If you’re reading this, you’ve more than likely just been challenged by the badpoets. Congratulations – we don’t hand out these invites lightly! If you came here this way, here’s the reason. We love your work and we need your voice for our project. Let us explain.
We are a group of British/English language speaking poets who are taking on the task of translating the poems below into our own dialects. So far we have poets from Glasgow, The Borders, Newcastle, Yorkshire, Hull, London, Liverpool, Wigan, Cardiff and Suffolk on our creative team and are always on the lookout for new English-speaking writers who use dialects and accents in their work to join in our nationwide experiment to send a poem around the world and watch how it changes as it goes – and what it says about us as people. Although we are Primarily focussed on British dialects, we more than welcome contributions from English-speaking poets from all over the world.
We have set you three main challenges, and are adding more as the list of contributors increases. To read them, please scroll down. To listen to them please see the YouTube links above.
To take part, please email your translation of one of the challenges below to badpoets@mail.com. To qualify as an official badpoet all you need to do is complete all three challenges, or join our Facebook group to work on new material. If your work screams at us, we’ll just invite you to join anyway, not the strictest bunch of folk but we know good poetry when we see it and are thrilled with the standard of what we’ve received so far. Heartfelt thanks to all contributing poets.
The poem you write here will remain your copyright and we will not use it any way other than on this website without express permission from you in advance. To find out more about us, have a say in how we operate and see what other poems are in formulation please join our Facebook group.
Please note – the dialect you write in needs to be your own to preserve the authenticity of the project!
