Sure, if by “these days” you mean the last 20+ years.

the coat of arms for a Swiss canton
reverse design on Mercury dimes
the borough flag of Brooklyn
on the Coit Tower San Francisco
seal of Colorado state – Senate and HoR
National Guard – on pylons flanking
a staircase leading to Lincoln’s seat

on the front arms of his memorial
Hupmobile car – emblem of Columbus
Knights, and above the door to Chicago
City Hall – carried within the limits
of a sacred inner city – white-birch
rods, cylindrically wound in red
leather ribbon, a blade of bronze
facing out – frieze on the facade
of a Supreme Court – the imperial
symbol – fasces facists smash it
trash it, lash out her lags who’d have
us not gassin cuz there aint no imbas
fizzin within their frame.

The final step, I pray, dear God, is that Barack Obama has laid that ghost to rest forever. He certainly has for me, because when I see that handsome face looking straight back at me and speaking such sense on the BBC I know I’m face to face at last with humanity.

Desmond Swords is Irish, and he’s got his laptop just clear of that Guinness spill where he sits at his table by the fire in the pub (it’s still damp and chilly in July). And the language of the people is what he’s typing out for us with his fingers on fire too, that’s why it’s so long. You can’t control language if you’re Irish–it’s got you in its grip and you better be quiet! So quiet too had better be we.

And I mean that.

Christopher

I am not a flarf groupie but am fully behind the flarf issue, because for too long there has bee a closed shop with lyric normals droning in the spot-light and getting all the (subsidised) praise in our miniscule community on life-support. This gaffe too is the first to actually execute the truly fair philosphy we get to hear a lot of online by the self-styled dictators of Democracy like John Boddie and other facists whose tight-ass talk of freedom and whatnot is merely the sheen of plank factory bosses whose idea of free speech extends soley to agreeing with every word they say.

I ‘ve lost count at the amount of pretend groovers in anti-intellectual cliques run on a basis of fear, founded on the rhetorical principles in which (as Laurie Smith who authored this article on The New Imagination in English poetry rag Magma, states) the mods of cod web democracies “use language as control – to control their own feelings by denying or minimising them and to control others by suggesting, through fluency, grammatical precision, irony or accent, that they are inferior.

Here the editorial policy is actually not run by idiots, which is very surprising for a poetry organiastion. What gets me is the people who moan about others saying their thing, when the best thing to do is, not read and if you get a ranter, as i had at the guardian poem of the week yesterday saying i was utter shite – just ignore it. If you are in any way good, loonies launching frenzied attacks are all part of the fun, and if you just say nothing and move on, once the heat’s gone the jibe’s just hanging there like frozon vomit. Pliny says something about it in his letters, how the moment befits passion, but time is conducive to reasoned opinion.

Unless we are trying to get global drug, sex-trafficking, or conspiracies to topple nations, there really is no good reason to start the Thirties Berlin shtick.

We are too lucky, too rich, to be thinking that Christopher Woodman, a very eloquent 70 year old man or Brady, should be treated as though they’re Robert Mugabe, for actually talking quantum level linguistics, impelled only by a deep love for language.

Once the logophobic oppos in the Big Mac and Fries of Poetry start waving the gun at yer head in a small room and demand crucifiction for the logorrheic – it’s time for the spirit of Borat, Bruno and Michael Moore to take over at the podium.

We just had a guest from Washington who said that the change was even bigger than that, that people had learned to talk again without notes! People were listening much better too, an equally important skill which Obama also models.

I am new to Harriet, but it seems to me there’s something of that rubbing off here too. The Poetry Foundation is the first powerful, well-financed poetry organization that is not part of the Old Dispensation, and I hear views regularly expressed here that would have had all sorts of institutional control freaks waving guidelines in your faces before. Is that possibly Obama too, that with the Bush etablishment voted out people are more willing to take chances?

At last the women are moving indeed—out from under the skirts of the feminists too. Hilary Clinton didn’t quite make it, but those 23 debates got men and women together as never before, and somehow her role as America’s representative abroad is equally important as Obama’s as president. At least that’s the way it looks to me in the Golden Triangle.

Christopher

He was a lawyer and i asked him what changes had occured since Obama got sworn in. He said, though it was still at the stage were no-one talked of it, there had been a palpable release and dissolving of tension between the various racial communities that was too big to put into words. The historic magnitude of the simple fact of an African-American being president,and the fact that who is clearly the most intelligent person in the room who got the job on merit – had procured an immediate effect which has achieved what no amount of equality legislation could have done.

But no one talks about it, he said, even though it is clear to all.