"Is calling something 'poetic' calling it a 'poem'?"

I find myself retorting to a reader, Nancy, who emailed me to say — in response to my calling something "a sincere effort at poetic polemic" — "Polemic, yes, but who would call that a poem?" 

At the link there's video of a performance called "White Privilege," which Slate called a "poem." I can see that I repeated that word, "poem," before my sentence that began with "I think": "I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic." I know I wrote "poetic polemic" to nudge the reader to question whether something that's too polemical deserves to be considered poetry. 

But, speaking of "White Privilege," isn't it white-privilege-y to question whether this set of words is a poem? I'm resisting googling "What is a poem?" but I do remember watching the "Master Class" course with Billy Collins teaching reading and writing poetry, so let me give you this from the old white man:

 

"No one else could have written that. This voice is just yours, and yours alone."

ADDED: I went back to the email to tell Nancy: "I made a poem post out of this."

And I see that Nancy has written back to me: "She calls it a poem." 

"She" is the reciter of "White Privilege," who I see I haven't yet dignified with a naming in this post, so let me say, it's Kyla Jenee Lacey.

"The Bidens are GIGANTIC. I had no idea."

The Bidens are GIGANTIC. I had no idea. pic.twitter.com/8JQrzLogP0

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 4, 2021

ADDED: That picture is mindbending. Fortunately, The Guardian investigated: "Why do the Carters look so tiny alongside Joe Biden and his wife Jill in this picture?/You don’t need special gear to create this optical trickery. If you have an iPhone 11 or 12 you too can loom large over a former US president." 

What amazes me is that the picture was chosen for sharing. It looks like it was the Carter Center that tweeted it. I think that showed poor judgment, but maybe they knew it was hilarious and wanted to amuse us.

PLUS:

There. I fixed it. pic.twitter.com/dmjLiX3oXk

— 🌊 Deonardo La Vinci 🌊 (@DeonardoLeVinci) May 4, 2021

FROM THE EMAIL: Nancy links to this famous Diane Arbus photograph and says: 

This was the first image that came to mind when I saw the Tiny Carter’s. (Finally, a name for my new band.) 

Perhaps The Carter Center has a good, slightly twisted sense of humor as this also reminded me of the story of Jimmy battling the giant rabbit.

I see "Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident" has its own Wikipedia page.

"'I didn’t come here to be insulted,' she murmured at one point, and Roth burst out laughing. 'But of course you did, he said. We all did.'"

"'That’s what I want carved on my gravestone. Philip Roth. He came here to be insulted.'" 

From "Excerpt: Novelist Philip Roth’s Unsettled Marriage to Claire Bloom 'God, I’m fond of adultery,' Roth liked to say. 'Aren’t you?'" by Blake Bailey (Vulture). 

That's from an excerpt from the Philip Roth biography we've been talking about, the one the publisher has been withholding because of allegations about the biographer. I've been reading about this book — have read several articles — and blogged it more than once. This morning, my readings brought me around to the subject of Claire Bloom, and I got to the point of blogging the quote above before I realized what I was reading was the writing of the accused man, the biographer — Blake Bailey. Strange!

Claire Bloom and Philip Roth sound like an awful pair. I don't know if I want to read about them. I considered buying Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving a Doll's House," but it's not available on Kindle. I'll keep her at a distance, as the star of one of my all-time favorite movies, "Limelight."

As for Philip Roth, it seems better to encounter him through his novels, and in fact, I'm reading one of his novels, "The Human Stain." When I blogged about the biography yesterday, I ran into a quote from that book, and it was fine enough to send me to Amazon to download the text and the audio. 

Here, I highlighted one quote so far. It's all one sentence:

My point is that by moving here I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience—or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.

Sure, you can diagram it. I'll start: point | is.... 

ADDED: The OED defines "caterwaul" as "The cry of the cat at rutting time. Also transferred. Any similar sound." It could be modernized into "catwail," but it's an old word, first seen in English in this sentence: "If the cattes skyn be slyk and gay, forth she wil, er eny day be dawet, To schewe hir skyn, and goon a caterwrawet." That's Chaucer. Circa 1386.

FROM THE EMAIL: Nancy sends this, from a NYT article on Leaving a Dollhouse: 

''He's tense; she's tense,'' Gore Vidal said from his home in Ravello, Italy. ''Each is neurotic. They were together 17 years; it couldn't have been all that bad.'' Like most of the couple's friends, Mr. Vidal is trying to distance himself from the memoir. ''It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces,'' he said. ''And their civil wars.''

Very funny and true!