The Remains of the Clay

"The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it."

- George Orwell

Definition of rhetoric

1 : the art of speaking or writing effectively: such as
a : the study of principles and rules of composition formulated by critics of ancient times
b : the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion
2a : skill in the effective use of speech
b : a type or mode of language or speech also : insincere or grandiloquent language
3 : verbal communication : discourse

Definition of prose 

1a : the ordinary language people use in speaking or writing
b : a literary medium distinguished from poetry especially by its greater irregularity and variety of rhythm and its closer correspondence to the patterns of everyday speech
2 : a dull or ordinary style, quality, or condition

Definition of poetry 

1 : verbatim speech

      The average North American doesn't attend poetry readings or slams and it certainly doesn't buy volumes of contemporary poetry.  We have been exposed to what Leonard Cohen would describe as "other forms of boredom advertised as poetry":

Inaugural Poem: "Praise Song for the Day"

Watch Poet Richard Blanco Read the Inaugural Poem

Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman delivers a poem at Joe Biden's inauguration

       And now we see this:

Amanda Gorman Recites 'Chorus of the Captains' at Super Bowl LV

    Today we honor our three captains for their actions and impact in a time of uncertainty and need.

    They have taken the lead, exceeding all expectations and limitations, uplifting their communities and nation as leaders, healers, and educators.

    James has felt the wounds of warfare but this warrior still shares his home with at-risk kids. During COVID he's even lent a hand, live-streaming football for family and fans.

    Trimaine is an educator who works non-stop providing his community with hot spots, laptops, and tech workshops, so his students have all the tools they need to succeed in life and in school.

    Susie is the ICU nurse manager at a Tampa hospital. Her chronicles prove that even in tragedy, hope is possible. She lost her grandmothers to the pandemic, and fights to save other lives in the ICU battle zone defining the front line heroes risking their lives for our own.

    Let us walk with these warriors, charge on with these champions, and carry forth the call of our captains. We celebrate them by acting with courage and compassion, by doing what is right and just.

    For while we honor them today, it is they who every day honor us.

     That is it.  Those are the only four 21st century "poems" that a sizeable minority, if not a majority, of North Americans have witnessed.  (For what it's worth, Maya Angelou's poem from Clinton's 1993 inauguration was significantly better.)

     Whether this is prose or rhetoric and whether or not we appreciate the heartfelt sentiments, it is not being memorized and performed--"covered"--the way songs are, the way poetry was when it was alive.  These pieces aren't quoted at all, let alone from memory.  By our inaction you, I, and everyone else--including the author--have spoken:  "None of this is poetry."  The lack of mnemonics (other that some overconsonance at Biden's inauguration) shows a lack of effort and/or intent to create poetry.

     "But what is the harm?" one might ask of this misapprehension.

     The next time someone tries to define poetry by its content, demanding that poetry be thought provoking or poignant, ask the person what prose authors they read.  Suggesting that poetry has some monopoly on and obligation to limit itself to philosophy or romance, aside from being laughably easy to disprove, does a disservice to all of our communication.  It delegitimizes the bulk of our canon:  humor, biography, bawdiness, commentary, narrative, history, description, etc.

"Only ignorance is fatal."

     On January 6th, 2021, the world saw what happens when deliberate misrepresentation becomes widespread.  The only defense is education and reflection, preferably in that order.

     Find some words worth memorizing.  Carry them with you, using spare moments to learn them.  Practice in a mirror.  Make a video.  Go to an open mic and perform them.  Carry them with you for the rest of your life.

     That is poetry.

     The rest is wind.

Show Some Respect!

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #112

cento:  Poetry made up of lines borrowed from a combination of established authors, usually resulting in a change in meaning and a humorous effect.

found poem:  A poem created from prose found in a non-poetic context, such as advertising copy, brochures, newspapers, product labels, etc. The lines are arbitrarily rearranged into a form patterned on the rhythm and appearance of poetry.

    Thus, the found poem derives from sources outside literature.  It follows that the cento tends to be drawn from novels, songs, films or other poems.  In both cases, though, they are presented in a poetic form, which may include open form (i.e. free verse or prose poetry).

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Earl the Squirrel's Rule #24

    Think of the last few times the public might have been exposed to the toxic radiation of "poetry".  In 2009 we saw Elizabeth Alexander's crowd-clearing "Praise Song for The Day", which gave birth to Rule #24.  This was followed up four years later with Richard Blanco's "One Today", which seems to have taken a day to deliver.  More recently, people may have been trolled by Frederick Seidel's "The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri".  Before him, Kenneth Goldsmith was reading baseball commentary and newspaper clippings to the POTUS and First Lady.

    "Why call raw prose poetry?" you ask.  "Doesn't prose sell a thousand times better?"

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #25

     Yes, but not if it is tedious.  Anything as banal as Seidel's braindroppings or Goldsmith's mind-numbingly inartistic random text is too dull for prose;  it can only be sold to pseudo-sophisticates as "poetry".  In fact, substitute "the actual words" for "reading the actual work" and this becomes the very definition of prose:

    "His work is about the ideas (read:  Content Regency) and discussions that it generates (read:  offense or antagonism it provokes), rather than about reading the actual work the actual words.

     Let's not miss the progression here.  I'll grant you that Ms. Alexander and Mr. Blanco are both profoundly lazy, untalented individuals but at least they aren't trolls.  They didn't mean to permanently lower our metabolisms by boring us stiff¹. 

     More disturbing is the defeatist, exploitative attitude toward poetry's moribund condition. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #19

    Mr. Goldsmith says:  "One of the great tragedies of poets is that they assume they are being read, and they are not. So why not assume there will be no readership and give great concepts to think about instead?"

    In essence, he has reduced Rule #19 to the absurd.  The implication is that since Nobody Reads Poetry it doesn't matter how bad it is.  We can't argue with that logic and, sadly, we must concede that this is the prevailing [anti-]aesthetic today.  It is a cornerstone of Convenient Poetics.  As for what qualify as "great concepts", we won't bother arguing with someone who seems to think he invented the found poem and that excerpting from sports broadcasts and newspapers constitutes plagiarism.  [It was legal when Lenny Bruce did it in the early 1960s and remains so today.] 

    The flaw in his "thinking" is that it applies general truths (e.g. Rule #19, Nobody Reads Poetry) not just to specific circumstances but to ones known to be exceptional.  Unfortunately, folks did hear those inaugural poems.  Many did read [about] Seidel trivializing the tragedy at Ferguson.  If not the people, their elected representatives in Washington did have to suffer through Goldsmith's silliness.  There was not a single line of poetry in any of the four presentations but the art form was publicly humiliated nonetheless.

    Looking at it now, we wouldn't guess that poetry was once alive and vibrant within our culture.  Still, there is something cowardly and, yes, sacrilegious about kicking its corpse.

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Footnotes:

¹ - Almost literally so, given the temperature.

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Public Performance

Typical non-poet, apparently.

     Think of the reaction PoBiz types have to these two words:  "public" and "performance".  Any mention of the public makes some poets think of diseased primates two or three rungs below us on the evolutionary scale.  Apparently, their world view encompasses leprous CroMagnons and poets.  Nothing in between.

     A similar extremism arises at the mention of poetry performance, as this Facebook exchange illustrates:

Commenter:  "...every poet intent on giving public readings should have a few lessons from a drama coach or speech coach. Delivery counts!"

Responder:  "Honestly, the really polished slam-type presentation can turn me off, too. Anything that calls attention to the poet takes away from the poem, IMO."

S.F. 49er Head Coach Bill Walsh (1931 to 2007)

     Again, we see the assumption that if reciters are not droning mesmerists they must be self-absorbed emo screamers.  Nothing in between.  We can laugh at the notion that slammers, few of whom would know a drama coach from Bill Walsh, are "really polished".  Nevertheless, there is a grain of truth to this stereotyping.  Aside from professional (usually Shakespearean) actors, it is difficult to name many competent poetry performers, let alone any proficient ones.

     On one extreme we see Shane Koyzan's carnival barking delivery of a beer commercial ripoff, "We Are More", written for the 2010 Olymic ceremonies.  The truly disturbing fact is that most "slam-type presentation" is worse, and by a significant margin.




     Poetry had two other opportunities to impress the world, both of which came from the soporific end of the spectrum.  While insomniacs may disagree, both yielded disastrous results.  As we compare the two Obama inauguration poems, we add a new dimension to the debate about performing first or second.

    The prevailing wisdom is that going second gives one an advantage.  In baseball, for example, batting last comes with the knowledge of how many runs we need to score.  In court, the defense gets to speak last in order to answer any and all assertions by the prosecution.  Slam poets mention "score creep", where judges get progressively more generous (and drunk?) as the evening progresses. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #24

     Suppose we extend the gap between performances by four years.  Does the advantage of going last remain?  Does it hold true for Richard Blanco's 2012 "One Today" versus Elizabeth Alexander's 2008 reading of "Praise Song for the Day"?

     Sort of.  The wrinkle comes in the fact that lawyers, baseball teams, and slam competitors are trying to make a positive impression.  It is hard to imagine that these two speakers formed any such intent or effort.  Neither bothered to learn their lines--literally, their lines--or write something that anyone, least of all a poetry lover, would admire.  Both could have used "a few lessons from a drama coach or speech coach" relating to poetry performance.




     While robotic, Blanco's reading voice was more natural--sorry, less unnatural than Ms. Alexander's.  It was a solipsistic if not megalomaniacal list of desultory objects with little or nothing to do with each other, the country, President or occasion.

     In terms of technique, "One Today" starts out rather well sonically, with considerable sibilance and the assonance of "uh", "oh", and then "ai" sounds. 

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes,

     These repetitions pop up later, albeit sporatically, without any apparent purpose and against an utterly arrhythmic backdrop (making it sound as clumsy as rhyme without meter).  The language is flat and rambling--too much so for interesting prose, let alone poetry.  Instead of "twenty absent children" he bludgeons the audience with "twenty children marked absent today, and forever."



    Elizabeth Alexander's piece alternates between tedium and schmaltz, as evidenced by this cringefest:

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

    Ms. Alexander pays the same passing tributes to rhythm that Mr. Blanco pays to sonics. 

    In the end, we have two high school graduation speeches.  Valedictorians, not poets.  Which one is worse, though?  What is proven here?

    Because she cleared a crowd of people who, having faced freezing temperatures for more than an hour and 40 minutes, could not withstand 4 minutes of her "work", we have to give the nod to Elizabeth.  Her shoddy display paved the way for Richard's.

     This demonstrates a fundamental but obscure principle of scheduling:

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #112

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Footnotes:

¹ - Before one of my fellow pedants mentions Robert Frost preparing to read "Dedication" at John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration, he had just written it and could not trust his failing memory.  Poor weather conditions forced him to fall back on "The Gift Outright", largely because he could still do so by rote.  One wonders if Ms. Alexander, Richard Blanco or any of their fans (if such people exist) have ever bothered to memorize anything they've written.

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Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel

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The Voice of a Generation

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Want to make popularity based on sales as the criterion of poetic worth? Think about the following:

Bestselling poet in England between 1560 and 1640 (the era of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and the early Milton, to name just a few) -- Thomas Tusser (he outsold most of those poets even when you take all their works sold during that period combined).

Bestselling English poet between 1890 and 1914 (era of Housman, late Tennyson and Browning, Hardy, and numerous others of note) -- Norman Rowland Gale.

     - Howard Miller (Gazebo, 2007-03-19)

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      Fifty years ago, among poets, the "voice of a generation" would probably be the Beat poet of your choice, most likely Allen Ginsberg.  Today, it could be a slammer, probably Shane Koyczan, if only because, in a rare moment when the world experienced poetry (if we can call it that), he did slightly better at the 2010 Olympics than Elizabeth Alexander or Richard Blanco fared at Obama's inaugurations.  If nothing else, at least one person was animated by Koyczan's performance:  Koyczan himself.

      You think this is a frightening thought?  Consider this:  the alternative is that today's poets don't have a voice. In any event, comparing Ginsberg to Koyczan, it is clear that poetry's voice is nowhere near as prominent or clearly defined as it has been in the past.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #56

      Being the voice of a generation will help your pocketbook but, as Howard Miller indicates, it won't further your chances of leaving anything behind.  The very qualification, "of a generation", suggests that our children will find someone else to speak for them, leaving us to be forgotten.  Still, by targeting a younger audience the poet may enjoy twenty years of fame followed by forty years of nostalgia.  Not a bad gig, really.

      By emphasizing advocacy rather than artistic value, "voice of a generation" also implies that the work is lacking in technical merit.  Not surprisingly, onliners and geeks could produce a very different list of greatest contemporary poets than Page or Stage poets might.

      Imagine that era, 1560 and 1640, without the likes of those poets Mr. Miller mentions:  "Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and the early Milton, to name just a few."  What if they'd never been born, never picked up a pen or never attracted notice?  Thomas Tusser would the best poet of that time!  Instead of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets we could be reading verse like:

A foole and his monie be soone at debate,
which after with sorrow repents him too late.

      Why, we might be quoting such epic epigrams as:

Who quick be to borrow and slow be to pay,
their credit is naught, go they ever so gay.

      [We pause to shudder.]

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #24

      In fact, that could be a reasonable assessment of our current situation.  To the vast majority, including the [fiction] reading public, Alexander, Blanco and Koyczan might not just be the best active poets they know, they may well be the only active poets they know.

      There are no Shakespeares alive today, keeping theatres open with their verse and forcing us to forget the Thomas Tussers of our era.  No poet is changing our language or adding a single phrase to our idiom.  Yes, there are a few great poets around but the public can't name one and the cognicenti can't agree on many.  This may create a vacuum in our present environment and a dead spot in poetry's history. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #19

      Every failed poet chants the Emily Dickinson Myth as a mantra, telling themselves that their work, so cruelly ignored during their lives, will be discovered and loved by future fans.  Leave aside the fact that Emily was directly solicited twice by the Atlantic Monthly's Editor-In-Chief for submissions (which hardly sounds like a "nobody" to me).  There is a critical piece missing:  It is one thing to emerge from obscurity when poetry outsold prose;  it is quite another to emerge from obscurity in an era when all poetry is being ignored.  This is even more obvious if all subsequent generations continue to ignore poetry, as this one does.

     Put simply, why should future generations take an interest in us when we ourselves don't?

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Zombie Poetry Part I

    For reasons no one can fathom the question reappears:  "Is Poetry Dead?"

   As a participatory sport golf is booming.  Duffers take to the links in unprecedented numbers, many without any care that they will never get a tour card and compete professionally.  Teaching golf can provide a steady, if not spectacular, income for some.  In these two senses poetry thrives, too.  There is more verse being produced and published today than at any time in the past.  Creative Writing and MFA programs are cranking out graduates in near-record numbers.  Conducting poetry seminars and workshops augments many an income.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #5

    As a spectator sport golf is doing well, bouyed by lucrative television contracts, thanks to millions of faithful viewers.  Poetry?  Not so much.  A century ago every newspaper and most magazines had a poetry column.  Now?  Not so much.  Before the effect of mass media, starting with radio, poets were rock stars.  Now?  The 2009 death of the woman voted the greatest poet of our time barely made the local news outlets.  People used to recite contemporary poetry often and at length.  Now?  Few people today can recite a single line of poetry written in the last half century.  In his May 4th, 2003 Newsweek article Bruce Wexler said, "poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it."  As Dylan sang, "I heard 10,000 whispering and nobody listening."

    In short, poetry is booming on the supply side, moribund on the demand side.  No one needs a degree in Economics to grok that demand can create supply but supply does not create demand. 

    "Anyone can write a bad poem," continues Mr. Wexler. "To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment." 


     As long as this is the case--or even the perception--debate is over.  Poetry is history.  Of course, there will be glib namedroppers,, self-interested deniers, knee-jerkers and the-customer-is-always-wrong shamers but the coroner's report is in:  poetry is dead and has been for more than half a century.  Why else would we be trying to reanimate it?

     As we'll see, even those who understand the obvious can still say some silly things.

Nathan A Thompson

     In "Poetry slams do nothing to help the art form survive" Nathan A Thompson expresses agreement.

     "Poetry is dying. Actually, it's pretty dead already for all intents and purposes..."

      He quickly goes off the rail, though:

     "...the rise of performance poetry slams is doing nothing to help matters. I know, I used to be a performance poet."

     It's a tiny point but "performance poet" is a reserved phrase for something quite separate from "slam poet".  The former exists in an "anything goes" environment;  typically, slam does not allow costumes, music or props.  Call it quibbling, but such incautious use of language bodes poorly.  Sure enough, he soon lapses into nonsense:

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #23

     "There was no cabal of posh people who had purposely made poetry unintelligible."

      L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.  Postmodernism.

     "Poetry has always been words on a page..."

     ...if we don't count the eons and cultures that produced poetry without benefit of literacy.

     "The politicisation of art and the drawing of sectarian lines continues to damage poetry to this today."

      Can anyone name a single competitive or artistic endeavor that hasn't benefitted from stylistic differences and strategic/aesthetic arguments?  No?  Neither can I.

     "I have taught poetry to hundreds of children aged seven to 14 and not one of them could name me a poet beyond Shakespeare."

      Then WTF were you teaching them?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #26

     "A further nail in the coffin is the rise of poetry slams."

      Oh, this should be good.

     "I have performed at many slams and the audience is almost always half drunk..."

      Not to be confused with habitués at poetry readings, all of whom wish they were falling-down drunk.

     "The only division in poetry is between those people willing to take the time to read it and those who will not."

      What about those willing to watch it?  In addition to slam, open mic and performance fans, were Shakespeare's theatre attendees not poetry lovers?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #16

      "Most slam poems are not strong enough to be published in even minor poetry journals."

      And do those "published in...minor poetry journals" routinely win slams?  Is this an "apples make poor orange juice" argument?  Are we forgetting that most poems published in minor poetry journals "are not strong enough to be published in even minor poetry journals?"

     "It's like there is an oedipal urge to kill the art that made it."

     Did I miss a memo?  When did it become illegal to enjoy contemporary, modern and classical poetry?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #2

     "We cannot allow slam poetry to replace the role poetry plays in our lives."

     Bafflegab.  "We cannot allow...poetry to replace...poetry...?"  Says who, why not, and how so?

     "There is a school of thought that thinks slams are the answer."

     And what was the question again?

     "Poetry, like all art, whispers its message and we must learn to slow down and take the time to hear it."

     "Whispers?"  I thought poetry had to be read.  I'm so confused!

Bottom line:  Don't confuse a mode (i.e. poetry versus prose) with a medium (i.e. text versus speech).

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Alexandra Petri

     Because it appeared in the Washington Post Alexandra Petri's "Is poetry dead?" drew a lot more fire.  Actually, it made a number of good points but couldn't seem to get the time of death right.  The last anglophone who could eke out a meager living from writing for adults died in 1953, 60 years before Richard Blanco's inaugural effort.

     "You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question:  Can it change anything?"

     Again, it's mode, not medium.  Changing things seems an odd criterion.  What if we simply want to report things?  Or praise them.  Or commemorate them.  Or laugh about them.  Not all communication is exhortation.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #7

     "... a very carefully gated medium that requires years of study and apprenticeship in order to produce meticulous, perfect, golden lines..."

     Okay, so we've established that Ms. Petri has never been to a slam.

     "All literature used to be poetry."

     Yes, as we all know, cave-dwellers spoke only in rhyming couplets that were memorized and recited by everyone else in the tribe.  Storytelling came later. 

     "But then fiction splintered off."

     Do people actually think before they write this stuff?

     "All the things that poetry used to do, other things do much better."

     Name one.  She mentions visual art, which has coexisted with poetry for almost as long as we've had caves.  True, songwriting did replace [spoken] poetry in popularity but, aside from lyrics being a subset of verse, too often the music overwhelms the words.

Gwydion Suilebhan

     At this point playwright Gwydion Suilebhan steps up to the plate.  No one knows why.

     "What pretends to be poetry now is either New Age blather or vague nonsense or gibberish. It's zombie poetry."

     As are many plays these days.  All are easily ignored without abandoning the art form.  Speaking of form...

     "There is no longer, really, any formal innovation possible."

     Wow.  Curginas, corata, cada líneas, cliché collages, reversers...  Such profound ignorance* leaves me speechless. 

     But not for long.

     "The constraints of meter have long been abandoned."

     By whom?  Those incapable of recognizing, let alone employing, meter in the first place?

     Alexandra goes on to make some valid points.  Yes, Blanko's inaugural poem was an embarrassment.  Public funding for poetry, while meagre, is a serious controversy, but one I'll leave for another day.

     And, yes, poetry is dead.

     But not for long.

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• Zombie Poetry Part I
  
  
• Zombie Poetry Part II:  You Should Perform

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Footnote:

* To be fair, if Mr. Suilebhan were using his terms advisedly he would be correct.  We cannot create new forms without an audience to serve as a testing ground.  (By that token, we can't have poetry--or any other mode of communication--without an audience.)  He means that we can't have new structures, though, which is ridiculous.

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Poetry 'n Politics - Part II - Occasional Poems

    What happens when you give a business card poet the job of an audience-oriented poet?

    As you are no doubt aware, today was Squirrel Appreciation Day.  This year we are proud to share our special moment with two great humans:  Martin Luther King and the reinaugurated U.S. President Barack Obama.  Both of these fine men are revered among us squirrels because of their unmatched ability to bring out the nuts.

    The inauguration offered another rare opportunity for English language poetry to make a positive impression on the country, if not the world.  Poetry lovers looked forward to this with some apprehension after the debacle in 2009 with Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day".

     My apologies to those who were trying to forget a crowd-clearing disaster so complete that one pundit quipped:  "Poetry's only selling point is that it is cheaper than tear gas."

     So how did it go with Richard Blanco's "One Today"?

     Compared to what?  "Praise Song for the Day"?  Well, by a factor of infinity, a person with a penny is wealthier than someone who is broke, but both are extremely poor.

     Compared to the words and delivery of the two men being honored today, Barack Obama and MLK? 

     On my Sonic Rhythms Meter Richard Blanco's cringefest demonstrated fewer repetitions than three prose samples:  a snippet of Twitter banter, a paragraph from a mathematics text and a transcript of commentary from yesterday's San Francisco 49er - Atlanta Falcon NFL game.  The run-on sentences sustained by ubiquitous, random em dash abuses disqualify it as good writing.  It is far too rambling for prose, taking as long as five sonnets would take in order to say far less than we'd expect from one.  Worst of all, it was boring and, especially given that it's a poem written for a historic occasion, it was self-absorbed.

     That said, unlike "Praise Song for the Day", "One Today" was not entirely devoid of poetry.  After a clumsy single repetition of "Great" in Strophe 1 we hear:

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,

     Fair repetitions of "face[s]" and nice "m" alliteration, presaged in the previous line with "moving".

the empty desks of twenty children marked [as] absent

     Good short "e" assonance and strong iambs until the missing "as".  Unfortunately, like the movie "Lincoln", which should have ended with the natural exit line "I'd love to stay but I have to go", Mr. Blanco blows it with the maudlin and redundant "today, and forever."  For God's sake, man, let the audience do some of the work!

     I suspect that those will be among the very few fragments remembered in the next few days.  For the most part, though, this was at best an outline for a poem, the penultimate paragraph of which should never have made it to, let alone past, the first draft:

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.

     As a whole, the "poem" was wordy to the point of chatty, endlessly iterating quotidian details like dead-end crime scene clues in a dime store mystery.

     How did others view it?  Predictably, the blurbosphere loved it.  As you know, some believe that dull, forgettable* prose largely bereft of technique qualifies as poetry.  Oblivious to the irony, a group of these people ridiculed the "10 People Annoyed That [the] Inauguration Poem Didn't Rhyme".

     And you humans call us squirrely?

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* Nota bene:  Even its author didn't bother to memorize and recite/perform "One Today", despite the importance of the event and with more than a month to do so.

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