Have you ever read this poem by Rita Dove?
Here's an excellent podcast about that particular poem, which of course has nothing to do with Elon Musk's renaming Twitter "X"... unless it does. You know, you can always put any 2 things side by side and come up with connections.
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So many poems have a few rewarding lines, and an awful lot of stuff that takes me nowhere. It's rare that I understand why the poem has reached its endpoint. It's rare that I read a poem that wouldn't be improved with more clarity and concision.
"You know, you can always put any 2 things side by side and come up with connections."
The 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
I don't know Rita Dove. That was lovely, thanks. Pages of writing like cords of wood to be chopped and stacked ...
That's not poetry, that's random carriage control.
She isn’t much of a poet, is she?
It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times.
I occasionally enjoy American prosetry,
like writing equity chopped and stacked in
odd lengths, lots
of X-nothings to maybe find
one lone IKEA.
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
And when I awoke I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
@Big Mike, here's the answer to your question, courtesy of Wikipedia:
"Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86).
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
Well, that explains the shitty legislation of the mid-nineties, the Bills didn't rhyme.
All kidding aside, the next amendment to the Constitution ought to be a requirement that all bills and proposed acts brought before Congress must be drafted in iambic pentameter with the AXXA rhyme scheme. At least that would guarantee somebody applied some degree of thought to our national body of law. $174,000 is a lot of scratch to pay for a monkey chained to a typewriter.
I guess ‘The Bird is not the word’, anymore.
I stopped reading Rita Dove when she wrote a poem about hating her infant daughter's skin color because Dove is married to a white man (or was then) and it made her think of the innocent infant as her oppressor.
She also stripped half the white poets out of the newer edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and replaced them mostly with lesser minority poets.
She is good at one thing: maintaining an extraordinary amount of resentment towards institutions that literally shower her with awards and money for her semi-average work.
That is not a poem.
@planetgeo, it was an observation, not a question. So she was an affirmative action hire at the Library of Congress? That or there weren’t many decent poets in 1993. Either way [shrug].
(N.B., the appeal to authority fallacy does not work with me.)
One of Edgar Allan Poe's lesser-known stories is a bit of hackwork titled X-ing a Paragrab, about a war between two newspapers and the theft of lead type used to operate the printing presses. It also features some racist humor on Poe's part, with an African-American printer's assistant speaking in stereotyped dialect.
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