22 April 2013

Terrible poem written in time for National Poetry Month

"You don't know how precious your iphone battery time was until you're hiding in the bottom of the boat" is a real line from a new poem someone wrote about the captured suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. I was going to say that I was not ready to find the humor and the humanity in all of this, but then I remembered that Esquire piece about being on a one-night stand during city lockdown, which did both of those things really well! Another great thing that essay did is that it personalized the crisis without calling attention to how profound the author was trying to be; instead it deliberately played up those aspects of the author's predicament he may wish to forget, and I respect those kinds of lengths of personal humiliation. Maybe this poet should have stuck to what she knows or experienced instead of trying to make artistic mincemeat so soon, and thus undercook it.

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