Notes from Evil Bender

Obama’s inauguration: Newsmax slams Elizabeth Alexander December 21, 2008

This is just hilarious. The far-right website Newsmax isn’t happy about Obama’s choice of poet Elizabeth Alexander to participate in his inauguration. Now, they like to pretend they’re a legitimate news source, so they don’t come out and say they’re unhappy. They just write an incredibly ignorant and mind-numbing article with all the intellectual merit or spray painting “shut up” on the door of a teacher one doesn’t like.

Take, for example, the enlightening title:

Obama’s Poet: “Mustard-Colored Poop”

The article then proceeds to deliver Teh Stupid immediately:

Obama has been touted as among the most literary presidents in modern history, but his choice for an inaugural poet has some scratching their heads.

It’s important to note that, in true dishonest journalism standard, they never mention who these “some” are. It’s easier just to make broad claims with no support, after all.

Acting more like a man of politics than a man of letters, Obama picked former Chicago neighbor and family chum Elizabeth Alexander to deliver an original inaugural poem next month.

Now Newsmax staffers want to lecture a constitutional scholar and a Pulitzer-Prize nominated poet on what it means to be “a man of letters.” This is roughly equivalent to Ken Hamm lecturing Steven Hawking on what it means to be a scientist.

But Alexander is no Robert Frost, critics are quick to point out.

“Alexander writes with a fine, angry irony, in vividly concrete images, but her poems have the qualities of most contemporary American poetry — a specificity that’s personal and unsuggestive, with moves toward the general that are self-consciously academic. They are not poems that would read well before an audience of millions,” writes George Packer in the New Yorker.

This may mark the first time ever that Newsmax has used a New Yorker writer’s views on poetry to defend its position.* And they’re also displaying ignorance of Robert Frost, who loved “fine, angry irony” and concrete images, and whose public persona was popular in spite of the content of his poetry, not because of it. (The Road Not Taken is a perfect example of irony and of meaning generally missed by “an audience of millions,” for example.)

Newsmax then proceeds to take two passages from one of Alexander’s poems out of context in order to try to make her look bad. Unfortunately for the idiots at Newsmax, they know less about poetry than politics, and generally just come off as idiots clutching their pearls at graphic language.

Alexander, who has published four collections of poetry, including 2005’s Pulitzer-nominated “American Sublime,” will take the stage along with a host of other celebs, including Aretha Franklin, Itzhak Perlman, and Yo-Yo Ma.

Apparently no one on Newsmax staff realized you can’t spend the a whole article mocking a poet and contemporary poetry as being irrelevant, and then call that same contemporary poet a “celeb.”

The good news is, this piece came out in December. If it had been in January, it would have crushed all contenders for the stupidest thing written by a wingnut about poetry in 2009. Now it just takes the 2008 award.

[*Packer's New Yorker post is also interesting, in that it's basically a critique of contemporary poetry as irrelevant, written by one who's employer has published Elizabeth Alexander more than once. It seems to me that Packer should have considered what it says about the New Yorker's relevance, if contemporary poets shouldn't read at public venues.]