Bad Poetry - A Liberal's Last Hope To Save The World

Harper Long was invited to 'A Night to Remember', an evening of poetry to celebrate the works of Paula Nettles and was asked to read some of her most popular verses; but when he read the dreck that was to be featured - impossibly dreamy treacle, he demurred, but since there were certain family obligations to consider, he agreed. 

The reading group was tanned and healthy - the kind of silver-haired foxes who had summered on the Vineyard and were just back in Washington.  'Overrun', said one. 'Absolutely overrun, but the Obamas made it and so did David McCullough and Carly Simon' whose reflections were followed by those of a Nantucketer who said she was delighted that they were still the lesser island, longer and richer in American tradition, and without the cachet that seemed to draw all sorts - no offense intended, she said to the first speaker, just making an important distinction, a bit harsh but true. 

The conversation moved from summering to Gstaad and St. Moritz, a very bad channeling of Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald's tedious story of disaffected, alcoholic Americans in Europe - would Eleanor be there? Had Patricia's French improved? Were the mountain view rooms still drafty? And Harper, who had been given an advance copy of the poetry to be read, despite its impossibly trite and adolescent ideas, preferred it to this negligent chatter. 

The mood livened when it turned to Donald Trump, snickers all around.  The absurdity of it all, the utter bottom-feeding ignorance of the man and his backwoods cracker, bass boat fishing, gunrack, trailer trash MAGA fool supporters. There was a settled murmur in the group as an older black man, former Chair of the English Department at Howard University and longtime supporter of his race's causes, held court. 

In his articulate, carefully modulated baritone, the Chair Emeritus spoke of 'insidious evil...retrenched bigotry...insensate capitalist predation...misogyny writ large...' and when he finished, the Islanders and Washingtonians nodded and said they couldn't agree more.  

The Chair was in his element.  He was used to orating and being listened to, for after all, who better than this articulate, prominent educator and administrator in a historically black college to speak of the plight, promise, and frustrations of the black man?  He, however, had nothing new to say, resting on his laurels and the nostrums he had honed and perfected over the years, a soothing bass organ like flow of familiar music without complexity.  He was no Bach, more of a Wurlitzer background man; but the tony, universally progressive crowd hung on his every word. 

 

'It's time, my dears', said the hostess, 'and let me introduce our honored guest, the well-known poet, Paula Nettles.  Paula, to start the evening off, would you be kind enough to read one of your poems?'

Nettles, a large woman affecting a retro Sixties bouffant hairdo, smiled at the hostess and the crowd, stood up and began:

The nightingale sings, first song of the night, awaiting morning, so plangent, so tender, a musical rose to give pause, the voice of happiness, the valleys beyond, and the rising sun...

The large woman rattled on. Her nightingale was goodness in a sea of blight, a chirping voice of hope and fidelity in a dark soulless night.  The metaphor, as clumsy, inept, and childish as it was resonated with the audience.  The poem was about today, and the need for beatific uplift 'as fragile as a nightingale's bones' to save the world.  

She paused before reading the last line, looked out over the gathering listening with rapt attention, and softly spoke the final, inspirational verse. 

And this was only beginning to the seance.  One after another guests selected to read from works read more of the same, sugary, insufferably pedestrian verse. 

God came to me one night on the counterpane of my dreams, and said to me, 'Wake my child' and so I did to the roseate dawn breaking over the hills...

On and on it went, irremediably bad poetry and worse, a fawning, admiring audience.  Who were these people, Harper wondered? Was this some kind of weird progressive cabal? Why amidst all the febrile nonsense that he heard from official progressive Washington, was any more soul-searching, breast-beating, and penitential prayer needed?

The old black Chair rose from his seat and waited for the group to settle.  He had been moved by the reading of the last poem because 'it spoke to the soul of the black man', native to the primal forests of Africa, enslaved, and herded in an involuntary diaspora to these shores. 'We black men and women all have the counterpane of our dreams', he said and sat down.

The room was reverentially quiet.  The hostess had done well to invite this gentleman to the reading.  He added just the right note of seriousness and above all righteousness.  

'Thank you, Bob', the hostess said to him, generously smiling. 'I think you speak for us all', and from that seminal moment on, every verse, every treacly line, every hackneyed phrase was treated as the best of Eliot, Thomas, and Dickinson. 

 

'Where did they find her?', Harper wondered; and it was indeed a mystery that this inane scribbler had been chosen to be feted.  Her thin, self-published volume had never seen the light of day (although she replied to a question about availability, 'in bookstores everywhere') and soon enough it would be fuel for the annual block party bonfire in Olney; but here it was, showing up in the toniest suburb of Washington, read and listened to with interest if not emotion by the town's swells. 

It was one of liberal politics' many mysteries Harper thought, some inchoate need to repurpose old chestnuts and regift them.  Redistributive, communitarian thinking had been around since Eugene Victor Debs, Lafollette, Brandeis, and Gompers, and their heirs kept on banging on about social justice, the little man and the oppressed - only generalities were now replaced by specifics.  Not just the poor, but the black poor; not just oppressed but the gender oppressed; not just the exploited but the brown, Latino lettuce pickers, all just as predictable and bland as the original. 

All this unenviable potpourri got distilled and watered down even more when it made its way into the emotional zeitgeist of the modern progressive.  The poetry reading was a good example of the mind-bending operational nonsense that becomes pervasive in an atmosphere of true belief. 

Harper's wife cooked him a nice pot roast for dinner to make amends for the poetry reading.  The hostess unimaginably was her friend and college classmate; but even his wife winced at the total irrelevance and lack of substance of the poems.  'Maybe they're lovers', his wife said, not a bad cover for such an unquestionably boring event.