Comments on: ALASKARNALITY

By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:01:57 +0000

Nice book cart, too!!

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:24:02 +0000

Everything else I wanted to say was just driven out of my head by that picture because OMG OMG OMG I need your bookshelves.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:21:34 +0000

Someone is wrong on the Internet!

By: Iain

Iain — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:12:22 +0000

Kent,
I’m not sure how much my irritation comes from actually disagreeing with Lawrence, or whether it’s just because he comes off as kind of a dick. What exactly is he suggesting we “poets” do? Become independently wealthy enough off of “investments” to support ourselves? To insert some Lawrence-style self righteousness in here, I say this as a poet working as a paramedic. However, I don’t have any delusions that being “outside the system” is good for anything besides one’s own smugness. You can always tell how far outside the system you are by how far you are from enacting any kind of positive change. Perhaps I actually share some of Lawrence’s frustration with academic poets who pat themselves on the back merely for the politics that they hold, but to suggest that stepping away from the system of power does anything more than allow it more power is a delusion.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:28:55 +0000

Here’s an endearingly prickly comment by one Lawrence Klepinger, from beneath Richard Archambeau’s essay on Poets and Left Politics over at Poetry Magazine. I don’t know if it belongs here under Olena’s post, but it seems pretty much anything can fit under Olena’s posts! And this *is* kind of fun…
The poetical is political, but always mainly personal,
Kent
*
I often get a kick out of people who call
themselves poets. They are usually the
ones who have an enormous
“chip” on their shoulder for not having
“made it” in society – so in righteous
indignation, they complain about the
evils of the community that they are
forced to exist in. As a retired
overseas English instructor – with no
pension from any school, and
supporting myself on investments that I
made throughout my teaching career -
I am always amused that those
“academics,” who profess to be “Left
Wing Truth-telling,” – are precisely the
ones constantly jockeying for position
in an administrative post, clamor for
longer “paid” sabbaticals and would sell
their mother’s gravestone to insure
permanent tenure. Until “poets” of this
ilk lose their tether to the economic tit
of modern education they will succeed
at nothing but academic mumbo-jumbo
and fade into the ivy covered halls that
they so obediently adhere to. Sorry -
but the truth hurts. That is why lies
were invented.
–Lawrence Klepinger