The time has come to celebrate the accidental lyricism of some rather unexpected wordsmiths: We speak, of course, of such heretofore grievously overlooked poets as poet-candidate Mitt Romney, poet-reality star Snooki, poet-tv personality Bill O'Reilly, poet-foot-in-mouth-prone Joe Biden, and many other estimable modern luminarie collected in The Anthology of Really Important Modern Poetry [Workman, $11.95].
These are poet-celebrities of today, the literary voices that we can't block out because they must be heard.*
We've collected their (almost, sort of) timeless words -- sometimes classically elegant, other times refreshingly rough-hewn, but always gripping, soulful, and eminently unforgettable.**
To help introduce you to these fresh new poetic voices, we've arranged this anthology and slide show by poetic schools. You will be introduced to the poems of the strangely evocative Derrieristes (the Butt School of Poetry) and those of the declining but still impactful Dictator School among many others. We discuss the more salient tenets of each school, allowing the reader a chance to truly understand the underpinnings of the different poems and, perhaps more importantly, the ethos from which they spring. It is this shared aesthetic and philosophical outlook that draws together and indeed weds such seemingly disparate individuals as actor Tom Cruise, mobster Big Joey Massino and pop star Miley Cyrus (all members of the Didactic School).
By selecting the verses to be included in this collection, we feel we have elevated them to their rightful stature. Yes, these poems are truly the important pinnacle of today's modern poetics.***
This, of course, says much about the admirable state of our modern high culture.
The poems herein anthologized can now take their justified place alongside the great works of the past; they can rub shoulders, so to speak, with the sonnets of Shakespeare, and, of course, the timeless epic verse of the immortal **** Homer.
In closing, we invite you, the reader, to "dip in" and sip the wisdom from the troughs of these brains.
* Ed note: because they do not stop talking
** Almost
*** op. cit.
**** Ed note. "immortal" is here used figuratively, actually Homer died around 850 BC
