Greeting Card Campaign: 8-18 Bad Poetry Day

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It is strangely appropriate that August 18th is Bad Poetry Day.  I spent yesterday looking through an old school notebook filled with my high school poetry. I needed Dramamine by the time I'd had all I could stand.  It was so awful, it kept drawing me on and on, page after page, hoping I'd get better over time.  I remember myself as a far better poet than I was. Of course, it wasn't so much that I couldn't write decent poetry.  Some of my efforts showed promise.  Unfortunately, about half the people I went to school with were either headed for state prison or brilliant careers in waste management. My teachers were easy. If you could write a semi-coherent sentence, they were pathetically grateful. I didn't have a very high bar to clear sad to say.


If you'd told me I couldn't use the words "pain", "lonely", "dawn" or "alone" and eliminated the month of April from general usage, I'd have been rendered poetically mute. 


You have to admire some bad poets, though. Scottish poet, William Topaz MacGonagal, (from whom J.J. Rowlings got the last name for Harry Potter's housemaster - Professor MacGonagal) is considered by many critics to be the worst published poet in the past two centuries. MacGonagal managed to get himself published, not by the quality of his verse, but by sheer tenacity.  Publishers surrendered to avoid being buried alive in his submissions.

So to bad poets everywhere - Salute!  Today's your day to write a poem for your love.  To that effect, we're leaving the inside of this card blank with a picture of the obligatory April dawn with the sparkling sun rising sedately over the heather. There's even a cottage and a horse you can throw in for good measure.  Don't worry about rhyme, meter or making sense. Just throw in a lot of poetical sounding words and you'll be okay.  Give it your best shot. Today is bad poetry appreciation day after all.  Send your sweetie a bad poetry card to show her you care.

Just click on the caption below the shop-a-holic and it will take you to a pdf file in Google Docs. Remember, instead of printing from Google Docs, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "Download" and copy the file to your own computer.  Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you use and print the card from there. For some reason Google Docs doesn't handle fonts well, even though they are supposed to be embedded in the PDF document itself.

This is a side fold card, so when it prints, be sure to tell your printer it's in "landscape" format so you get the whole file. Flip it on the short side to print double-sided. This will save you a lot of time.  Time you could be writing your own abysmal poetry on the inside of the card.