How to Write a Political Poem
How to Write a Political Poem
To write a political poem you must use
obfuscation, equivocation, prevarication,
circumlocution, dissimulation, insinuation,
and speculation. A poem without these seven
essential elements of a political poem would
not be a political poem but some other form
of literary chicanery. A political poem must
always hullabaloo the hoipolloi by making things
obscure, by using double-meaning language,
by deviating from the truth, by using a large
number of words to express an irrelevant idea
or a fraudulent emotion, by concealing facts,
intentions, and opinions under some pretense
or false appearance, by introducing deceptively
deceiving deceitful thoughts, feelings, emotions,
and ideas in a covert stealthy way, and by
paraphrasing reality inconclusively with an avalanche
of hocus pocus. To write a political poem you must
earnestly engage in duplicity complicity. If you do not
camouflage your denotations and connotations in a
masquerade of mindnumbing mystical mysteriousness,
you have not written a political poem but some other
nonpolitical verse not even remotely similar to those
politically poetical strategems and those poetically
political contrivances reminiscently reminiscent of
the big con euphemistically parading as the struggle
between the struggle for and the struggle against.
Copyright 2012 by Larry Ziman
Permission to Reprint with Acknowledgment
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