Anti-Slam: Bad Poetry Slam Photos and Recap (NSFW)

I had the honor of being one of a trio of judges at Truth Serum’s "Anti-Slam: Bad Poetry Slam," at the Milky Way Sunday evening (which, not coincidentally, coincided with the National Poetry Slam Competition), and it left me wondering if bad poetry is more enjoyable than good poetry - or at least more entertaining.  Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell once said, "Nobody would write poetry if the world seemed perfect," and that seems even truer for bad poetry which, as Sunday’s Bad Poets proved, spawns from broken teenage relationships, overly wordy musings about nature, passionate emotions related to mundane objects, and disgust with cultural tendencies to over-technologize everything. The irony was palpable - aren’t those the basis of many so-called good poems? - and creativity was abundant with the contestants diverse approaches to the concept. Third-place winner Lindsay Crudele bravely and unabashedly shared works from a tattered high-school journal, which she noted has actual tear stains; Mike Perlman, of 123 Party! fame, carried his typewriter onstage and finished writing a horrible-yet-hilarious, verbose nature poem (someone alert Pitchfork); a hot redhead in a satin dress named Johnny Blazes (the second-place winner) blanked on the words to her poem, and subsequently stripped down to read the words written all over her body; the Cumbaya Slam Collective praised the vagina for being "sweet as sugar, pink as a rose, wise as Buddha," and an inventive, spiky-haired "Stud McMuffin" pitched a new Apple product called "iPoem."  In the mean time, Aliza Shapiro, the woman behind Truth Serum, held everything together, calling breaks to get drinks from the bar, and offered herself as the sacrificial lamb, by reading at the start of each of the four rounds. As said, there was no shortage of eclectic entertainment, but the hands-down winner of the evening was Phoenix freelancer Chris Braiotta, whose "Tryptic Plus One About the Stages of a Man's Life," which included a poem declaring that "The boys of today will make terrible lovers," and an ode to pantyhose ("You've ruined finger fucking, but you're required at the office") were so awesomely bad that they were kinda good - which seemed like the whole point.