The Poetry Lobby

 Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.

                                         "A Defence of Poetry", Percy Bysshe Shelley

            With Elizabeth Alexander reciting the first poem at a presidential inauguration since 2001, it is inevitable that Clinton-type scandals fueled by Big Poetry's money will arrive at the doorstep of Congress soon, once special interests catch on to the legislative power of verse.

Ruth Lilly:  "If I gave you a $100 million, would you publish my poem?"

            The force that has sent the shock of recognition down K Street?  A $100 million bequest by drug heiress Ruth Lilly to Poetry Magazine.  If a bunch of sonnet-scribblers can bring home that kind of swag, why waste your money on a golf outing for a first-term rep from the 8th District of Tennessee, lobbyists will ask.

Elizabeth Alexander:  "For a villanelle I'll need a retainer of $2,000 a month."

     If you've been reading the highbrow quarterlies, you've already seen the foreshadowings.  Alison Spicka's "poem about the poetess (me)" appeared in this spring's edition of plangent voices, a quarterly journal of avant-garde verse.  The final quatrain reads:

Poets too long have done without bling.

(Look at my necklace-look at my ring!)

I must work free from the toil of scansion--

I want to live in a honking big mansion!

             The unremunerative nature of poetry has always left its practitioners open to corruption, but the naked appeals for earmarks that will begin to appear in an administration that has chosen to lead with its metaphorical chin will surprise even the most jaded observers of the Washington scene.  A.A. Vazquez, a faculty roué and professor of English at Swarthmore, has been working on a bit of verse that will keep both coeds and junior senators from Sunbelt states enthralled--his "Ode to Tax Code §168":

She looked,

her eyelids low-

like window shades.

She spoke-

with hesitation.

"America's capital-intensive manufacturers,"

She said,

"Need accelerated depreciation."

And I--rapt by those eyes

And corrupt in heart-

Could only vote her way.

Robert Pinsky

            Cynical Washington lobbyists will soon discover that even the best poets can be had cheaply.  This email surfaced in response to a subpoena by the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice during the second Clinton administration:

"Spoke to Pinsky.  He will write sestina pushing earmark for Florida water basin infrastructure!  All he wants is season tix to Baltimore Ravens.  Says he loves Edgar Allan Poe, wants to see the only professional sports team named after a poem.  Mentioned something about 'tintinnabulation' (sp?).  Is that what Dick Morris did to women's feet?" 

            Once deep-pocket special interests sign up the best and brightest versifiers to plead their cases in iambic pentameter, groups with less cash will be left with the poetasters.  A Native American tribe eager to cash in on legalized gambling paid a hundred thousand dollars a line to The Doggerel Group, a D.C.-based government relations firm, for this couplet addressed to the Chief Policy Researcher at the Bureau of Indian Affairs:

I love you down to your smallest neutrino-

Now please help me out with the Choctaws' casino.

"You make me wanna-shout!"

             The modern classics will be reappraised, and found to hold much low-hanging fruit for influence peddlers.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical

   waiting

for a table at Citronelle, looking angry for the maitre d'

             Clinton's desire for fast track authority to negotiate regional trade agreements will be re-appraised by the labor-friendly Obama administration; expect an unlikely alliance between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Eskimo fishermen:

Up or down, yes or no--

Fast-track is the way to go.

Help the lands of ice and snow.

Ancient glaciers, hard as cement,

Need the yeast of free trade's ferment--

Polar Ice Cap Trade Agreement!

Wilde:  "I'm thinking of a number between ten and twenty years."

            Jail sentences will be inevitable, and when they come, minstrels will recall these lines by Oscar Wilde, a poet who knew something about hard time in prison:

Ballad of Club Fed

And all men kill the thing they love

By all let this be heard.

Some do it with a chapbook

And others--just a word.

The law man does it for the pork

The poet for a verb.

This piece first appeared in slightly different form on Amazon Shorts