WE HAVE A NEW U.S. POET LAUREATE!!!!!!!
That laureate, ladies and gentlemen, is…
CREATIVE LUMINARY DAN BROWN!
Finally, after fives of years and hundreds of pages, lifting the public imagination beyond the smokescreen of cheap narrative and into a stratos where form and content are woven, inextricable, expandin the -
Of course, I’m fucking with you. Our new (and by our, I am assuming you live in Fat America) poet laureate is
William Stanley Merwin.
Wh… whu?
While his name might not ring out on the mountaintops of stupid like Plotdevice Brown up there, Mr. Merwin (pictured above with his drying sheets, wakka wakka wakka) actually has a pretty impressive resume, winning the Pulizter Prize twice for poetry, in addition to the Tanning prize (kind of like the poetry world’s MVP, with a $100,000 prize tag attached) and a bunch of other poetry awards you’ve probably never heard of. You mongrel.
Well, let’s take a sample gander, to find who we’ll be ignoring in favor of Dan Brown this time around.
———–
THANKS
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
