It wasn’t until FDR’s second term that we deigned to establish an office for poetry in the people’s library; and not until the end of Reagan’s reckless reign that the librarian of Congress crowned the first poet laureate in America.
Today, there are as many poets laureate in America as there are school districts, maybe more, while, we, the people are not as smart as we were before. We’ve re-elected a fraud and felon and let him authorize a visa-cheating alien to destroy, in two months, what Americans had struggled two hundred years to make, not great, but pretty damn good.
Although more statistics should be compiled, more numbers run, it seems that the liberal distribution of laurels, the widespread allocation of official acclaim for clever talk, adds nothing to the welfare of the general mind, but may, instead, amount to so much smoke of the screening kind.
If wise, we’ll return to poets the freedom to say who the chief poet is. Already BigPoetry, the corp. that succors verse, has enough BigPharma loot to make gifts of gold-edged copies of Horton Hears a Hoot to every girl and boy born until the cows come home, so wily Poetry Foundation bankers are, so lucky it is to be dot org rich in poor America, where money grows on 501 (c) (3) trees.
In the American democratic republic, it’s up to the people to reason why, not to do and die, urged on by loyal poets laureate. All that glitters is not gold, all that laurel-crowning has left us dumb, with more daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, unhoused than when Herbert Hoover occupied the people’s house.
In the midst of so much mental and bodily sickness, wealth signals sin, not health. And uncommon wealth, such as the worst of us worship and serve, spells sickness and death to the American democratic republic, which once was our common wealth.
Dave Read