On Friday, February 24^th, twelve students competed in the 7^th Annual Worst Poet at VES Contest before an audience of fifty students and faculty. About the event, which is always a favorite among students, English Teacher, Jason Knebel shared the following:

Sherry Bai unfortunately demonstrated the greatest peril in the competition, as she sabotaged her chances when she inadvertently wrote a line that wasn’t that bad: referring to observed dancing as “elastic collision.”

Frances Fenton may have committed the strangest non sequitur in a night of non sequiturs, when her manuscript provided the improvisational bracket “[insert iMessage generated message here]”.  Somewhere there is perhaps a brave footnote ready to explain this.  

Max Feinman, proved grammar is not dead as he led the crowd in a rousing audience participatory Mad Libs, including suggested nouns (B Period Math Analysis, Disco Ball), verbs (shanghai, defenestrate), and adjectives (fluffy).

Vane Peniche offered an ode to her favorite soda, lamenting a bitter loss as well as demonstrating a sharp understanding of biology, “Mtn Dew used to run through my veins / and now the only thing that runs through my veins is blood.”

Last year’s second place recipient, Jim Smith, seems to have gotten worse, or better, in time and did not even place in the top three.  If this rate continues, perhaps in a few thousand years, Jim will be Poet Laurate.  In those future days of glory, his roommate, Alex Kagan, will probably appreciate that he and a broken air conditioner were once the subjects of Jim’s verse.   

Carlie Gates shared a narrative of a gastronomic video game.  If that sounds strange, it was.  And then she got the audience cheering as the protagonist achieved a high score.  

The night’s longest work, as tradition, was read by Bo Browder, a seven-page affirmation of the human experience and fluffy bunny slippers.  

Many of the judges were charmed by Rachel Staggers’ poem titled “Poem” which claimed to be a haiku, despite being over fifty lines long.  Rachel’s work also spent much of its pages in celebration of the word “moiety,” a word not seen since Shakespeare last used it in 1606.  

This year’s Third Place Winner (and former champion his sophomore year), Ryan Crawford reveled in filial confusion and “The Secrets of the Hallux.”

Porter Stands earned Second Place by offering a monologue that was introspective, philosophical, and existential (“your mirror with which you look into and say ‘that is me, but it is not, for I am me’”).  These great themes were juxtaposed with the surprise reveal that it was all an advertisement for a Dave & Busters Rewards App.

In the end there could only be one champion, one winner, and this year, to prove perhaps how idiosyncratic and absurd this contest is, there were two, a team of Weston Richards and Amogh Thallapragada.  These young men read a work titled, “I Miss the Good Old Days”.  This poem was a nostalgic catalog of what was wrong, or at least disappointing, in the world today, while feeling intense longing for when we “used hands instead of spoons.”

The quality of Amogh and Weston’s work is best demonstrated by this stanza:

“Nowadays we have health care and like 7 different kinds of bears, there’s panda bears and polar bears, and black and brown bears.  Also red pandas, but I don’t know if they are considered bears.  Also like grizzly bears, but aren’t those just brown bears? I don’t know, I am not a bear-ologist.  Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.”

It was only with the last line of the poem that they remembered the koala. . . which is a marsupial.  

All twelve poets brought happiness and goodwill and laughter to the Virginia Episcopal School, and all have earned a place as immortals in the school’s pantheon. 

See Photos from the Contest