I slowly read out loud to myself the poem by Noah Eli Gordon posted on Ron's blog the other day. It took me less than two minutes! The language of the poem is pellucid, and the entire text has a strong narrative dimension. This is not Paul Celan we're talking about. This was the poem that the student organizing a poetry reading against the war said was too long and abstract. And today I notice that Matthew Zapruder has written Ron to protest Gordon's protestation. I agree completely with Ron's resistance to "dumbing down" our poetry. Why is only poetry required to be stupider in times of political crisis? Are we to listen to stupider music, look at dumber art, because the times require it? Even if the guy HAD wanted to read Celan, in the original German, at an anti-war protest, I think it could have been effective, more so than the empty rhetoric of your usual anti-war poem.

Sure, go protest the war, but leave "poetry" out of it if you are "functionally illiterate," as the audience would have to have been not to get this poem.