Bad Writing: What Is It Good For?

That's the question Salon recently asked.

From the piece...

Sadly, if bad writers have one thing in common it's that they're all firmly convinced that they're good writers. Really good writers. So it's not as self-flagellating as it might at first appear for Steve Almond to devote a monthly column at the Rumpus to publishing the bad poetry of his early years and recounting how it came to be perpetrated. If he were a truly bad writer, Almond wouldn't be harshing on his own juvenilia, right? And he certainly wouldn't be so funny about it.

A particularly memorable Almond lyric, "Sartre, You're an Asshole," features the line "I've met old teabags with more hope than you." "I don't need to tell you that I'd never read any Sartre," Almond adds after explaining the genesis of this poem in a spasm of thwarted grad-school love. Steve Almond's Bad Poetry Corner also takes reader submissions, so by all means, pitch in.

Bad writing can serve as a lesson of one kind or another, but can it ever be recycled into something approximating art? That appears to be what Vernon Lott tried to do with "Bad Writing," a documentary inspired by the discovery of a cache of his old poems. Like Almond, he soon understood that you don't necessarily need more than one person to have a disagreement about what constitutes bad writing. The novel, poem or essay you write today, in full confidence of its genius, may be regarded by some later version of yourself as soul-witheringly dreadful. But was Lott able to spin the straw of poems like "Sketches of Despair" into the gold of a nifty short film featuring interviews with the likes of George Saunders and Margaret Atwood? Hard to say, as "Bad Writing" has yet to find distribution.