zodiac20 Apr 2005

2) Consider the alternative: You have almost no experience with blacks, have no education in appropriate ways of talking about blacks, and have pretty much nothing else except a room-filling self-righteousness. If you were trying to be a car-mechanic instead of a poet, you'd be adding cats to the gas tank and using week-old luncheon meat for steering-adjuster. Then, when an actual mechanic tried to tell you that car was never going to run on cats, you'd trump in his face and leap headfirst into a wall.

And I don't just "say" I'm more educated than you are [in terms of talking about African-Americans]. I AM more educated than you are [in terms of talking about African-Americans]. That's not in dispute. But no, I'd like to think you'd at least give my comments a chance because they made sense, mainly, and because I had more experience than you in the subject, secondly.

6) Um, yeah. That's why it's called a suggestion. Is what you want this poem to be about essentially, "I, Dovina, am colossally ignorant of anything about blacks at best, and a racist at worst"?

4 [Reprise]) If I told you "Dovina, go ahead, post 25 comments on poemranker today", what would you think?