Odiously awful odes are sought for the 2026 West Texas A&M University Bad Poetry Contest, presented by Brick & Elm magazine.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. April 7 in the Sybil B. Harrington Fine Arts Complex Recital Hall on WT’s Canyon campus.

Participants—either WT-affiliated or from the general public—should bring two or three original poems. Audience members also are welcome to simply enjoy, to use that word loosely, the readings.

“Critic Ben Lerner has argued that poetry ‘has a fatal problem: poems.’ All poems, he suggests, are doomed, unable to live up to our demands on the art,” said Dr. Matthew Harrison, contest coordinator and WT’s Wendy Marsh Professor for Shakespeare Studies. “At our annual Bad Poetry Competition, we gather together to celebrate poetry's failures and our own.”

Poets are asked to keep their material in the PG-13 range.

For information, contact Harrison at mharrison@wtamu.edu.

The event is held by the Department of English, Philosophy and Modern Languages in WT’s Sybil B. Harrington College of Fine Arts and Humanities.