It takes perseverance and skill to write what Steve Kowit calls a…

It takes perseverance and skill to write what Steve Kowit calls a “Purposefully Awful Poem”: a poem that fails simultaneously on many levels. Have fun drafting a truly bad poem, a real stinker, using the means listed below. Label each of the ways your poem achieves its awful purpose, connecting the label to the highlighted or circled infraction:
• abstraction substituting for imagery
• cliché instead of your own fresh language
• pointlessly formal or antique language (“thou, O, thus, whence”)
• inverted word order (unnatural for modern language: “if sleep I well, I’m rested”)
• obvious rhyme (“June/moon”)
• overuse of adjectives (“the creepy old dusty brick mansion”)
• purposeless line breaks
• senseless punctuation (using periods, commas, and the like, but not writing actual sentences)
• prosaic (having many unstressed syllables and lacking compression)
• MS: letting Microsoft decide what words/lines get capitalized, where margins are
• sentimentality (self-pitying or self-involved declarations of nostalgic emotion)
• misuse of allusion or symbol (references to Greek gods, to Shakespeare, to the flag, to a medicine wheel, or to the occult, for example, when these allusions serve no purpose or have no meaning in the context of the poem)
• hipsterism (obsessed with seeming cool at any cost)
• titular fail: no title, a pompous title, or a title that spoils the poem’s surprise