by Hillary Hardcore and EW Wilder
1.Lo-Cajun
2.Astronomical Brindle Tarts
3.Spud Handle
4.Kredit-Müncher
5.Cranberry Battleship
6.Nip-Slip Weekend
7.Tabloid Brainphärt
8.The Dongle Kitties
9.Rogue’s Collar
10.Smugbanquer
11.damndirtyape
12.The Fluffycake Conspiracy
13.Mustard N?z
14.Paralegalz Nite Out
15.Simonize ur Sister
16.The Gland Bellies
17.Blood Muffin
18.Turnip Transit
19.Tinkül Balle
20.Tinker-Tron
21.Buck Sandwich
22.Butane Overcoat
23.Klesmer vs. Cthulu
24.The Tinsel-Fanciers
25.Glass Nickel
26.Bourgeois Pencil-Sharpener
27.Slaw Coaster
28.Dastardly Digital
29.Rick Ray Ban
30.Frosted Kumquat
31.Freez-R-Bürn
32.Necro-Klüster
33.The Drool-Mobsters
34.Kill Button
35.Kraken Charmer
36.B?n-Spindle
37.Jizz Mönkie
38.Thümbreth
39.Stürm Dancer
40.Lobster Bris
41.The Insect Crescendo
42.Hotpants Conspiracy
43.The Violation
44.Fistluvur
45.The Fur Dancers
46.Drooling Privileges
47.Scröt Candy
48.Strepto-Scrötus
49.Sizzle-Puppy
50.Loose Snooze
51.Spider Bucket
52.The Slender Whistle
53.Blat-tasm
54.Roar-Gasm
55.Gunny Snak
56.Scroatia
57.The Fur Burglars
Poems and plays and novels and films must be culturally powerful, that is to say they must have the potential to change culture by changing people, or they would not exist.
Artists may create for very limited audiences—even just for ourselves—but do so for some reason having to do with real change in the real world. I am a First Amendment extremist not because I take the “what’s the harm?” attitude but because I believe the exact opposite: words and images and music can cause great good or great harm, and, under circumstances when great harm is called for, they must be asked to do just that.
Documents as problematic and small as the Declaration of Independence, novels as flawed as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or polemics as wrongheaded as Mein Kampf, can cause actual shooting wars. This is why our ability to survive the onslaught of ideas must be developed with the same attitude the Spartans took toward combat. Our problem with free speech in this country arises because of our intellectual unpreparedness: we have not trained to deal with the realities of ideas, and therefore we are slaves to weak and preposterous ones.
We are being ruled by idiots because we have shown by our lack of intellectual strength that we deserve to be.
Because words are dangerous and should be dangerous, their use in public requires great responsibility: both in the sense of being held accountable for their misuse and also in the sense of a duty to use them when we need to. We ought to take Sarah Palin to task for her inane non-sequiturs. We ought to hold Obama responsible for not speaking with the kind of force and conviction this moment in history calls for. We ought to ridicule John Boehner for the abject disingenuousness of his pronouncements. We ought to call a lie a lie and we should reveal it as such, loudly, publicly, mercilessly.
The press has failed in this across the board. It has confused bipartisanship with objectivity and fairness with frivolity. It can’t distinguish between tactics and strategy, rhetoric and reality. Its obsession with opinion polls is the simulacrum of democratic thought, and those in the press are too desperate of avoid real controversy to realize their role in fulfilling the prophecy of the pollsters.
The weakness of our professional political communicators is amplified by an educational system that rewards rote learning and punishes analysis and critique. It is enhanced by workplaces that quash creativity and incentivize compliance and acquiescence. It melds with a consumer marketplace that infantalizes people into ids and an entertainment regime that never passed the seventh grade. The result is culture artificially flavored, art popped to froth and fizz, ideas the equivalent of cognitive Twinkies.
We have to push ourselves back from the table and venture out beyond the pre-packaged, harvest the produce of our culture the old fashioned way. If we do, we’ll be made hearty by its nutritive value, but also shocked at its succulence.
–EW Wilder
I call on all older poets to kindly die,
on all the Greatest Generation schussing dust,
on all the crotchety Boomers stuffed into too tight,
too young dungarees in futility against the wrinkles
to generally step aside, take a dignified dose
of cyanide and make way for the young and the no-longer-
quite-so-young, those few in count but patient
in soul who have waited until the dawn
of middle age for a book, a book, our kingdoms
come, a book—or even a berth in the hallowed
galleys of academe. We're too aged to be pulling
your lattes anymore; you've milked
your connections, dug dry the groovies
of your whoreson hips. Now die.
You're bored with poetry anyhow, tired
enough to seep sentiment and senile
to the degree you believe any of this matters.
Let us, for once, for all, plumb the deaths
of this pointlessness, lose ourselves in lines too long,
the coffee-fog and wine-breath
of empty
self-promotion.
by Mary Chino-Cherry
If a short story or a novel can said to be a work of fiction, a poem or a play can said to an act of fiction: the creation of an artifact that represents a truth but without necessarily being anchored in fact. A work of fiction creates its own world in which to exist; an act of fiction exists in this world but uses the means of fiction as a medium for truth-telling.
This is not to say that works of fiction cannot also do the work of truth-telling, but they do it differently, as a matter of theme rather than thesis.