The “Hatemonger’s Quarterly” Second Annual

The “Hatemonger’s Quarterly” Second Annual Horrible College-Student Poetry Contest: And the Winner Is…

Frankly, dear reader, we thought that this moment might never come. Since this humble “weblog” has a colossal and fanatical fan base, you would undoubtedly expect that our humble contest would draw a lot of entries. But, to be totally honest, dear reader, we didn’t know that we were collectively this big. We’re like the Wilt Chamberlain of Blogger, for crying out loud.

As a result, our official contest judge and poet of the ages, Anonymous, was bombarded with a veritable cornucopia of submissions. The situation soon proved so overwhelming, in fact, that we were compelled to hire an assistant, Unknown, who’s a dandy of a poet in his own right.

Naturally, dear reader, it took days and days for Anonymous and Unknown to sift through the treacle that was our lofty submissions pile. Given the fact that both Anonymous and Unknown have managed to acquire sinecures in English departments at fancy universities, it’s the first lick of real work they’ve done in well-nigh two decades.

The job proved so toilsome that Anonymous and Unknown almost passed it on to their impoverished graduate students. As anyone who is familiar with contemporary academia knows, college professors are incessantly bleating about the “oppression” of peoples thousands of miles away from them; meanwhile, however, they don’t seem troubled by their own oppression of feckless, underpaid graduate students.

But enough of our saucy impertinence. Before we get to the awards presentation, dear reader, we must offer a word of condolence for those of you who offered up a poem, and do not find yourselves among the winners. Unfortunately, your number is legion.

We received so much atrocious balladry that we simply couldn’t recognize everyone’s excruciating non-talent. Rest assured, however, that your poem was terrible, although not sufficiently horrible to receive specific mention. There, don’t you feel better?

With that in mind, dear reader, we can move on to the big winners.

THIRD RUNNER-UP:

This year’s third runner-up is none other than Gordon, the Internet dynamo also known as the Cranky Neocon. (And, no, we didn’t call him “the Internet dynamo also known as the Cranky Neocon” in order to compel Gordon to quote us on the “Critics Rave” portion of his “website.”) Gordo’s abysmal poem is the following (as is the case with all of the poems we received, all of the errors are presumably intentional):

Under The Florescent Moon by Gordon

Dull glowing,
never changing.
I see the eternal glow
of the florescent light
above my cubicle.

I work for the Man.

Pretty wretched, n’est pas? Even so, we thought that this poem offers the impression that the average college student is far more farsighted than he actually is. After all, this piece of doggerel presumes that said college student understands that he will eventually work for a living. This quotidian reality tends not to dawn upon the composer of collegiate verse, who seems to believe that organic chemistry is as trying as life can become. All the same, we simply loved the “landscape of corporatist dehumanization” line.

SECOND RUNNER-UP:

The second runner-up is one Mona Narstan, a woman who seems to be in tune with the literary theory side of the undergraduate experience.

Not For $ale by Mona Narstan

not mine; not yours;
Can’t be bought,
can’t pay for it;
“your money means nothing here”;

(a)wake to global consisiousness

Ah, that’s the stuff! Delicious misspellings; hackneyed clichés; pathetic use of parenthesis—it’s all here! Clearly, the first runner-up and the contest winner must have produced some vomit-worthy balladry.

FIRST RUNNER-UP:

A fellow who goes by the name Commander Cool sent us a particularly wretched verse that well earns first runner-up status.

What is real? by Commander Cool

Whats real?
What IS real?

look around one bright day and wonder;
What Isreal?

Darn, that’s good stuff. It’s simply spot-on. The grammatical lapses are just right. And the failed attempt to indict Israel through an inept play-on-words (“Isreal”) is simply sublime. Who could possibly top this piece of garbage?

THE WINNER

Regular readers of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” won’t be surprised to learn that the man who came out on top is Michael E. Lopez, Esq., a fellow with an uncanny knack for parodying atrocious collegiate poetry. Since the esteemed Mr. Lopez, Esq. won last year’s contest, Anonymous and Unknown were loath to toss him another crown. But we simply couldn’t offer runner-up status to the following piece, which is clearly another minor masterpiece of satire:

be a man by Michael E. Lopez, Esq.

my Ears burn with blood as 

BusHitler walks across the stage (bodies)

smiles stolen

     from the crowds and raped childrenhoods

     here and elsewhere in his their

Patriarchal Hegemony


his their limpid cocks

shining grease from domination

gotta be a man

     strip the snowy vistas

     shackle up your womb (bodies)

force his their seed to grow on tax breaks for the top two percent



?why me?

i never knew his their family

?why me?

i never was rich my parents struggled

     vacations in provoh not aspen

?why me?

i always loved my dog and fed him

     and wept for Etheopia and Sudan (bodies)

?why me?

     i only think the silent truth

     words that he they dont want to hear

     love beauty moon touch gentle

     and truth to power

fuck him then

lots of U.S. deserve the pain and pillage

supersized lives drenched in a desert of misery

     grown fat on the cries of pain we see

     not me but lots of U.S.

but he they dont care if we deserve it

     bend over

          it hurts

     march into the ovens, the Patriot Acts (bodies)

         just because

and become an ash coating the

screaming shrieking desolation

of the amerikkan dream (so many bodies)

Oh, man! All we can say is, hand that man his award! What heavenly hokum! What fabulous feculence!

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are delighted to crown Michael E. Lopez, Esq. the reigning champion of our Horrible College-Student Poetry Contest.

Can this man be beaten? We suppose we’ll find out next year.