Literati schmati

Once again a reader wrote to let me know that she felt my blogging about European poets was pretentious and that it made her feel that there was something wrong with preferring to watch a DVD over reading poems about dead men (see blog, February 5). Some explanations are in order:

1. Bukowski, though born in Germany, moved to the States when he was a toddler, and so he doesn’t qualify as a European. Mary Oliver is, of course, beyond a shadow of a doubt American. Born in Ohio – how American can you get!
2. I didn’t put a Bukowski bumper sticker on my truck (for one thing the truck’s too dented and rusted, insofar as plastic can get rusted), I was just reporting on what I saw.
3. Anyone can find any info on Bukowski on the Net, which is the source of much blog wisdom after all. A reader would have no reason to suspect that I’d heard of "Hank" Bukowski [um, those in the know call him Hank] before yesterday, and few people know that I occasionally glance at small press literary journals – usually at the table of contents and at their submission policies should it ever strike me to write something good enough for their worth.
4. In order to pander to the odd person with a 4th grade reading level that would find my blog (I’m thinking of the one who found my blog yesterday by googling ha+ha+ha+ha), I make a point of avoiding words with more than three-syllables in all posts that have the possibility of appearing high-brow.