An Open Letter

Dear William,

I'm only writing you right now because I'm concerned that Nick Montfort may have gone a bit overboard -- and probably at your urging -- on the Ralph Nader thing. Alright I don't blame on you completely. It seems that Robert Pinksy and Derek Walcott are involved as well.

No they didn't like Nader, authentically, in real life. Nader seemed like a threat to their middle class tenured lifestyle here at Boston University. He was talking about bringing down the corporations and making sure kids didn't play with broken glass and how the man has been putting us down, and how the Corvair is dangerous even though the fins are cool. They didn't want Nader to win, but they made all the grad student poets here write for him I mean vote for him because they were trying to put Gore out of office.

Let me explain.

It seems that Pinsky and Bill had grown quite close during Pinksy's time in office. I mean as the Poet Laureate. I mean in the oval office. I don't want to go into details but lets just say that Pinsky was a real poet and Bill was always nuts about Pink. I mean poetry. Anyway Bill went through some trouble and Robert wrote him some poems. Shit let me be frank Robert Pinsky was writing Bill Clinton like a sonnet a day and they were all dirty. And he was wearing a dress. A red one. Pinsky. While he wrote the poems. You think it sounds humiliating and I do too but times are tough for poets William. You wouldn't know with your high class HTML and Database government sponsored gig but it's hard now for poets to even pick up a crust of bread nowadays. That is one that hasn't already been chewed up and spat out. And certainly not with jam.

Anyway, Hillary let's call her Hill and Al it seems too (although from an outside perspective, from my point of view, I guess, Al can't really be blamed, Hillary's kind of tough and into power games or so they say though if you ask me that's just a sexist characterization of a strong woman -- and she definitely won no recount about it), anyway, decided to put a stop to it. The daily recitations. So Al was sent to be the hatchet man, the hatchet guy, I guess. He had a little leverage because Clinton was worried Al might come out against him almost as much as Al was worried that Clinton might come out for him. And clearly Hill had some pull with Al. Now as I've said this was all kind of humiliating for Pinksy, the dress thing. Trouble is he kind of liked it. That guy's like a machine, but he likes discipline, he liked writing a newspoem every day, and he liked wearing a dress doing it. I don't see the problem. If you were to go that way I wouldn't hold it against you. Regardless.

Anyway, long and short, Pinsky struck a deal with Bush. All the kids in Texas were going to participate in the favorite poem project. And even though there are term limits nationally, seems Pinksy was (what am I saying was) probably is going to be named Poet Laureate of Texas. And he's going to write cowboy poetry. That's part of the deal. Don't blame yourself but cowboy poetry's just going to get bigger and bigger now.

I guess Walcott just thought Gore was smarmy. Bush is going to give him an ambassadorship. Cheney's giving him an oilfield too, just for measure. A deal was cut.

Anyway, the poet kids voted for Nader. Not just here, either. I hear this thing is nationwide, practically. Bush figured divide and conquer and he couldn't come up with a better population to divy up than poets. So he got all the big name poets to push Nader big-time and chuckled at the mantras about global capitalization that all the kids wrote in their poems. While in fact planning to base all that capitalization out of Austin.

I don't hold any of this against Nader.

I blame the poets.

All Best,

Scott