[RCL]

There's something salemi about that rag!

http://pennreview.com/

[Ann Drysdale]

Let's not go there, Ralph.

I posted that reference in answer to Nigel's request for Charlie to produce a poem that reflected his views. It was the familiarity of the pâté remark that made me think of it.

[Nigel Mace]

I am astonished, Ann, at your intelligence (maybe that's not le mot juste) service. Wow! But ducked and dodged away in the murky depths of the Pen. Review is not the same as coming clean (not le mot juste this time) on a self-declared thread on the Sphere. So my question stands.

Is 'Charlie' real - and if so, let him meet the challenege of Cecil Day Lewis here.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

There is tendency on my part to answer Charlie's gibberish for the sake of anyone actually trying to work this out from a position distant from my own. If anyone actually cares to discuss decentralized and participatory forms of social organization and anarchist theory or the successful forms of that type of organization I have been involved in or studied I am happy to start a thread with someone. Anarchism as a political idea is unrelated to anarchy as a synonym for chaos or disorder. It always has been. They aren't laughing about anarchist theory in Rojava or Chiapas. They are doing their best to imagine a different world.

Charlie, the only way you can write these things in public and not feel ashamed is that your inability to grasp political concepts extends far enough to blind you from wreckage of your hubris colliding with your stupidity. People aren't listening to your ideas, they are gawking at the unbelievable damage that your ideology can do to simple facts, even at the slow speed you are driving. Except maybe John. He is the car seat in the back though. Safely belted in to his moral dementia routine.

[Charlie Southerland]

Ann, thanks for sending folks to that Journal, The Pennsylvania Review, and more specifically, that poem. I have a new poem there too. I don't think I could bear to read any more of the America bashing New Verse News, where some here fall all over each other with some of the worst poetics I've ever read, just to reach for some distant point of irrelevance. Trump-bashing seems to be in vogue over there.

It's OK, Andrew M, as long as you get my drift...

Nigel, I write about nearly everything. Is there a problem?

[Nigel Mace]

Well, then, Charlie, how about taking the Cecil Day Lewis challenge?

[Charlie Southerland]

Ya know, Nigel, wouldn't it be just as easy to go to The Pennsylvania Review and read my current poem there? Would that satisfy you? And if not, why not? How many Trump poems would it take to satisfy you? Does anyone here on Eratosphere really want to see Trump poems? Please, respond to Nigel's quest. If the vote is affirmative, I'll write some and post them.

[Ann Drysdale]

Ah, I must disappoint you, Charlie and Nigel. My Intelligence was merely Google. I live a sheltered life by many people's standards and so when I come across somebody within my poetry purlieu whose worldview seems terrifyingly alien, I look them up. "Charles Southerland poem" took me to that place. When I saw that part of the text of the poem had been expressed in almost the same terms in a post on this thread, I thought I had found an example of what Nigel wanted. I seek only to serve and in doing so I often transgress.

Is this a digression from the Trump theme? I think not. I have been following this thread because I want to understand. Trump seems like the antithesis of everything I would wish to support, but the point that Charlie (and John, though he relates his views to Brexit) are making is, to me, the most terrifying aspect of this. That there is a large number of people who truly believe in, and are determined to create, a future that looks to me like hell.

I freely confess I do not have the political vocabulary or the fiscal nous to discuss this on what many would consider a proper level. I am not even fully clear about Leftliness or Rightitude in this context. I am reduced to my own linguistic devices. I have all my life espoused causes that I truly believed would benefit humanity and the planet we inhabit. I worked in the sixties for the PPF, supporting Greenpeace and the CND. Pretty well everything that I believe in is about to be trampled by a regime whose criteria for excellence I simply do not understand.

So I come here to read and attend and listen. I hear John saying “the people have spoken” and the “remoaners” must accept that “we won”. It isn’t so much the “we” that scares me, it’s the extension of the thought to the question. “What, then, are they who are not “we”?

Charlie’s cockroach references appal me. That satisfying crunching sound. The assumption that everyone takes pleasure in it. The headspace of the hunter…

But then I am a superannuated old hippie, who was once proud of having mended a broken snail. There is no place for me in this new world of America (or Britain) First. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to live in it anyway.

Wotthehell, Charlie. Wotthehell.

[Nigel Mace]

Oh, I've read it, Charlie - and I can see why you didn't post it here.
AND - everything that Ann said. Come north, Ann. We are trying hard to win the same kind of country you've always sought - and I have every reason to believe that we are going to succeed.

[John Whitworth]

And the best of luck, Nigel. You will be poor but honest.