Via Vox Popoli, where the comment is that one should now never feel bad about not having an Ivy League diploma. For the Ivy League does not know a good poet: it cannot distinguish between Mayavosky and Pushkin, or an approved Hack and the best English poet.
The blackest thing ever happened on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania: A group of students recently removed a picture of William Shakespeare and replaced it with one of Audre Lorde.
Fisher-Bennett Hall is home to Penn’s English department, and the portrait of Shakespeare has resided over the main staircase in the building for years. The English department, in an effort to represent more diversity in writing, voted a few years ago to relocate the portrait and replace it.
Despite the vote, the picture was left in the entranceway of the building. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that on Dec. 1, after an English-department town hall meeting discussing the election, a group of students removed Shakespeare’s portrait, delivered it to the office of English professor and department Chair Jed Esty, and replaced it with a photograph of black feminist writer Audre Lorde.
This is Lord’s poetry. It is awful. I was writing better at middle school, and my poetry should never see the light of day.
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is that one seeks beauty and the other seeks power. Lorde achieves neither.
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else
only the color”. And
there are tapes to prove that, too.Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10” black Woman’s frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”Audre Lord.
Is this comparable with Shakespeare? No. I don’t care about Lorde’s sex, chosen gender or skin colour. I care about the language and the poetry. She has not written poetry: she has written a blog post.
I write enough of those. I know the difference.
This is poetry.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun;
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust.Fear no more the frown of the great,
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dread thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!William Shakespeare
Penn State has abandoned beauty and debased truth, scholarship and honour for the false pleasure of virtue signalling. None of us are as good as the Elizabethan poets. But that is why they are worthy of study, when our modern scribblers are not.