August 18 is Bad Poetry Day! It’s a day for poets to laugh, relax, and toss aside the stress of trying to create the perfect poem—by creating some not-so-perfect poetry.

And what better way to celebrate the silliness of Bad Poetry Day than with a few tongue-in-cheek poetry awards created by the bards here at Writer’s Relief?

“Faux Poe” Awards To Celebrate Bad Poetry Day

🏆 Award For Longest Run-On Sentence

Jonathan Coe is currently monopolizing this award (as well as several pages) for a sentence nearing fourteen thousand words. Other runners-up include Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald!

🏆 Award For Most Clichéd Opening Line

Okay, we know these awards are celebrating Bad Poetry Day, but we couldn’t resist! While this may be the most clichéd opening line of a story, each year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges writers to create the worst opening line to a novel. Here’s one of our favorites:

In the predawn mist nothing was quite so satisfying as dawdling across someone else’s morning paper, so thought Sally B. Slug on her early morning glide.—Paul Sutcliffe

🏆 Award For Weakest Simile

Coming up with similes (or metaphors) can make you as nutty as a fruitcake. You may end up writing a real clunker: “Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.” Or “Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.” Check out a full list of “award”-worthy, cringe-worthy similes here!

🏆 Award For Worst Rhyme Crime

Whether it’s a rhyme that’s so overused you know Shakespeare is rolling over in his grave…or two words that come sooo close to rhyming—but don’t (“dawn” and “song”)…or a determined attempt at rhyming an unrhymable word (face it, nothing rhymes with “orange”)…a bad rhyme can leave you discombobulated and frustrated.

🏆 Award For Not Knowing When To Say When

At 1.8 million words, the Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem, giving the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Beowulf a (very long) run for their money. And today’s literary journal editors almost always favor shorter poetic works. In poetry, sometimes less really is more!

QUESTION: What other silly poetry awards can you add to this list?