Rant of Ferox

I wrote a lot of bad poetry in high school.

It wasn’t the sort of thing that ‘everyone was doing’. There was about four of us in my year level that wrote poems for fun. Every year, there was a ‘Poetry Competition’ and this ‘young author’ who wrote some fiction book about surfing was invited to judge the poems. they were supposed to have a new judge every two years, but never got around to replacing him.

I didn’t have a high opinion of this fellow. He was all about encouraging us to be writers and I’d already written the first draft of my first book at that time, as bad as it was in hindsight. I found him pretentious and a waste of time.

What was worse was that this surfer dude did not have the same likes as me when it came to writing or poetry. When I wrote something I thought was good, it was dismissed without a second thought. The poems I didn’t like, he ended up liking most. I was rather indiscriminant with my poems, submitting everything I had written that year to the competition. It was about 20 pages for the sucker to sift through, sometimes with two poems on a page.

One year, in my adolescent frustrations, I wrote a poem directed at him. I did it to be mean, harsh, and to show my distaste. I can remember writing the first sentence, which was really all I wanted to say, and then thinking “Now what will rhyme with this?” because if didn’t make it rhyme then it was really just a mean note.

The poem turned out rather bad…

Pride
If I wrote about surfing
Would that let me win this year?
If I painted words for a subject I did not like
And ignored what I held dear?
If I bent myself to fit the mould
For sure I’d break my back,
But my words would never feel right
It’s sincerity and love they’d lack.
Perhaps not love for the subject,
But a love for seeing what’s real;
For the truth, for the work itself
The art of remembering how to feel.

And the bugger loved it. I won that year with the worst poem I had ever written, and the poem featured above, intended to insult the judge, was given an ‘honorable mention’ and the only poem mentioned in the judges review.

It’s because I mentioned surfing.