Could POTUS have been trained to be honest?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 1, 2025 – As AI demonstrates, the composition and utterance of poems is not evidence of a poet any more than composition and utterance of prayers is evidence of a priest. People can be programmed to exhibit writing behavior, but no amount of programming will ever transform a non-poet into a poet.
Everybody who speaks can also sing, but only singers will ever sing for their supper.
The fact that there is no such thing as a model poem, no tried and true template or stencil, no perfect pattern of rhyme, nor measure of meter, nor flavor of metaphor, nor style of simile, let alone range of subject matter, almost proves that there is no such thing as a poem.
But, since the 1970s, the coining of poets has been a tuition magnet in Higher Ed. Previously, such a thing was a highly profitable side-hustle for writers and publishers. But a piece published in the July 1970 Atlantic Monthly led to Random House CEO Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School being found liable for fraud and sued right out of the public marketplace.
Almost immediately, a Creative Writing Industry* began to mushroom inside the cloister of colleges and universities. The University of Southern California, one of America’s premier research institutions, recently awarded a PhD to someone whose professed area of expertise is poetry that speaks about menstruation.
Of course, academic fealty to diversity, equity, and inclusion demand that now somebody must be recruited to profess the poetry of nocturnal emissions! What’s good for the ovum must be good for the sperm – until Biblical sex is made clinical, that is. How and why we got to such a place is of secondary importance to the absurdity of giving public sanction to meditations on personal bodily functions.
In our post-citizen world of consumerism, the customer is always right. On campus that translates to, “So long as tuition and fees are up-to-date, students get to study whatever they want.”
What famous writers and industry-leading publishers cannot do in the public marketplace, neither can be done by professors who submit to the pretense of academic regalia and whatever else Alma Mater requires before she issues paychecks.
Poets are products of nature, same as singers, architects, physicians, priests, at al. Human nature sees to the care and feeding of humanity by seeding a sufficiency of vocations throughout the human race. Higher Ed is an artificial construct; it is subservient to nature, because human nature is a feeble thing when measured against nature’s grandeur.
Human feebleness is nowhere more evident than in the truth that a meretricious few have succeeded in training the hoi polloi to refer to the effects of unregulated industrial pollution as climate change! To cement indifference into the gullible public mind, the bastards go on to say “hey, when was the climate ever static?” I heard a big podcaster repeat that canard just the other day!
When poets are a dime a dozen, when the public is inundated with the trivial drivel that garners academic accolades and employment throughout the errant consumerscape, the public mind will eventually dissipate. If Higher Ed represents the public mind, then it turned a corner when what was found to be fraud in the public marketplace was transformed into easy A’s for lazy smart Alecs and clever Alicias.
That Nixon was president then and Trump is now validates at least two adages, 1. that elections have consequences, 2. that fish rot from the head down. Unless the public elects to excise fraud from Higher Ed, tricky Dicks and little Donalds will keep getting away with murder.
*About the Creative Writing Industry
In a 1991 interview in the Paris Review, Donald Hall (1928-2018, US Poet Laureate 2006-07) was asked, Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?
“Well, not really, no. I’ve said some nasty things about these programs. The Creative Writing Industry invites us to use poetry to achieve other ends—a job, a promotion, a bibliography, money, notoriety.
I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.
Workshops make workshop-poems. Also, workshops encourage a kind of local competition, being better than the poet who sits next to you—in place of the useful competition of trying to be better than Dante. Also, they encourage a groupishness, an old-boy and -girl network that often endures for decades.”
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