in school to examine why it’s a great poem. It’s just as likely you’ve never read William McGonagall’s “Tay Bridge Disaster,” widely ...

Bad poems never die, never really go away: The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, ...