Tuesday, May 25, 2004

There's some sort of controversy going on with a fired New Mexico teacher, a column he wrote after his firing, and a lawsuit over the whole thing. Said teacher was the sponsor of his school's poetry slam club. He was claiming censorship and tyranny and suppression of poetry, so I'm afraid I'm going to be hearing about this for years to come, poets being who they are, on average. Given that there's a pissed-off letter from the allegedly "censored" high school poet complaining that her work wasn't intended to be published, and that it's dissemination and modification by her self-appointed partisans is intellectual theft, I am inclined to be quite wroth if anybody starts in on mythologizing the sorry mess in my presence.

"Shy teen poets" my ass. I'm about as shy a poet as you'll ever find at a slam. They don't attract the timid.

Via Harley at Tacitus, who was honest enough to offer the Volokh rebuttal link after initially blowing his stack at the News-Journal article. Even if he didn't initially provide enough comment on the story to explain what it was he was on about.

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