Do you think Robert Pinsky is a funny guy? Well, you should. Pinsky isn’t just the venerable former Poet Laureate, a Pulitzer-nominated author, a Boston University professor, and the poetry editor of Slate.com–the man has a serious sense of humor. See, for instance, this clip, in which Pinsk upstages both Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert! Now, The Colbert Report is pretty funny, but if you want real deal, Pinsky’s full-throttle humor, then you must click on The Spiel.

And when you’re done with that, check out our latest agons, produced in association with JBooks.com. First, the Pulitzer prizewinning Philip Schultz bids goodbye to the “dear Prophet of absence” and asks that he “once again” fail to appear. And then David Lehman, famed editor of the Best American Poetry series, improvises a few phrases on Elijah’s violin.

And that’s that. When you get a chance, check out FSG’s cool poetry blog as well as Norton’s Poems Out Loud.

Until next time, keep an ear peeled for that extra fine turn of phrase. If you don’t fine one, we’ll bring more soon.

Oh, the old dog and pony show — Bode’s childhood at the Alton School for the Remarkably Giftless. Cue the voilins! How many times is he going to pin his stupidity on his 4th grade teacher? (Who by the way, I hear, went on to become a prize-winning Medical Transcriptionist, competing on both county and state levels. What awards have YOU won, Bode? Huh?)

Oh Baggott again and her fluffy word-choice-ages … or is it fluffy word-choissisage (as in the French)? … or is it fluffy word-corsages? In any case, fine! So be it! She’s a poet and I know it. And I’m not. Blah, blah, blaaaaah.

Charles Bernstein’s poetry has always had an implied politics, and he is skillfully theoretical. But in the QuickMuse prompt poem he leaps directly onto the back of the current American problem.

We are in a critical moment in U.S. history. Everyone feels it: an expensive war designed for profit and world control, high gas prices, a declining middle class, and widespread despair over the economic future of our children, the first generation since WWII not to have better prospects than their parents. And those failings are nothing when compared to the moral losses we have suffered.

The nearly imageless poem that resulted was influenced by my recent reading in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and the comments of thinkers Deleuze and Guattari on the body as a “desiring machine.” We thought we were prophets, discovered that we are only about profits, and now we are forced to prophesy once more. Don Quixote was a comical knight errant, tilting against windmills. His errand errs; he follows a wandering path. This makes him an agreeable, comical, and noble character. The poet Cole Swensen is writing a paper on the value of such error to poetic discovery, thus truth. But the current American adventure is far worse. Bush and Cheney have not simply followed a blundering path. They have pursued directly what they value and don’t care about the rest. Even with Katrina, the government’s motive was disaster profiteering, the toxic FEMA trailers being only one example. Our loss is not only of the dream; it is also of the actual. The nation is migrating beneath our feet, making strange what was familiar. Did you ever go back to the town where you were raised and realize how foreign you are to it? Our situation is one of internal exile, because the change designed for us was intended to be permanent.

The door “locked open” refers to the state of our information and news gathering systems. The gate keepers tell us the door is open. But we are not allowed to enter. Because the frenetic entertainment industry seeks to keep us entertained, we stand in the locked-open smiling uneasily.

The New Pleasantry (reality television, happy talk news shows issuing false news) is part of the New Peasantry.

I feel a little silly, standing in public with my cardboard sign that says, “The end is near!” But the critique is richly deserved. Inanity is our characteristic mode; therefore, as Adorno predicted, there can no longer be tragedies of heroic size; finally, I should add, no people of size. Thankfully, we are not yet small enough for the time we are forced to live in.

This may be the first time in contemporary literary history in which a poet rhymed “George Steiner” and “vagina”! When we asked David Lehman to write against the Steiner-on-LSD theme, we didn’t know the he had studied in Cambridge. And had taken acid there. And had heard Dr. Steiner lecture on “Language and Silence,” which is, of course, the title of one of his best books. Sometimes things just line up perfectly for QuickMuse… and this is one of those times. A First for DL!

Here’s something you don’t see every day, poetry fans: Thylias Moss rewrites the New York Times’ obituary for the late and extremely great Bo Diddley. All we can say is ba domp domp.

At JBooks.com, the website I edit when I’m not working on QuickMuse, we know from Philip Schultz — and have for some time. (See this review, and this one.) So it was a great surprise to watch as Schultz was given this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Even more surprising, Schultz took time out of his extremely busy schedule to do a terrific one-man agon.

What else? Our pals at Found Magazine were good enough to help out with Schultz’s theme. Thanks, guys.

“When the puzzle piece snaps in,
it’s like ziplock, an ad hoc Matlock.”

Ladies and gentlemen, stop what you’re doing and read the superbly unpremeditated poetry stylings of Matthea Harvey. An ad hoc Matlock!  

Mary Jo Bang overhears a baby-monitor conversation and cooks up soothing non-nursery rhymes:

The baby grew up. Became an almost three-five.
She denunciated the keepers
Of the albums where her brother was pointing
To some flippant toy, and a copy
Of Henry James pointing to little Edith Wharton.
His face as smug as a rug.
Both of them clueless.

Some fascinating stuff here linking Sonny Rollins, Hart Crane, Bud Powell, and Walt Whitman.