[Newspoetry] The President's Poetry

[William Gillespie]

When the guy who does the poetry show on the community radio station
announced his bid for congress as a Green Party candidate, the Democrats
demanded equal time. Now every other week the poetry show is all Maya
Angelou. Regular listeners are pissed but feel too guilty to phone in
complaints.

Here in Urbana the Champaign-Urbana Arts Council, reportedly well-endowed
with state money earmarked for poets, is not listed in the phone
directory. Nobody I talked to at the chamber of commerce or public library
knows who serves on its board or what exactly it does. It is suspected by
some poets who have been around a long time that the UAC gives a private
reading now and again to which a few wealthy people are invited, and that
the poet who hosts these events owns a ten-acre ranch up near Moraine View
and has never been published except by small presses whose identity
remains forever obfuscated from scholarship. It's the same story with the
mysterious "44 North:" occasionally you might read an article about them
in the mainstream papers, but you will never find their post office box or
fax number. Whatever projects these local arts organizations fund are
closely-held secrets.

During National Poetry Month there was no accountability at the state
level for how poetry was promoted or pursued. Without looking at the
state's overall poetry needs, politicians might arrange for a poet to give
a reading here, or a book signing there, doling out honorariums to
constituents well-placed in influential universities. There was no sense
of the state's having a larger plan for poetry, no broader vision
regarding the state's poetry infrastructure. (The situation downstate is
especially bad nowadays, even though the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book was once
published there.) There have been allegations of bribery and of poetic
licenses being distributed to writers who have not sat before the state's
rigorous thesis committee. Poets gave readings at closed-door sessions of
congress, state money effectively being using to fund readings closed to
the general public. Now the state has had to borrow several billion
dollars and there is no sign of any poetry anywhere. In public schools
they are reading light verse from the 1950s. With the budget cuts, the
state's major research university is no longer able to afford to retain
their best poets, much less hire new poets. Even novelists are leaving.
This on top of another tuition increase will make the university system no
longer attractive to prospective MFA candidates. Is there no
accountability? Governor Ryan should have his books confiscated by the
state and donated to public libraries. State planners involved in
allocating the funds for National Poetry Month should lose their positions
and serve time teaching poetry on death row to pay their debt to society.

At the federal level the situation is all but beyond hope. The President
of course has become poet laureate for a second term, the statute that a
laureate could serve only a single term having been overturned by the new
Office of Homeland Poetry (appointed not elected), which is headed up by a
major shareholder of the media conglomerate that owns the publisher who
publishes the President's poetry. In polls taken of the legislature, more
than half have stated unwaveringly that the President's poetry is beyond
criticism. It is worth noting that the house's opinion of the President's
poetry is divided along party lines suggesting that bipartisan bickering
is more at play then any serious appraisal of literary quality, not that
this is a surprise really. Scarcely credible to my mind, polls of public
opinion show an "overwhelming majority" appreciate the President's poetry,
though there is more public skepticism with regard to the quality of his
painting. Well, nobody needs to be reminded of the circumstances of the
President's being awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize at a time in his
life during which he has all but explicitly denied not abusing drugs and
cheating on exams: the recount was eventually completed but the results
were suppressed. The major newspapers of course are uncritical of the
president's poetry, save an occasional angry editorial buried in the
opinion section. If the political cartoons can be taken as meaningfully
indicative of a popular consensus, it would appear that few outside of the
circles of poetry power would claim that the President's writing is
credible. In an election year, of course, the President's poetry supplants
discussions of any other issue, especially an economy in which the average
family of four made about as much per year in 2001 as a Yale poet in 1970.

The President's poetry has been written about elsewhere, but it is the
stuff of death and broken dreams. The President's poetry mines the bottom
of oceans. Asphyxiation by poverty, exhaust, gas chambers. Millions of new
bombs. Fascism's cliche, the President's poetry is closed libraries,
unheated classrooms, prisons: ruined language.

Are we to accept as true that the average citizen thinks the President is
a good poet? Does anyone really believe that the President's poetry
represents our country? Are these the limits of discourse? Has literary
criticism failed?