UPDATE: Irritating L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poet Has Read Homer And Apparently My Thesis

Nothing lights a fire under my blog-neglecting ass faster than scholar-poets who have the audacity to claim that their work is political. It's like what I told my redneck jock tennis champion little cousin the last time we spoke and he more or less accused me of bringing shame upon the Aryan race: some black people may hate white people but that doesn't make you a victim of racism. You can only be a victim of racism if you do not benefit from it as an institutionalized framework of our culture. Eat your turkey leg, I'm audi. Similarly, Bob Perelman, don't call your poems political unless enough people outside the academy read them for it to make a goddamn difference. But please, by all means, keep giving interviews where you say shit like this:

it occurs to me that iambic pentameter is a little bit like the current Republican regime: the best that they can do is to try to disguise what they are doing. A good Bushista tries to mouth centrist sentiments while doing his nefarious, extremist reactionary things. I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here. But it seems to me that the better iambic pentameter that has been done in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries is iambic pentameter that doesn't draw attention to itself. That seems really odd, actually. So if that's the good iambic pentameter — the iambic pentameter that doesn't draw attention to itself— and the point of it is to mime natural speech but somehow to be obeying the rules in a clandestine way, that seems fairly odd to me.

OMG FASCIST PENTAMETER! This is funny because, as some of you might recall, I spent a whole 9 months of my life birthing a 108-page demon-baby on innovations within the sonnet genre and named it "Form or Fascism?" - a title an equally sleep-deprived Jess immediately praised for its catchiness - and explained to a tribunal why it should be allowed to live and then I won at college, hooray. The analogy to the Bush administration is cute, and prompts me to point out that some of us should remember Billy Collins was Laureate during the first two years of the Bush administration and while he isn't a meter freak or anything he did mainly write about Traveling by train, lying on a beach, and listening to jazz on the radio. Billy Collins you are the father of lies! Just sayin'.*

Anyway, with regards to content, there really is no such thing as a good political poem. I defy you to show me one. Stop trying, you can't, okay? It's just impossible. Poetry is successful when it shows us a new way of thinking, not when it tells us what to think or tries to shock us into just emoting. That's why meterical subversion is actually political and Allen Ginsberg is nightstand decoration. So good job L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets! You bug me, but you are smarter than basically everyone else who publishes poetry. Just stop writing poems about Derrida and then complaining that no one pays attention to you.

*Billy Collins you will always make a million dollars every day and eat lobster in your hot tub no matter what I write about you and I need to acknowledge that now, because as far as American poetry is concerned you are a fucking GANGSTER. Okay? Respect.