“The judges in the front row were ready to revel in wretchedness, line by line and verse by verse, as the contestants, more than 30 Columbia University students in a lecture hall on the campus, read their poems aloud.” (In case you’ve forgotten, Kilmer is the man who perpetrated “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” He is memorialized with a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.)