Zetia....

Lunesta. Can lunesta cause weight gain. Lunesta side effects....

The piggy-wiggy cries out the wilderness:
Lo, there shall be a great Loaf of White Bread in the Sky
A smothering shroud of lettuce and tomato

O gestation crate! O mother of sows!
My heart is cloven as my hooves
And I am shredded in a Carolina-style vinegar-based sauce.
Squeal, boy! Squeal with your pretty mouth!

Yes, it's a blog. Which is why there are blog comments. Which is why people offered them.

But I'm done with this. It's impossible to keep up with your strained logic and self-contradiction: Critics of the OP must be snobs! Critics of the OP must be anti-intellectuals. Etc. It's just too tiresome. But congratulations on the word count.

Valdez reported her response and quoted the work in question for others to read. She may have done so snidely, but hey, welcome to the blogosphere: show me a blog without snide, and I'll show you a blog with no readers. Her post (note, BLOG POST, not an in-depth critical article considering Mort's poetry), captured a hard-to-sit-through-event: the sincerely intended poetry reading that makes listeners snort. I've been to many of these, and may have given a few. Few will acknowledge them when they happen. The thoughtfully appreciative face, the slight audience "ah" as the poem ends -- these are the accepted responses at a poetry reading. Snorts are unwelcome, but sometimes warranted.

Valdez captured that need to snort-muffle nicely. She pretty much established the tone at the outset with the anecdote about falling in love at the prison rape reading. Snide it was, and much more amusing than the implications about her writing skills and lack of understanding of "poetics" that followed. If you're turning to this blog for sincere, in-depth, rigorous poetry analysis, that's pretty embarassing for you.

Love this ham-handed versifying. The nastiness over "poetics," not so much. Is it not possible to say you thought a poem sucked without having your grasp of "poetics" challenged? For god's sake, Frost and Eliot and Pound and Stevens all hated some poetry. Sometimes they hated each other's poetry, but they had enough respect to not bring out their Webster's and fling definitions of "poetics" about. Are we really at a point where you can't say you didn't like something unless you can cite Cleanth Brooks on why?

It says a lot about how weakened a state poetry's in that someone giving an unfavorable review of one reading brings out such hostility. Poetry -- and this young poet -- will survive someone not liking a particular piece of her work and saying so in print. After all, she's just gotten into Poetry magazine and had her work published by Copper Canyon, y'all!

Anyone read David Orr or William Logan in the NYTimes? They hammer at beloved writers like they were building a house. And what's the result? People get pissed and talk about poetry. I say halle-freakin-lujah to anyone who's got any opinion about poetry at all. Thank god for a strong opinion, because without them, all you got in the bookstore poetry section is Mattie Stephanek and those rainbow pastel paperbacks with titles like "I'm So Glad I Had a Mother Like You."

Lipid gossamers
Sweet pink proteins exude brine
Toothpick destiny

Maybe you can judge a CP-sponsored Emily Bronte Poetry Writing Contest and show these Belarusian upstarts some real poetry.