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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, June 30, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black The worst writer of all time Never heard of Amanda McKittrick Ros? Count your blessings. Ms. Ros was an Irish lass who was born in 1860. The name on her birth certificate reads Amanda Malvina Fitzalan Anna Margaret McLelland McKittrick and that should have been a clue right there, for anyone who comes into the world so encumbered and shackled by vowels and consonants is bound to have issues with the English language. And she did; Ms. Ros became a writer. Many believe she became the very worst writer in the English-speaking world. She produced three novels and several volumes of verse, all of them howlingly bad. Here, for instance is a passage from her novel Irene Iddesleigh: "Leave me now, deceptive demons of deluded mockery; lurk no more around the vale of vanity, like a vindictive viper, strike the lyre of living deception to the strains of dull deadness, despair and doubt." Ms. Ros lived to the age of 99 blissfully certain to the end that she was a great writer. She imagined her reading audience as "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen". She was pretty bad, but there's no reason for Canadians to shuffle shamelessly, toque in hand when it comes to bad writers. After all, we have James McIntyre. McIntyre came to Canada from Scotland as a child in 1841 and eventually settled in the town of Ingersoll, in the heart of southern Ontario dairy country. James McIntyre and dairy cows: a marriage made in poetry heaven. McIntyre became known as The Cheese Poet. He had verses for every occasion providing the occasion involved cheesemaking. His verses offered advice: Our Muse it doth refuse to sing Of cheese made early in the spring, When cows give milk from spring fodder You cannot make a good cheddar. Fodder, cheddar...Sure, that...almost rhymes. McIntyre's masterpiece? Well, it's hard to beat his "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds". This is a poem written about an actual, three and a half ton cheese which was produced as a PR stunt in Ingersoll in 1866. We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese Lying quietly at your ease, Gently fanned by evening breeze; Thy fair form no flies dare seize. The famous Ingersoll cheese was slated to go on exhibition in Toronto, New York and Great Britain, but McIntyre envisaged even grander travels: May you not receive a scar as We have heard that Mr. Harris Intends to send you off as far as The great World's Show at Paris. James McIntyre didn't write just about cheese. He was a versatile artist, more than capable of turning his creative talents to other subjects, like, well, sweet corn: For it doth make best ensilage For those in dairying engage It makes the milk in streams to flow, Where dairymen have a good silo. So in the end, who's the worst - McIntyre or Ros? Well, I'd love to be a homer, but I'm afraid the Irish wordmonger deserves first place. Hard to top her last novel Helen Huddleson, in which the characters are all named after fruits (Lord Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum and the Earl of Grape) - and how do you top this description of 'Madame Pear' and her "swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with the sapphires of scandals..." and, well, it goes on. Sorry, but even Canada's Cheese Poet can't compete with talent like that. Not that Amanda Ros would have doubted her supremacy for a moment. "I expect I will be talked about at the end of a thousand years," she once said. I fear she might be right.