Politics and Poetry

Reading back in the blog, I saw one of my first posts and the reference to Lyn Nofziger.  I used to read his wonderful blog wherein he often had silly doggerel poetry about politics and events of the day.  It wasn’t meant to be serious.  He certainly never considered himself a serious poet with those bits and pieces.  But I think that kind of thing is more likely to be remembered and appreciated than most of the serious poets working, just as Ogden Nash is a bigger part of the popular poetic culture than many who took themselves more seriously.

There aren’t many like Lyn that I know of.  I have seen poems in National Review.  And of course, there is the incomparable F. R. Duplantier with his Politickles.  But there aren’t too many out there who seem to be having fun with light verse at the expense of their political opponents, at least not on the Republican and Libertarian side.  Since we at the Attila the Hun School of Political Science do not bother reading the liberal magazines too much anymore, we may be missing a new trend there.  But traditionally, combining liberal politics and poetry comes out more earnest than fun.  So, where have all of the light verse artists gone?  Have they all gotten serious?  Are they just in the deadly drought of media attention deficit?

I think I’d welcome a candidate who had a twinkle in his eye and a limerick on his lips to counter some opponent’s windy gustations.  Maybe it’s even time we had a Poetry Party of America?  Maybe that would get more people engaged in politics if the candidates would have to frame all of their debates in verse, preferably limericks?  It could start a whole trend with new parties representing different streams and subgenres in poetry.  Someone might have the next Presidential nomination all “rapped” up.  Maybe we could put the stress in the language and get it out of the politics?

This started to be a post about politics alone and how I seem to feel less engaged with politics this year.  It migrated and twisted and turned, but in a sense, it did get there.  Would a metrist get me more engaged this year?  Perhaps not.  But it might give us all a bit more levity and leavening in this extended political season to make it more bearable.

This entry was posted on November 3, 2007 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Politics, Ideas, Poetry, In the News, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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