A viral post claimed that JD Vance’s visit to the 2026 Olympics in Milan required 14 planes to transport his security team, staff, vehicles, and supplies, including food—to Italy. Traveling about the narrow streets blocked some athletes from their venues but it is unknown if any of them failed to reach their destination in time to compete.
There’s no excuse or justification to pontificate
simply because you have a voice, reveling in the choice
that life afforded you to create a concerto or paint
a painting, benefitted by the time to while away
your life while butler and maid come to your aid,
make your bed, lay out your clothes, and draw your bath.
That’s no path to glory—more like the tunnel entrance
to empire decline like Rome. Whether you live
five hundred years or half that much as seems the luck
or misfortune of the United States you’re already lost if
with no cost and no discipline you write 500 pages
just because you can. Why put a backflip in your routine,
except you can? Is “first” always worth the risk of it
to get a “ten?” Why bring an escort of 13 planes, monster
vans that crowd streets, and food to Italy?
Is not the latter like bringing coals to Newcastle? Would you
not lend me your ear, dear countrymen and women,
and consider the worth—or not—of Nautilus by Meredith?
It takes me into despair just as I suffered from the movie 1984
I finally got around to seeing, with no excuse for ignoring
this masterpiece, though watching bent me in two. I could not
conclude viewing the destruction of the hero by his nemesis
stepped out at last from lurking, shadowed behind
dusty chiffon curtains through which our hero barely saw.
Like that, I wish I had not concluded listening to Nautilus;
it broke my ears and my heart. Stark—the screech
upon the chalkboard, so loud that if I continued, doom
portended as when giant speakers belch decibels that destroy
ears of foolish youth. Have we so little respect left for history
and for discipline, for craft and those who went before us
forming rules and guidelines that create a far better art
than chaos? “SAM,” she said, Ms. Bishop, meaning
the spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery that all poems worth
the name must have. And Ms. Moore of the tri-corner hat,
that respected dame opined that we do not admire what we cannot
understand. At least do that: make it understandable!
Don’t let mystery grow so wide it means that you got lazy,
donned a blindfold and took a shot across dear poetry’s bow,
only doing it—Marianne and I object!—because you can.
