How To Write a Political Poem
HOW TO WRITE A POLITICAL POEM
To write a political poem you must use obfuscation,
equivocation, prevarication, circumlocution, disssimulation,
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 poetically political contrivances
reminiscently reminiscent of the big con euphemistically parading as
the struggle between the struggle for and the struggle against.
Copoyright 2008 by Larry Ziman
Permission to reprint with acknowledgment