Poetry News

Welcome to the Widening Gyre!

By Travis Nichols

Let’s begin with Sarah Palin.
This week, Hart Seely offers up examples of the Alaska governor’s poetry on Slate, prefacing it with this analysis:
“In campaign interviews, the governor, mother, and maverick GOP vice presidential candidate has chosen to bypass the media filter and speak directly to fans through her intensely personal verses, spoken poems that drill into the vagaries of modern life as if they were oil deposits beneath a government-protected tundra.”

Seely’s examples of Palin’s verse prove once again that the best way to make fun of the Republican VP candidate is to simply repeat what she says:
“Haiku”
These corporations.
Today it was AIG,
Important call, there.
(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)
“Challenge to a Cynic”
You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there’s absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.
(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)
But lest we forget how effective making fun of Republican candidates’ speaking patterns can be, let me offer up these reminders:

Hahaha!

Oh.
Elsewhere, David Samuels congratulates himself on going to Harvard, and explains why it would be nice to have a reasonably intelligent human in charge of the United States:
“How wonderful and strange it would be if our creaky American empire were to be governed by poets! It is true that Barack Obama isn’t Shakespeare or Cervantes, or even John Ashbery, and that most writers would make lousy presidents, especially in America, where literature and politics have learned to keep the other at arm’s length. Still, it is hard to argue with the fact that Dreams is a terrific book–an insightful, well-written, cunningly organized black male bildungsroman that also serves as a kind of autobiographical rejoinder to one of my favorite American novels, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.”
Also in the news, Penn professor and Girly Man author Charles Bernstein spoke at the book launch for Best American Poetry 2008 in New York, re-casting the financial crisis thusly:
“As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West,” Bernstein said, “These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.”
And so on, provoking this response from Paul Zukofsky.
As always, it’s hard to parse the layers of sarcasm and/or irony in Mr. Bernstein’s work, so anyone wanting to laugh rather than just titter uncomfortably might should just read The Onion.
And, in closing, Carl Sandburg’s FBI file.

2008-10-10

Posted in Group Blog, Poetry News on Friday, October 10th, 2008 by Travis Nichols.