The Literary Magazine of the Philolexian Society
Columbia University · Established MDCCCII
An Annual Tradition
The Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest, held each November in Havemeyer Hall, and published each Winter in the pages of Surgam.
Joyce Kilmer (Columbia College, Class of 1908) wrote Trees. The poem — sincere, often anthologised, and remembered chiefly because no one can remember why — has been treated by the Philolexian Society, since the late 1980s, as the patron-relic of an annual evening of the worst original verse the Society's members and friends can produce.
The Contest is held each November in the modest acoustics of Havemeyer Hall. A faculty panel adjudicates; entries are recited aloud; the winning poems are inducted into the canon by the Moderator with the seriousness the occasion demands. The Winter issue of Surgam is then given over to the year's winners, with prize citations and, occasionally, footnotes.
Entries are open to all. The form is unrestricted, the tone is required. The deadline is announced each fall, typically in late October; instructions are emailed to the Society's whip list and posted to the Society's Instagram. To enter, send your poem to submit2surgam@gmail.com with "Kilmer" in the subject line, or bring it on the night.
The Society distinguishes carefully between work that is bad on purpose, work that is bad by accident, and work that is bad in ways its author has not yet identified. The Contest exists for the first; the editors, in their kinder moments, encourage the third.
Past Kilmer issues are collected on the archive page. Selected highlights from the Contest's long history are kept, with affection, at fuckyeahkilmer.tumblr.com.