Poetics and Ruminations

Daily Bluesanelle 5/5/13

ABANDONED FACTORY

A Philip Levine tailgater bluesanelle

 

Beyond, through broken windows one can see

Barely, through broken panes, can barely see

A lot of subjects for great poetry.

 

Squint your eyes, or close your eyes completely

As you stand enraptured, rapt completely,

And through those busted windows you will see

 

Downtrodden workers…or their darkling ghosts,

The wraiths and phantoms of despairing hosts --

All of them subjects for great poetry.

 

They’re still downtrodden, everyone who labors,

Who toils for pelf, performing manual labors.

Beyond, through broken windows one can see

 

Prose odes and elegies to beaten workers

Written by academics, word-warrior workers

Who find in labor topics for poetry.

 

The mill towns of New England were a wreck,

But now it’s old Detroit that is the wreck --

Through all its broken windows one can see

A lot of Luddites reading poetry.

 

Copyright © 2013 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

Daily Bluesanelle 4/26/13

THE MASSES

A Sandburgian Tailgater Bluesanelle

 

A million young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads;

They got stiff last night but this morning they’re still on the roads

Trying to get high on the funny mushrooms and the juice on the toads.

 

Since my day there’s all sorts of new stuff that they can use

To get high and drunk and imbibe to confuse

These million young workmen straight and strong lying stiff on the roads,

 

But in their condition it’s getting harder and harder to catch those hoppers

Jumping from pond to pond, turning the young themselves into hoppers

Trying to get high on the funny mushrooms and the juice on the toads.

 

They don’t have enough to do, I guess, to keep them busy,

So they go out every night to get completely confused and dizzy --

They got stiff last night but this morning they’re still on the roads

 

And on the grass in the fields searching for who knows what these days:

A new sort of high, something that can keep them for days in a daze

Trying to get high on the funny mushrooms and the juice on the toads.

 

It makes you wonder how you ought to pronounce the term “the masses”

Nowadays, where to break the syllables, as for instance: “Them asses!”

A million young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads,

Trying to get high on the funny mushrooms and the juice on the toads.

 

Copyright © 2013 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

An epitaph for Carl Sandburg may be found here:

 

Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1.

 

Critical material on Carl Sandburg may be found here:

Visions and Revisions of American Poetry by Lewis Putnam Turco, Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 1986, 178 pp., ISBN 0938626493, cloth; ISBN 0938626507, paper. Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America.

 

A Message from Carl Stevenson

A MESSAGE FROM CARL STEVENSON

I started my own campaign on CREDO's new site that allows activists to start their own petitions. My petition, which is to members of Congress, asks the following:

Support the Student Loan Fairness Act (H.R. 1330), which is common-sense legislation offering a 10-10 repayment plan that would require borrowers to make 10 years of payments on their federal student loans at 10% of their discretionary income, after which the remaining student loan debt would be forgiven. The legislation would also limit interest capitalization to 10% of the original principal.

I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2008. Although I am fortunate to have a job doing what I love, I can never pay all my bills in any given month because of the amount of student debt I am in.

I grew up with a single mom, and worked hard to get myself into and through college. I did everything I could to help myself--I went to a state university, applied for scholarships, and worked full time for most of my college career. It took me six years instead of four to graduate because I was working so much. And yet I still graduated with almost $50,000 worth of student debt.

But my story is not unique. There are millions of Americans in the same position as I am. That's why I am asking you to sign this petition to support the Student Loan Fairness Act.

There are many good things in the Student Loan Fairness Act (H.R. 1330) that will help people like me, including capping interest rates on federal student loans at 3.4%, capping monthly payments at 10% of borrowers' discretionary income, and putting limits on interest capitalization. These provisions will help me and millions of other Americans get out from underneath our crushing debt loads. This is good for us and good for the economy. Click here to learn more and add your name to my petition to members of Congress urging them to support the Student Loan Fairness Act (H.R. 1330).

Carl Stevenson

A REPLY TO CARL STEVENSON

Dear Carl,

I was born in 1934, the heart of the depression, the son of an impoverished Sicilian immigrant who served in two armies, the Italian and the American. He put himself through grammar school, high school and seminary by working many jobs, to become an Italian Baptist minister. My mother was a Methodist missionary who grew up in rural poverty in Superior, Wisconsin, but managed to work her way through secretarial school in Chicago and subsequently, working as a stenographer, through Boston University.

Neither of my parents could afford to give me a nickel to attend college, yet now I am a retired professor of English who put himself through college and graduate school in the 1950s by graduating from high school and giving eight years of my life to the U. S. Navy in exchange for the Korean War G. I. Bill. I put my daughter through college with her help: she worked.

I have little sympathy for young people who put themselves deeply into debt in order to go to college. You could have managed in other ways, for instance by working and saving for a few years before entering, or by working full time and going to college part-time, or by working part time while you attended college, as my wife and many of my friends and acquaintances did. You chose your path. Live with it.

Lewis Turco

 

Emersong

EMERSONG

A tailgater bluesanelle

 

Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting --

Waldo Emerson’s wisdom-fruiting

Transcendental instituting!

 

Rainbows love to come to flower,

Arch above his orchard bower,

Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting

 

While he tries to meditate

On his Concord apple-crate,

Transcendental instituting!

 

Something good will happen soon,

Probably before high noon,

Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,

 

The rain will stop and he’ll dry off --

The sun make rainbows of his cough,

Transcendental instituting!

 

He needs a literary hit-man…,

Perhaps he’ll hire Walter Whitman!

Waldo Emerson’s wisdom-fruiting,

Transcendental instituting! 

 

Copyright © 2013 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

Child Abuse

 

 

T. S. Eliot

CHILD ABUSE ★

A tailgater bluesanelle, 12 April 2013 

 

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Winter weather of the basest breeding

While the infant March is still breast-feeding.

 

Fare thee well, grim month, you ancient March,

Get thee begone! Attention! Forward march!

April is the cruelest month, breeding

 

The most disgusting weather here in Maine

Long after states below us, in the main,

Have started weaning. March is still breast-feeding

 

Here while, there, crocuses abloom

Encourage daffodils to start to bloom.

Winter weather of the basest breeding

 

Squalls and wails away in April’s cradle

Here in Dresden Mills. April’s cradle,

Where the infant March is still breast-feeding,

 

Rocks and trundles with its little bundles

Of snow, sleet, and wind, those joyful bundles:

Winter weather of the basest breeding,

While the infant March goes on breast-feeding.

 

by Lewis Turco

 

© copyright 2013, Lewis Turco. All rights reserved.

★PLEASE NOTE: Certain readers are allowing the title of this poem to influence their ability to actually read what this poem says. The only "child" in the poem is the month of March which this year refuses to grow up and turn into spring. IT IS THE CHILD MARCH THAT IS ABUSING US ALL; the infant year is the abuser of us who live in Maine.

 

 

 

 

Margaret Thatcher Epitaph

R. W-O. P. MARGARET THATCHER

13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013

 

Here lies Margaret Thatcher

With many honors laden.

While she was living the Iron Lady

Deserved the iron maiden.

 

 

 

The Hustle

 

Gene and Lewis Turco at a family wedding.

          When I was five years of age my brother, Gene, was born in Meriden, Connecticut.  His middle name is "Laurent" — the male version of "Laura," my mother’s middle name, just as my first name is “Lewis,” the English version of “Luigi,” and my middle name is “Putnam,” my mother’s maiden name. It was many years before I realized the derivation of "Gene": it is the American version of "Gino," which is short for "Luigi" — my father had named both his sons after himself!  In my second collection of poems, a chapbook titled The Sketches of Lewis Turco and Livevil: A Mask (1962), I wrote about our childhood:

 

GENE

 

"Ragtail Gene, don't tag along here;

        scram on home or I'll bop your nose."

Brother, come the first of April,

        that was the word the second of May

        and all you heard when our lead pipe cannon

        swallowed a cherry bomb and belched a stone

        that boomed across the Fourth of July,

        nearly crocking you where you hid

        to spy on all the older kids.

 

If the world grew huger in your eyes,

        that was because they went wide

        to hear the clubhouse secrets told

        in the dark garage where gasoline

        smelled about good enough to swill.

 

For, the first you knew of going,

        you knew because we swore our raft

        was not a raft, but a ship to float

        a boy's body out of sight

        and a man's voice too deep for sounding.

 

That's the way that I am going;

        ragtail Gene, don't tag along here.

 

          When I was in the eighth grade my father sent me off to Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut.  He told me that he was doing it to give me the best education he could, but he evidently told my brother that he sent me away to save Gene's life.  I don't recollect that I was all that homicidal toward my sibling.  The worst thing I remember doing was tying him to the porch of the parsonage on Windsor Avenue when I was supposed to be baby-sitting him.  I wanted to play with my neighborhood buddies instead, and I knew he was safe because I could hear him yelling.

          One weekend while I was in the Navy and Gene was in high school I came back on liberty to Meriden and discovered that he had gotten himself into some sort of trouble. Papa and Mom May talked to me about it in distress, and I think I must have become angry, because I wrote “The Hustle”:

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, "The Hustle."

 

O your eyes are slightly wondered,

           Brother Gene.

They allow the world's been sundered,

           Brother Gene.

So you travel with your brothers:

Not the flesh-and-blood kind — others

Who deplore the ways of fathers,

           Man! you're mean.

 

There are rods and there are women,

           Brother Gene.

You're a rebel, you're a demon,

           Brother Gene.

You were spawned beneath the atom

On a lower social stratum.

People stink, and so you hate 'em,

           Bile and spleen.

 

What's a lifetime's secret essence,

           Brother Gene?

Is it kooky adolescence,

           Brother Gene?

Is it ninety miles per hour,

Is it acting beat and dour,

Or professionally sour?

           Cool the scene.

 

We will halve the world and share it,

           Brother Gene.

Call half minah, call half parrot,

           Brother Gene.

In our monstrous aviaries

We will ostracize canaries...,

Any bird that sings or varies

           In between.

 

Then we'll blow the whole bit higher,

           Brother Gene,

Than the sun shoots tongues of fire,

           Brother Gene.

For commitment's too much trouble;

Prick the big dream like a bubble.

You can be the final rebel,

           Brother Gene.

           It was very strange, it seemed to me, that Gene had gotten into a scrape because he was, and still is, a very nice guy. He had never been a minute’s trouble all his childhood, to my recollection, except that he was accident-prone. Strange things happened to him: once he walked through the smoke of a bonfire — in those days one could burn leaves in the fall — and came down with a case of poison-ivy all over his body. Another time he and some of his friends were playing with a BB gun and he was shot in the eye which split his cornea. For most of our lives we have gotten along pretty well, our wives like each other, and our kids all get along on those few occasions when they get together. The poem is an over-reach, over-the-top. Reading it now, it seems to me that I was writing about the 1950s, not my brother.

          Jean and I had graduated from Meriden High in 1952. Two or three years later rock-n-roll had arrived, the new teen-agers were acting quite strangely, wearing d. a. hairdos (that’s “duck’s ass” in case anyone wonders) and developing the culture that would eventually lead to American Graffiti, Hair, James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause and the Beatniks. My wife and I had grown up in the post-World War II culture, where the last days of swing and bebop and bobbysox were fading into the unsettling and ominous future.

          The poem ttled "Gene" is from Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007. ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper; an e-book edition was published in 2013.

          "The Hustle" may be found in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback.

The Weed Garden: A Poemoir

          One of the most common, and most unanswerable questions a poet is asked is, “Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s as though people expect one to say someplace specific, as though every idea were born in the same place and, if they knew where that was, maybe they could become writers too. My standard answer is, “I have a guy in Chicago who sends me new material every month.”

          That’s a lie, of course, but then poets are prevaricators by profession. In the early 1960s the poet Miller Williams participated in a writers' conference held at the Cleveland Poetry Center of Fenn College, now Cleveland State University, where he made a number of cogent comments, but in the course of a panel discussion on "The Poet's Masks" he said one thing in particular that I have remembered ever since: "The poet lies to tell the truth."  As an illustration of this thesis Miller used an incident that involved his son:  One day the boy ran into the house and said, "A lion's chasing me!"  Of course, there was no lion in the yard, but out of courtesy to childhood Williams looked, and there was a lion in the yard...in the form of a fair sized dog. 

          The point Miller made was that to an adult the animal was a dog, but the quality of the boy's experience was that he had been threatened by something as large and menacing to him as a lion would be to an adult, so the child had "lied" in order to convey the magnitude of the experience to an older person.

          Usually one doesn’t recall where a motivating idea comes from, but in the case of the poem following I recall reading in a periodical long ago an essay by or about R.  D. Laing, author of Knots, who, though himself a poet, made his living as a psychiatrist. Laing quoted one of his patients who said, “I am the ghost of the weed garden.”

          I don’t remember whether I finished reading the article because that line stopped me in my tracks. I knew I had to do something with it, for it was burrowing into my brain evoking…I knew not what, nor would I know until I wrote about it. In order to do that, though, I needed the other inhabitants of that weed garden, the herbs and plants among whom Laing’s patient lived.

          Fortunately, I was a book collector (what writer isn’t?) and I owned an old copy of John Quincy’s Pharmacopoeia Officinalis & Extemporanea. Or, A Complete English Dispensatory, in Four Parts, published in London by Thomas Longman in 1742, “Twelfth edition, enlarged and corrected.” It was bound in full contemporary calf with raised bands, blind-stamped borders and designs, but a modern leather label that I had made to replace the missing one. Its covers had been reattached with leather strapping at the top and bottom edges. The rear cover had been damaged, perhaps by acid, but I had refilled the holes with pieced leather. It was the perfect volume to tell me what I needed to know:

THE WEED GARDEN

On a line by a mental patient, with reference to Quincy's An English Dispensatory.

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "The Weed Garden"

 

     "I am the ghost of the weed garden."

           Stalk among stones — you will find me

remembering husks and pods, how crisp burdock

     couches in the moon for every passer.

           I am the dry seed of your mind.

 

     The hour will strike when you dream me, your

           hand at the sheet like five thin hooks.

I will wait for you in the old vines rattling on

     the wind, in the ground-pine.  I will show you

           where rue has blossomed and eyebright,

 

     mother-thyme.  You must name me Yarrow.

           Bitter vetch shall catch your step as

you follow, hearing the stars turning to crystal,

     sweet lovage turning sere, adder's tongue and

           Jew's-ear at their whisper.  Nightshade

 

     will consume the beautiful lady.

           Dwarf elder, dodder-of-thyme, I

am the thing you fear in the simple of your blood:

     toothwort in the dust, feverfew, mouse-ear,

           sundew and cup-moss, tormentils.

           An idea can happen any time, anywhere. According to David Eagleman in his 2011 book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain we have any number of secret “selves” or systems working beneath our “consciousness mind,” which is actually a very small portion of our brain. “Ideas” bubble up from some sort of subliminal brain committee that is forever working to keep us alive. A poem may begin with a single word — for instance, I heard a word on television one morning. I was watching the weather forecast and the forecaster said, "When will the snow do what it's supposed to do?" But instead of "snow do" I heard "snow-dew." That word fascinated me. I don't know where that idea is going to lead, but perhaps eventually something will click, one of my subconscious committees will put that word into some kind of context for me, and I'll be able to write a poem.

          On another occasion I'd been collecting such words and making a list of them, hoping I'd eventually find a place to use them, but I never did. It was a short list — "twilleter" is a neologism, meaning a kind of insect, from Alistair Reed's children’s book Ounce, Dice, Trice; "common goatsucker,” is another name for the nighthawk, one of my favorite words, but I tend to overuse it; "clum," which I ran across in the Oxford English Dictionary, is an ancient synonym for “silence.”

          Finally I got tired of waiting for "inspiration' to strike, and my conscious mind decided to write a poem and use all of the words, just to get rid of them. So I did, and as I was typing up the final draft (yes, “typing” — this was back in the ‘seventies, as I recall), I meant to write the word "slicing," but it accidentally came out "sliving." I looked at that typo and decided it was more descriptive than the word I'd intended to use, so I kept it. Years later, long after I’d written the poem, I serendipitously ran across the verb "to slive" in a book of archaic words, Charles MacKay’s Lost Beauties of the English Language published in 1874. It meant, "to do anything furtively or slyly; to sneak, to skulk." It turned out to be another ancient word and not a neologism after all! I wonder which of my subconscious systems understood that. Anyway, this is the poem I, or several of my selves, wrote from my word list:

 

HOME THOUGHTS

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Home Thoughts"

 

 

       Time buzzes in the ear.  Somewhere

nearby, beyond my peripheral

vision, an insect throbs its heartsong

to the couch.  A twilleter fuzzes

       against a burning lamp.  Outdoors,

 

       a common goatsucker strings twelve

yellow streetlamps on its bill.  Between

its hoarse shrieks, the town sky drops pieces

of clum among my snoring neighbors.

       If I close my eyes, a crack along

 

       the wall comes sliving my lids to

split the mind's dry sight.  Look inward: a

plaster skull sifts dust down upon old

webs that hang, buzzing, as darkness moves

       ruthlessly to feast on something

 

small and hollow with blind, jeweled eyes.

          So ideas come from everywhere; I guess all one need do is be receptive, keep one's ears open for sounds and one's eyes open for images. A poet, above all other writers, is interested in language. That's his or her material, You keep your ears open for language and your mind open to impressions.

          "The Weed Garden" and "Home Thoughts" were published in my chapbook, The Weed Garden, Orangeburg, SC: Peaceweed Press, 1973, and they were eventually collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2007. Copyright © 1973 and 2007 by Lewis Turco; all rights reserved.

 

Inauguration Hypocrisy Extended

Natasha Trethewey
U. S. Poet Laureate

According to The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, “Poet Laureate” is a noun (plural Poets Laureate...), “an EMINENT [emphasis added] poet appointed by the British royal household to write poems for royal and official occasions.” [© Oxford University Press, 2004.]

Generally speaking, according to Wikipedia, it is “a poet officially appointed by a government, or conferring agency, who is often expected to compose poems for special events and occasions.” Furthermore, “The United States Library of Congress has since 1937 appointed an official Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress until 1984. An Act of Congress changed the name of the position in 1985 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.” On June 7, 2012, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington … announced the appointment of Natasha Trethewey as the Library’s Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2012-2013.

On January 10th of this year, on this blog, I posted an entry titled, “Inauguration Hypocrisy” in which I discussed the fact that President Barack Obama had appointed as his inauguration poet a little known (I had personally never heard of him) gay, Hispanic civil engineer living in Maine (where I live). Now that the inauguration is over and we have heard the aptly named Mr. Blanco read the “poem” he wrote for the occasion, I have a question to ask:

Why was the official “Poet Laureate” of the United States, Natasha Trethewey, not given the assignment to write and deliver the President’s Inauguration Poem?

In response to my original posting I received this message from a writer in Montana:

“’Gay, Hispanic-American’ hits enough political buttons to make his [Obama’s] point with all but people who think that the poetry might be the best reason for choosing the poet. Maybe choosing a gay, Hispanic-American policemen would be the right choice if you wanted to dress up the balcony to salute the blue states.” J. H.

I think that response answers my question. The consequence? Today I received this email message from California:

 

OY OY OY “THE PLUM BLUSH OF DUSK”

Blanco was

Another

Blank

In the Great

Blank

Tradition

Of Inaugural

Poets

A lotta

Corn

In "One"

Really

Bad

Poem

 

Jack Foley

I replied, “It didn't come close to being a poem, Jack. It was as bad and lengthy a speech as any we heard today, including the interminable Invocation. The full text is on-line in several places; here is one of them:

http://www.denverpost.com/nationalpolitics/ci_22419123/inaugural-poem-text?source=pkg. And Stephen Colbert took a shot with a limerick at Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco on “The Colbert Report”: "Of course, folks, being Democrats, there legally had to be a liberal, gay Latino poet from Maine." After showing a clip of the poem, Colbert said, "Would it kill you to throw a rhyme in there? It's a poem. It's not that hard. Here:

BACK TO BARACK

There once was a man named Barack


Whose re-election came as a shock


     He raised taxes I pay


     And turned marriage gay 


And now he's coming after your Glock."

 

Stephen Colbert

 

I figured that, if Colbert could do it, so could I:

 

BLANCO VERSE

 

A poet named Blanco wrote verse 

That wasn't quite, but, what was worse,

     As everyone knows,

     Was rather like prose

That never approached being terse.

 

Lewis Turco

 

And apparently, so did Jack Foley:

 

OBAMA DREW A BLANK

 

Obama, alas, drew a Blank.

He’d heard from his famous think tank,

     “We need a poem

     To serve as a proem.”

He got one but, honey, it stank.

 

Jack Foley

 

I am considering a new term to be included in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Fourth Edition: "Blanco verse," non-verse; prose, an ode without metrical form or linguistic interest.

On Jan 22, 2013, at 12:05 PM, jforjames@aol.com took umbrage with my Blanco send-up of Sir W. S. Gilbert's "I am the very model of a modern major general":

 

I AM THE VERY MODEL OF A POET ORATORICAL

With apologies to the shade of Sir W. S. Gilbert

I am the very model of a poet oratorical.

Although I have no store of clever pictures metaphorical,

I know the presidents of the United States historical

And I can name them in an order that is quite rhetorical.

 

I am a civil engineer, but I can wax poetical

To some degree – I’ve written now and then, I think, a versicle

That, though it may not strictly be what some might call prosodical

At least, perhaps, it’s prose put down in documents methodical.

 

CHORUS: At least, perhaps, it’s prose put down in documents methodical -

At least, perhaps, it’s prose put down in documents methodical --

At least, perhaps, it’s prose put down in documents methodical.

 

I’m very good at writing town reports that are quite legible,

Unlike my fellow townsmen’s that are rather inaccessible.

They did not know my talents are in no way antithetical

To writing odes for Presidents in masks that are poetical.

 

CHORUS: In short, although he has no clever pictures metaphorical

He is the very model of a poet oratorical.

 

In matters of my gender I am gaily interchangeable

And not at all what Baptists might believe to be derangeable

Which counts in politics these days almost as much as ethnical,

But I have that as well because my genes are called “Hispanical.”

 

I’m middle-aged at forty—five, but I am adolescent-ish

In people’s minds because when I perform I’ll still be youngest-ish,

Compared with Robert Frost who was the first to read for Kennedy

A famous verse which he applied to Russia as a threnody.

 

CHORUS: That famous verse which was applied to Russia as a threnody.

That famous verse which was applied to Russia as a threnody.

That famous verse which was applied to Russia as a threnody.

 

Oh, I can write a parking ban in Babble-on cuneiform

And tell you every detail of a housing codex uniform.

In short, although I have no store of pictures metaphorical.

I am the very model of a poet oratorical.

 

CHORUS: In short, although he has no store of pictures metaphorical

He is the very model of a poet oratorical.

 

Athough I don’t know what is meant by "anapest" or "triolet"

I’m Puerto-Rican, born in Spain, I understand the word “Ole!”

And that, no doubt, is nothing short of something more than wonderful,

For I can tell the difference ‘twixt “chattels” and a lotta bull,

 

And I hope soon to learn what progress has been made in punnery

Though I suspect that nonesuch will be found in any nunnery;

In short, when I've a smattering of elemental poesy

I’m sure Obama will agree I’ve done him proud in poetry.

 

CHORUS: You’ll say he’s done Obama proud in what must pass as poetry!

You’ll say he’s done Obama proud in what must pass as poetry!

You’ll say he’s done Obama proud in what must pass as poetry!

 

In versifying practice, though I'm plucky and adventurous

I’m sure you’ll find there’s nothing found that’s rhyming or censorious,

But still, although I have no store of pictures metaphorical.

I am the very model of a poet oratorical.

 

CHORUS: But still, although he has no store of pictures metaphorical.

He is the very model of a poet oratorical.

 

Lewis Turco

 

He wrote:

 

Lew,

Not as much charm and wit as I remember in G&S and too much mocking of Blanco's heritage and homosexuality for my taste.  Blanco did a stand up job, I thought. Just because he doesn't do poetry in meter and rime doesn't mean he couldn't if he chose to. You presume a lot (unless you know Blanco more than you're letting on.) 

Jim

 

I replied,

I've looked his work up on-line and read as much as I care to; however, the point is that he was chosen, not as a poet primarily, but as a politically correct symbol because he is gay, Hispanic, and the son of a Cuban immigrant, all target demographics for the Obama administration. Natasha Trethewey is the official Poet Laureate of the US, and it ought to have been her job to deliver the Inaugural Poem, no?

As to your remarks about Blanko's metrical abilities: he has none that I can discover. I have always felt that an artist ought, at the very least, to be able to draw. Likewise, any poet ought at least to be able to hear the music of the language and to demonstrate it in verse. Ignorance is not bliss, Jim, it is simply ignorance.

Lew

 

Inauguration Hypocrisy

 

Richard Blanco, poet, and, on the right, Rev. Louie Giglio           Interesting day on-line. When I woke up this morning I discovered that President Obama had asked an unknown, gay, Hispanic-American poet living in Maine, Richard Blanco, to deliver the upcoming inauguration poem. Then, later on, I found that an Italian-American Baptist preacher, whom the President had asked to give the inauguration benediction, Rev. Louie Giglio, had withdrawn because back in the mid-nineties he had said in a sermon that gay people are (like the rest of us, no doubt) sinners. As an Italian-American poet living in Maine whose father, the Rev. Luigi Turco, was an Italian-Baptist preacher, I find enough politically correct hypocrisy in these events to make me sick to my stomach.