[xoxoxoBruce]

This article about the worst poems published in the last 100 years, has the top six plus an honorable mention.

#1

And the winner is—the envelope, please—Hal G.P. Colebatch, the Western Australian from outer space, whose bibliography includes such science-fiction tours de force as Man-Kzin Wars X. (“How the Wunderlanders,” Man-Kzin Wars X’s blurb-writer hyperventilates, “first learned of the Kzin attacks on Earth by slower-than-light communications, barely in time to prepare to fight back—how valiant human defenders turned to guerilla warfare in the Wunderland jungles and caves after the feline warrior race had destroyed . . . ” The suspense is killing you, right?)

There could be no denying Colebatch the cordon bleu once the judges discovered his “Reactionary Observations at the Pistol Club” (Quadrant, June 2008), and in particular the sheer astuteness of its first couplet, as opposed to its first quatrain. Quickly, the judges realized that whatever connotations of self-respect, discretion, or skill his title’s adjective reactionary might imply, Colebatch’s actual poem shows his aesthetic kinship with the decorum levels of interchangeable Kardashians. Who needs the deep understanding of the human heart that is obtainable from Jane Austen or Scott Fitzgerald, who needs the billets-doux of John Donne or Andrew Marvell, when we have Colebatch’s laser-like insight into emotional relations between the sexes?


Watching women pull the trigger,

It’s funny how their nipples get bigger.