World Class Poetry Blog

I’d never get a tattoo, but I like looking at them. Click here to see a Poet knuckle tattoo.

Over at the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is at it again - helping the Bush Administration with one more overspending scandal. And you thought poetry was exempt from the excesses of capitalism!

And on the lighter side of verse, mzbarbielicious - no, seriously, that’s Mz. Barbielicious (and her uno el friendo) - tells us how to write a poem “from the heart”. I just love how she uses your in place of you’re. Makes me think she’s a member of that elite group called the Language Poets.

And On The Not-So-Funny Side

The Poetry Project upcoming calendar.

Liz Henry wages war on the Republican Party.

Mark Strand does George Herbert, class of 1633.

What’s the real debate about?

Then there’s …

Ron Silliman On Sarah Palin

Ron Silliman discusses the election. He’s almost brilliant. He does, in fact, understand electoral politics and his analysis of the electoral landscape is fair and stark. But he totally misses the point on Palin’s selection as VP. It was meant to mend the broken relations between John McCain and the Religious Right. Yes, there are gender politics going on there, but the conservative religious voters who follow Pat Robertson and James Dobson needed someone to cling to because it wasn’t McCain. If he didn’t pick a strong evangelical - and by strong I don’t mean politically, I mean religiously dogmatically - then he was going to ensure that a good number of evangelical voters in key states were going to stay home on election day. As it is, they may not stay home, but I’m not sure that John McCain and the Republican operatives are aware of just how many of their evangelical base are upset with Bush and the Republican Party over the war in Iraq and lost opportunities in other areas of importance to them. They do not necessarily see Obama as their political savior, but in a land of ‘lesser of two evils’ he is looking a lot less like Lucifer than the other guy. Palin just takes one of McCain’s horns away.