The Nation’s poetry editors denounce themselves
I’m a lover of poetry, as you can probably tell from the number of posts listed in that category on my right sidebar (as I write this, it’s 161). But the poetry of the last twenty or thirty or even forty years leaves me cold, for the most part. Oh, there are some poets I think are decent, but they represent a small percentage of the whole, and there are none I think compare with the poets of the earlier part of the 20th century.
Of course, back then the world took poetry more seriously. And poets generally took their mission as poets very seriously indeed.
And it was even more so in a still-earlier time. Here’s Shelley, for example, in “A Defense of Poetry,” written in the early 19th Century:
“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . . . the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator.” The task of poets then is to interpret and present the poem; Shelley’s metaphor here explicates: “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”…
To Shelley, poetry is utilitarian, as it brings civilization by “awaken[ing] and enlarg[ing] the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”…concluding with his famous last line: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
These days a lot of poets still take themselves and their mission quite seriously, but it’s a very different mission, and the circles they move in are very very small. Most of the time they are only important to themselves and to each other, and to the universities that are their usual stomping grounds. Much recent poetry reads like prose broken into lines that resemble poetry to the eye but not to the ear. And a tendency to pretentious and seemingly deliberate incomprehensibility makes much recent poetry accessible only to the academics who seem to make up the vast majority of those who write it, publish it, read it, and analyze it.
As for larger, non-academic venues for poetry, I can’t say I even knew that The Nation published poetry. The New Yorker, yes; as a former three-decades-long subscriber and faithful reader (I canceled around 2003, when I could no longer take their ubiquitous liberal slant), I knew they published poetry. But I’ve never been a Nation aficionado.
So I had initially missed the brouhaha about a poem entitled “How To” that was published there. Go here and scroll down till you get to it, and read. The poem is quite short, and quite accessible compared to a lot of poems written today. The furor seems to have come because it was written by a white guy in a voice that uses urban black syntax. Also, it’s got a political message (as does a lot of recent poetry) but it’s an interesting and perhaps incompletely-PC one, I think: instructions on how to get money from people in the street by begging. It ends with these lines:
…If you’re crippled don’t
flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough
Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,
say you sin. It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.
Seems to me the poem is about the hypocrisy the speaker believes exists in people who give money to beggars, and could be summed up as “they’re virtue-signaling rather than actually caring.” It’s also about the tactics used by those begging in order to play on the motives of people giving them money.
Apparently this poem caused quite the social media uproar, so much so that the poetry editors of The Nation decided to issue a joint mea culpa. And what a mea culpa it is! As leftist and PC as the editors almost certainly are, apparently they weren’t PC enough for some readers. And, unlike in the Soviet Union, neither torture nor the threat of death was involved in generating their confession. But apparently being excoriated on social media is an ordeal nonetheless, enough to have put the editors in that Soviet-show-trial-confession frame of mind [emphasis mine]:
…as brigade commander S. P. Kolosov whose final fate is unknown expressed it in an anything but timid letter in 1937: “I am afraid to open my mouth. Whatever you say, if you say the wrong thing, you’re an enemy of the people. Cowardice has become the norm.”
Stalin had won the struggle for power and was now dealing death blows to the opposition by organising uncontrolled terror at every level of society. The purges carried out within the party, the army, among members of the scientific community, artists and prominent cultural figures came to be known as the Great Terror. The term is actually bizarre; terror is hardly a rank great or small but absolute: once it has taken root in a social system it spreads and acquires a life of its own.
Here is the note from the Nation editors on their later, “corrected” thoughts concerning their decision to publish the poem that so offended [my comments can be found in brackets]:
On July 24, 2018, The Nation and its poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, made this statement about the poem below, which contains disparaging and ableist [apparently a relatively recent word popular on social media] language that has given offense and caused harm to members of several communities [“several communities” keeps it vague so that everyone feels included in the apology, and note also the language of groups rather than individuals, because good little leftists think in identity groups]:
As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received [so, they hold themselves responsible for what readers perceive; what an extraordinary notion, but it’s one that is quite common in academia and activism today—the postmodernist idea that fault lies in what other people perceive rather than in an objective evaluation of what a person actually has said and done and whether it was wrong]. We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem “How-To.” We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities [there are those vague “many communties” again] affected by this poem. We recognize that we must now earn your trust back [on our knees, groveling]. Some of our readers have asked what we were thinking. When we read the poem we took it as a profane [“profane” means “to treat (something sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt”—but what is it the editors thought was so sacred here? The disabled community? The black vernacular? “Profane” also can mean “to debase by a wrong, unworthy, or vulgar use,” so maybe that’s what they’re talking about] over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups [there are those many groups again] are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization [the work of marginalization equals what? begging for money? being ostracized? “Marginalization” is another piece of jargon that seems fairly impenetrable unless you’ve spent the last few years on a college campus or social media, I suppose]. We can no longer read the poem in that way [so because some people on social media attacked you, you will abandon your point of view and in the future you will be performing crimestop in order to avoid being guilty of thoughtcrime)].
We are currently revising our process for solicited and unsolicited submissions. But more importantly, we are listening, and we are working. We are grateful [they must thank their accusers to show the proper respect] for the insightful critiques we have heard, but we know that the onus of change is on us, and we take that responsibility seriously. In the end, this decision means that we need to step back and look at not only our editing process, but at ourselves as editors [ironically, “ourselves as editors” echoes one of those final lines of the poem: “It’s about who they believe/they is..” The editors have apparently been shaken to their leftist cores by the fact that they have transgressed.]
Who are the editors? The two names listed are Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith. Looking them up, I see that the first is transgendered (male to female, but the photo looks like a man) and the second is Hispanic. They may have thought that their identities as members of these communities would have protected them from SJW wrath. But if they thought that, they were wrong, and lacked appreciation for the history of the left as well.
However, it’s interesting to note that the comments to their mea culpa at The Nation are uniformly criticat not of the editors’ decision to publish the poem, but of their decision to apologize for it. For example, here was one of the first ones I saw (I couldn’t find a way to link to it):
As a long-time subscriber of (and former reviewer) for The Nation, I am extremely upset that The Nation’s poetry editors felt they had to apologize for this poem, and that the poet felt forced to apologize too. First of all, it’s a perfectly fine poem, and secondly, since when did editors (especially Nation editors!) apologize for their choices?! I took part to some degree in the furor that broke out on Facebook over the poem, and then felt so sickened by all the unsupported assumptions about the poet and the lack of understanding of the poem, that I took a day off Facebook, and thought a whole lot about the lack of civility (and critical thinking!) in this Trumpian Age. I could say more but I think Grace Schulman, The Nation’s former poetry editor, said it all in her opinion piece in The New York Times today: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/opinion/nation-poem-anders-carlson-wee.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
It’s certainly a good development that every one of the comments I read is a ringing defense of the poem and the poet’s right to speak, and a condemnation of the editors’ decision to issue their apology. Since I doubt any of these people are conservatives, it’s encouraging that they don’t like the direction this is going in (although I doubt they’ll be doing anything to stop it).
Note, however, the phrase in that one comment I quoted: “in this Trumpian Age.” My, my, my; the strength of the urge to bring Trump into it and to believe he is the root of all evil is impressive. Now, even the left’s long-established propensity to eat its own is blamed on Trump. And the “Trumpian Age”—I had no idea that Trump had generated his very own era, much like Pericles or Queen Elizabeth I.
Have you read Phillis Levin’s poetry? How about Molly Peacock?
“I took a day off Facebook, and thought a whole lot about the lack of civility (and critical thinking!) in this Trumpian Age.”. What an outstanding lack of self awareness. Trump made them do it. No, it’s because you are part of a community that is essentially a bunch of hormonal teenage drama queens that switches from one outrage to the next as soon as the queen bee gets bored with the latest hysteria. It’s your turn in the barrel when she denounces you, and you get out and get to humiliate someone else when her attention shifts to some one else. Accept it or walk away.
That apology certainly smacks of the “self-critcism” forced on non-conforming thinkers during the Cultural Revolution.
How do you trans a gender? Gender refers to nouns.
For “The Nation”‘s poetry editors, pathetic is much, much more than a fallacy.
Heh. Abelist? Whack you with my cane I will! Then run you over on my bicycle! I like Billy Collins,even though he’s a furriner. Any poet who can get published with a piece about the new Victoria’s Secret catalogue, well, he’s got my vote. At least he’s gazing at someone else’s navel, not his own.
“Much recent poetry reads like prose broken into lines that resemble poetry to the eye but not to the ear. ” – Neo.
Exactly.
For some reason, people think that writing any paragraph with weird line-breaks somehow makes rather mundane prose into poetry. Not so. If you take out the breaks, white space, indentations, and other typographic tricks, very few modern poems are anything other than boring.
If you can’t hear poetry when you read a poem aloud, then you are writing prose.
THIS is just about as “poetic” as anything I have read for decades (and more meaningful).
* * *
Heh.
Abelist?
Whack you with my
cane I will!
Then
run you over on my
bicycle!
I like
Billy Collins,
even though he’s a furriner. Any poet who can get published
with a piece about the new Victoria’s Secret catalogue, well,
he’s got my vote. At least he’s gazing
at someone
else’s
navel,
not his own.
* * *
I had some more entertaining indentations, but the editor removed them. Oh well.
No one said a poet’s life was easy.
not really on topic, but let me voice a heresy.
but first a qualification: I don’t read much poetry.
I have often thought that rap music (which i don’t listen to either, unless I’m sitting in traffic next to someone playing it) is a return to a time when poetry was a more important part of the culture.
and before anyone takes too great an offense to that, remember Sturgeon’s law: “90 % of everything is crap” (the cruder version). And I suspect that most of what we know of as good poetry by the poets of yore has been a) self selected for the good stuff and b) the bad stuff has fallen down the memory hole.
yara:
That’s no heresy. It has been mentioned in comments on this blog before, although I have had some trouble finding where right now.
See this and this, however, for related discussions.
YARA: very much agree with you, on both points.
I can’t speak much about rap music (I understand the genre actually embraces some sub-categories which don’t have despicable lyrics, including some Christian varieties), but the “folk poet” has a long and honorable tradition, and still operates today in Wales, along with the “literary” variety.
Song lyrics in general function as our cultural poetry: their advantage is that they generally have to scan and rhyme (although not always). Check out Mark Steyn’s reviews / essays on The Great American Songbook aka Tin Pan Alley & Broadway.
You will also still find decent poetry (blank verse and traditional meter) in non-literary places; for instance, my church magazines regularly feature some fairly good examples.
The selection process also applies to prose.
A few anecdotes, the first two of which have been in my memory-bank too long now to give citations.
(1) a theater director decided that the usual repertoire of Shakespearean plays was too over-done, so he planned a series titled “The Little Known Plays of Shakespeare.” After the conclusion of the season, with gate receipts severely depressed, he said, “Now I know why they are the little known plays.”
(2) some relatively famous personage (Dorothy L. Sayers IIRC), having some time to kill either between terms or because of illness, wondered why the only books from a certain time period were those of Jane Austen and a very few others, and decided to investigate the situation, by dint of reading all of the holdings of her library for that era. At the end, she concluded that the works of Austen and those few were, indeed, the only ones still worth reading.
(3) Robert Graves, a major poet of the 20th century (and the only one IMHO whose “blank verse” is NOT just prose-with-line-breaks), continually re-issued his collected poems with old ones removed and new ones added, along with some editing of the olderones, because he was self-selecting the best of his works.
(4) A friend of mine gave me several boxes of sheet music inherited from her music teacher, after pulling out the few that she personally wanted. I played every single piece, and trashed 90% of them as simply not up to the standard of the 10% I retained, and almost all of those were ones that I was already familiar with.
I think I have been using “blank” verse where I should have used “free” — sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference in practice, for various reasons (sometimes typography disguising the meter — which is why they have to be read; sometimes just plain incompetence).
Also, I personally would consider any metered unrhymed poem to be “blank” (not just iambic pentameter, contra the first bolded sentence below). The second link agrees with me; the bolded sentence there pretty much sums up my opinion of free verse writers.
The lack of any kind of pattern in free verse is probably why I dislike it so much; I also much prefer classical and even baroque music to romantic or modern, and traditional (old folk music) even more.
https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/668141-Blank-Verse-and-Free-Verse
NOTES: Blank Verse and Free Verse are probably the most misunderstood and misused forms of poetry. Before we can use either correctly, we must first understand what they are and what they are not.
Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter (ten syllables with the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables accented). The form has generally been accepted as the best for dramatic verse in English and is commonly used for long poems whether dramatic, philosophical, or narrative.
While blank verse appears easy to write, good blank verse demands more artistry and genius than most any other verse form. The freedom gained through the lack of rhyme is offset by the demands for required variety. Some ways of gaining that variety are as follows:
1. Shifting caesura, or pause, from place to place within the lines.
2. Shifting of the stress among syllables.
3. The use of stanzas to group thoughts together (like paragraphs in prose).
4. Variation in tonal qualities by changing diction from passage to passage.
5. Adaptation of the form to reproduction of differences in the speech of characters in dramatic and narrative verse and in differences of emotional expression.
6. The effective use of poetic devices.
Blank verse is not any metrical unrhymed form of verse.
Free Verse is poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic cadence recurring, with variations of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter. In other words, free verse has no rhythm scheme or pattern. However, much poetic language and devices are found in free verse.
Rhyme may or may not be used in free verse, but, when rhyme is used, it is used with great freedom. In other words, free verse has no rhyme scheme or pattern.
Free verse does not mean rhyme cannot be used, only that it must be used without any pattern.
http://pediaa.com/difference-between-blank-verse-and-free-verse/
Main Difference – Blank Verse vs Free Verse
Blank Verse and Free Verse are two important features in poetry. Blank verse refers to poetry written in regular metrical but unrhymed lines. Free verse refers to an open form of poetry that has no rhyme or rhythm. The main difference between blank verse and free verse is that free verse is not written in consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern whereas blank verse is written in regular metrical patterns.
What is Free Verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that does not use a consistent meter, rhyme or any other pattern. Although it is devoid of regular rhyme, rhythm or meter, it still provides artistic expressions. It tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech. Since it does not follow set rules, the poet can give any shape to a poem. Free verse also gives a greater freedom for poets to choose words without bothering about the rhyme and rhythm. It is commonly used in contemporary poetry.
It is true that stand-alone poetry does not have the mass appeal that it used to. That mass market has been replaced song lyrics.
The old glory days of the Russian Revolution and Stalin and his terror to be sure.
But, I gotta say things are starting to get very Red Guardy too.
This mea culpa reminds me of something that could have come out of one of those Chinese Communist “criticism and self-criticism” sessions the Red Guards were so fond of.
What’s next in this progression? Are all of these violent leftist organizations/mobs, the “activists,” who have been harassing Trump Administration officials, going to morph into our own version of the Red Guards?
Are we going to see “offenders” they target dragged out of their homes, placards announcing whatever their “deviation” was around their necks, and them beaten as they are shoved through the streets, going to their next public “struggle session”?
It seems to me that there might be a business opportunity here.
If someone can quickly get products–t-shirts, coffee mugs, pre-printed signs to hang around your neck, fridge magnets, dunce hats, bumper stickers, decals–on the street and in on line stores, emblazoned with the slogan, “I Denounce Myself,” they might sell very well with the Left.
“What’s next…”?
Whatever it takes to make people think “properly”….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/08/09/male-pale-stale-university-professors-given-reverse-mentors/
The Nation has long been a forum for the worst strands of political discussion in this country. Autophagy on their part is not something to regret.
On their poetry, The New Republic published about 30 years ago a brief squibb from one of their editors on a gross typographical error in a piece of poetry in one of their issues. He said the one person who complained was the contributor of the piece and wondered if any of their readers ever read the poetry.
These publications are old and have for decades been part of the philanthropic sector. When they were founded, poetry had a much more prominent place in liberal education than it does today. See Norman Maclean’s memoirs of his upbringing. His mother was distressed when she discovered (when he was around 16) that he hadn’t been taught to scan poetry and took it upon herself to home school him in this particular skill. This was what a professional class housewife expected of her sons in small town Montana ca. 1918. Clara Maclean was a farmer’s daughter who was born in one patch of countryside in Quebec and spent much of her upbringing in another patch of countryside in Manitoba.
It’s a reasonable guess they decorate issues with poetry because they always have, and they once did because poetry was once serious business.
Blank Verse, Free Verse and then there is Vogon poetry – the worst in the universe:
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Vogon_poetry 🙂
But then again PG Wodehouse had a few things to say about the trendy poets of the early 20th century – “Neo Vorticist” poets or something. Not to be confused with the Vorticism movement (in poetry)?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69480/vortex
Don’t blame me, I wasn’t an English major.
It is true that stand-alone poetry does not have the mass appeal that it used to. That mass market has been replaced song lyrics.
That argument might have made sense during the period running from 1920-1965. After that, song lyrics grew increasingly incomprehensible.
They probably thought they were on solid ground as the poem attacks ‘Christian’ hypocrisy. Joke’s on them.
I have to agree with the comments that poetry has been supplanted by song lyrics. Perhaps this is part of the reason for modern poetry’s inaccessibility – in the same way photography has been blamed for the death of representative art. Poets and painters must now make their work impenetrable to differentiate themselves from the common herd…
I was very fortunate that the home school program I used for my kids included poetry as a regular subject. From early elementary through 8th grade there was a weekly poem to memorize and recite. All the poetic forms and devices were studied with increasing complexity as grade level advanced. My computer obsessed son (now an engineer in the field) just suffered through it, he was never as interested in poetry as his sister or myself. So imagine my delight when during AP Eng Lit he spontaneously identified “The Windhover” as an Italian, rather than English, sonnet!
But we still struggle with synchydokey and mentalme…
Representational art hasn’t died. It may not interest critics or collectors for whom $100K is sofa change, It may not interest the studio-art-faculty circle jerk. It’s still produced and interesting to people. See Thomas Kinkade.
Poetry, on the other hand, has retreated to literature department faculties. I used to attend poetry slams at a coffee house down the street from me. Amusing, but very little poetry was offered the assembled. Humor pieces, bits of song, ‘statements’.
I was just at the Tate in London, taking a docent-led “highlights” tour because we only had a couple of hours there, and was struck most forcibly by the visual and emotional impact of the older, representational work versus the near-total sense of “meh” that the modern stuff produced in me. It was only *near*-total because sometimes the execution was worth noticing. But the poor docent had to explain each modern piece to death in order to engender any sense of meaning at all.
Meanwhile, the room next door would have Turners that made me marvel at his perception of light and his bravery and bravura, Millaises that were so beautiful they made me wonder what was wrong with the real world, Constables that drew me in like an HD screen held inches from my face – artists who mastered and furthered technique and then used it to express deep feelings in ways that their viewers could share, not (as Heinlein said) the pseudo-intellectual masturbation of “artists” whose work is incomprehensible to anyone but themselves until they write a novella about what they were trying to do and all the deep symbolism of painting with animal dung. No kidding, the Turner prize was won recently by an artist who did just that. To be fair, he created a pretty piece, and it was well rendered, but who the heck cares that he mixed his paint with poop?
I should amend: the Turner prize piece did employ some symbolism that was discernible to the viewer. But he muddied it up by (as I said) rendering the work in dots of paint mixed with dung, creating stands for it to rest on out of more elephant dung, painting pretty much invisible words in phosphorescent paint across it (that the docent had to point out even though you couldn’t see them), and specifying that it was to be propped against the wall instead of hung for some reason. It was… positively Victorian in its over-decoration. But I’m just a bourgie; my opinion is not worthy.
Agreed. A great many curators are clowns as well. Museum boards should fire them. It’s a consistent feature of the age that trustees are forever betraying their fiduciary responsibilities.
Art Deco on August 12, 2018 at 12:00 pm at 12:00 pm said:
“It’s a reasonable guess they decorate issues with poetry because they always have, and they once did because poetry was once serious business.”
Very nicely phrased.
Dont you love gliechshaltung as each slowly falls till the diversity creates the homogeneity for what came AFTER the french revolution, the russian revolution, the chinese revolution, the cuban revolution, Czech revolution, the months and all the colors like orange…
GLIECHSHALTUNG
very interesting how key it was to turn a free voting majority into something else
Anne Elliot said
“she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry, and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/literature/0/steps/12584
But Jane Austen was speaking of the likes of Scott and Byron, Things are different nowadays.
And then other here have noted that song lyrics today take the place of poetry
and referenced Norman Mclean, so here is an example written about the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 (ref. Young Men and Fire):
“My name is Dodge but then you know that
It’s written on the chart there at the foot end of the of the bed
They think I’m blind that I can’t read it
I’ve read it every word and every word it says is death
So confession Is that the reason that you came
Get it off my chest before I check out of the game
Since you mention it well there’s thirteen things I’ll name
Thirteen crosses high above the cold Missouri waters
August 49 North Montana
The hottest day on record the forest tinder dry
Lightning strikes in the mountains
I was crew chief at the jump base
I prepared the boys to fly
Pick the drop zone C47 comes in low
Feel the tap upon your leg that tells you go
See the circle of the fire down below
Fifteen of us dropped above the cold Missouri waters
Gauged the fire I’d seen bigger
So I ordered them to side hill we’d fight it from below
We’d have our backs to the river
We’d have it licked by morning even if we took it slow
But the fire crowned jumped the valley just ahead
There was no way down headed for the ridge instead
Too big to fight it we’d have to fight that slope instead
Flames one step behind above the cold Missouri waters
Sky had turned red smoke was boiling
Two hundred yards to saftey
Death was fifty yards behind
I don’t know why I just thought it
I struck a match to waist high grass running out of time
Tried to tell them step into this fire I’ve set
We can’t make it this is the only chance you’ll get
But they cursed me
Ran for the rocks above instead
I lay face down and prayed above the cold Missouri waters
Then when I rose like the phoenix
In that world reduced to ashes
There was none but two survived
I stayed that night and one day after
Carried bodies to the river
Wondering how I stayed alive
Thirteen stations of the cross to mark their fall
I’ve had my say I’ll confess to nothing more
I’ll join them now those that they left me long before
Thirteen crosses high above the cold Missouri waters.”
https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/2238487/Cry+Cry+Cry/Cold+Missouri+Waters
And a link to the song as performed by Cry Cry Cry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQNeGPJdcQ
We’ve only had small fires this weekend here in the Tri-Cities (WA). Only five houses destroyed and two horses killed, even so, still sad. But a fire was not long out along the interstate near Spokane this morning, the warning sign still on as I passed.
om – listened to the song & read the comments; it is certainly poetry.
A good friend is in the forest service’s firefighting corps (don’t know the technical name), his wife must think about this kind of tragedy every time he goes out on call.
Aesop:
The Forrest Service leaned a lot from the Mann Gulch Fire but even with new technology and methods (setting a back fire, and portable heat resistant shelters for the individual fire fighters) there have still been mass casualty events. I think they lost more than a few in a wildland fire in Arizona (or was it Colorado?) less than ten years ago. Dangerous, dangerous work.
Who knew I’d find the Democratic party’s ethos so elegantly stated in a poem.
According to what I read, in ancient China some rulers would send out people to collect whatever current poetry was being written, as a way to gauge the temper of the people.
If this is a good gauge of what people are thinking, what, then, do either current day poetry, or even song lyrics, tell about the temper of people today?
It strikes me that such poetry and song lyrics only tell us what a particular group of “artistes” are thinking, and it’s not reflective of people’s main concerns, and what people in general are thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVd8w1VEwW4
What sort of ‘thinking’ is this broad doing?
Poetry isn’t a poll
People lie to pollsters
Most song lyrics are just
Fillers for the hook
Any more questions?
Pingback:Save Up! The 2019 Nation Magazine Calendar Is Out! - NoPaperNews
Here’s my hero, Billy Collins, performing his poem, The Introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1C9SEHTeMQ
It’s all you need to know about a lot of modern poetry.
Pingback:PowerLine -> John Hinderaker - Today Straws, Tomorrow Balloons? - President Trump revokes Brennan’s security clearance — Hoax And Change