by JULIET WATERS

Putting together an anthology like Teen Angst: A Celebration of Really Bad Poetry was probably more work than most people would expect. To begin with, there’s the sheer bulk of material to choose from. On the Web site that inspired the book, www.teenangstpoetry.com, Sara Bynoe confesses she wrote about 450 poems from 1990–98. Not everybody would fit that category, but rare is the teen who doesn’t have at least one journal filled with shame-inducing pseudo-profundity, or a private collection of angsty song lyrics. Bynoe must have built a lot of stamina by laughing at her own poetry. Most people would have become tired of this project a long time ago, which probably explains why nobody’s ever gotten around to publishing a collection of terrible teen poetry before.

If the only thing driving this book were mockery, however, it probably wouldn’t work as well as it does. There’s plenty of laughably bad poetry here but, to her credit, Bynoe has also made room for poignantly bad, self-righteously bad and even psychotically bad. This is a chance to remind educators, and ourselves, just how normal it is for teens to write raging poetry about mass-murder, etc. Then, of course, there are the suicide poems, and one section is pretty much just odes to Kurt Cobain.

The only limit Bynoe has placed on what goes into this anthology is that the author can’t be a teen anymore. Teen Angst contains only poetry contributed by people who now know better. Each poem is explained and introduced by the author. This is important, since it’s hard to appreciate the absurdity of a poem like “Love Doesn’t Just Go Away,” if you don’t know that it’s about a two-week relationship in grade nine.

The end product is an anthology that, in a lot of ways, is probably more entertaining, useful and therapeutic than, frankly, too many poetry collections. A smart high school English teacher would put this on a course list with Shakespeare. One of the best ways to learn what makes a good poem is to first look at what makes a bad one: terrible rhymes (“I don’t care about your games/To me you are only James”), obvious metaphors (“Life is a mountain,” “a road,” “a three ring binder”), trite or weird titles (“More than Like,” “Unicorn Pain II”), or goth (“Kissing Vampires”).

Studying this would sure beat that abusive ritual of torture and shame, asking teenagers to write poetry for English class and rewarding them by reading the best ones out loud. I can’t imagine what sadistic urge prompted Sarah F.’s teacher to do a spontaneous public reading of “Cold as Ice,” a poem about finding out that her boyfriend was getting it on with her best friend. Apparently the teacher was convinced that Sarah F. had the soul of a poet, and she may have been right. One of my favourite poems in this collection is Sarah F.’s “You Also Suck,” with its painfully sincere closing verse: “So maybe I’m a loser and I’m not even worth a fuck/But you acted really beastly/So you should know/You also suck!” Wise as this insight is, however, it’s probably best understood in retrospect.

Valuable as Teen Angst poetry might be for teenagers, it is clearly pitched at adults—adults, however, who probably haven’t put their teen angst as far behind them as they’d like. It’s hard to tell from Bynoe’s tone how seriously she takes herself sometimes. At the same time, there’s something endearingly adolescent about this. You can easily imagine Bynoe hawking her own poetry zine at Calgary punk rock shows in the ’90s. For that rare person who’s never actually written a teen angst poem, Bynoe has tips on how to do this, from listening to emo to creating a mood with candles. If anything, these tips are a useful reminder that you’re never too old to be bad.

Teen Angst: A Celebration of Really Bad Poetry by Sara Bynoe, St. Martin’s Press, pb, 201pp, $18.95