Karl Rove's Election Game Plan

Not to be a pessimist, but here's what the Republicans are setting up for the November election:

(1) They have created two red herrings to divert attention from the country's real problems and to arouse, as before, nativist fears and prejudices. On the international level, it's the supposed Iran nuclear threat. On the domestic scene, the play is for nativist resentment against immigrants. The Hispanic version of "The Star Spangled Banner" becomes the conservative rallying point, just as gay marriage and racism did in previous elections. This is the perverse Zen of Karl Rove; he knows how to create reactions in liberal quarters that show them to be everything that red state consciousness had feared. No expensive ad space is required, since the news stations willingly seize on such imagined controversies as the "real," and liberals do most of the work of their self-destruction.

(2) A Bin Laden tape appears one week before election day. This happened in the last election. Now ask yourself, why would Bin Laden be so unsophisticated as to release a tape at such a crucial time, knowing that it can only benefit the Republican election campaign?

(3) Bush makes the appearance of being reasonable on Iraq by withdrawing some troops a month before the election.

(4) Oil prices go down in July and August to $2.50 a gallon and remain there until after the election. By the following April they are be back at $3.50 or higher. Republican poll numbers start quickly climbing.

(5) The coup de grace: Diebold goes into action wherever the congressional race is close.

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"Winter (From a Dream)": Yosa Buson, 1716-1783

Two villages,

with one pawnshop between them--

in a winter grove.

Translated by Steven D. Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford UP, 1991)

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Note of interest from Anne Carson's Economy of the Unlost (Princeton UP, 1999) on the fifth century B.C. poet Simonides of Keos (the first poet to professionalize his art), Paul Celan, and gift economies:

"Phidias the sculptor worked on the chryselephantine sculpture of Athena in Athens for 5,000 drachmas per year, out of which he had to pay himself, his workmen and his production costs. And Herodotos tells us of a successful doctor whose annual salary was 6,000 drachmas when he lived in Aegina, 12,000 drachmas when he lived on Samos, and 10,000 drachmas when he lived in Athens. This same amount, 10,000 drachmas, was the fee commanded by Pindar for a single dithyramb compose in honor of the Athenians. Meanwhile, Gorgias the sophist required his students to pay him 10,000 drachmas apiece for a single course in rhetoric and made enough money this way to erect a solid gold statue of himself in the precinct of Apollo at Delphi." Later Carson notes, "It has been estimated that 10,000 drachmas would have been equivalent to about twenty-eight years of work for a laborer at one drachma per diem."

Sylvia Plath and Tuna Salad

There has been a dedicated campaign from the right and center of poetry to impact the modernist canon. The first goal is accessibility, as opposed to the "difficulties" of modernism; the second, I fear, is cultural change. The major players are Dana Gioia of the NEA, John Barr of The Poetry Foundation (with funding from Ruth Lilly), Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, and Garrison Keillor of NPR. Here is a quotation from Keillor's introduction to his anthology, Good Poems:

"When you compare Bishop to, say, her friend and mentor Marianne Moore, the mentor pales severely. Marianne Moore was a dotty old aunt whose poems are quite replicable for anyone with a thesaurus. A nice lady, but definitely a plodder, and it would be cruel punishment to have to write a book about her. Her contemporary, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who played the glamorous broad and taxi dancer to Moore's bunhead librarian, wrote more that is still of interest, whereas Moore's reputation must be due to the fact that, in the republic of letters, there are many more Moores than Millays. From Millay it's a straight shot to Anne Sexton, a writer of profound exuberance and wit and a hot number, and her cohort, the beautiful horsekeeper, Maxine Kumin, two women who, forgive me, make St. Sylvia Plath look like a tuna salad."

This passage is as rich in sexist stereotypes as Where's Waldo? is in Waldo. Moore's "The Fish" is filled with sensual and linguistic detail. Sensual, as in "of the senses" not as in "glamorous broad." The poem begins:

The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.

Where's the difficulty? It's one fierce, attentive, sympathetic seeing after another. The fish are underwater, of course, in an aquarium. In their slow swimming, they seem to "wade "through decorative black jade placed by an aquarium designer. A crow-blue (nice!) mussel opens and shuts like an injured fan, the force of which adjusts the grey sand (poetic license: ash) at the bottom of the tank. The poem's eye is public. Its music is evident but has a secret--the lines of each stanza are measured as follows: first line, one syllable; second line, three; third line, nine; fourth line, six; fifth line, eight. Moore is, yes, something of a formalist, but an eccentric and inventive one. Moore's talent does not exclude that of Bishop. As their biographies reveal, Millay and Sexton were actively, almost frenetically sexual, therefore what, easy to understand as poets? The erotic comes in many forms including the sublimated, and eroticism is not, at any rate, a reasonable standard for a poem.

As for the more beautiful woman poet, Sylvia Plath or the "horsekeeper" Maxine Kumin (there's nothing like the odor of the stables to get your D. H. Lawrence up), we must judge for ourselves.