The HyperTexts
Tweedie-die-die and Tweedie-Dumb
In his poem on climate change, James A. Tweedie confirmed for the zillionth time that the
Society of Classical Poets, better known as the Keystone
Scops, are clueless about apostrophes, as well as climate change,
science, and thinking in
general:
Don’t succumb to the deception climate change leads to a grave,
Lest we kill the very thing our good intentions tried to save.
None of this means that we ought to keep polluting, heaven's [sic] no!
Clean the air and atmosphere! But let the ice caps ebb and flow.
In his alleged poem, Tweedie argues that climate change is natural and thus
nothing needs to be done about melting ice caps. Human beings should
accept climate change gracefully, adapt, and (presumably) grow gills.
The dinosaurs who were wiped
out by "natural" climate change might argue otherwise, and point out
that they did not contribute to their demise, as man is so obviously doing
today. But even if man is not responsible, it makes no difference. Ask the
dinosaurs. All that matters is what we can do to reverse, stop, or at least slow
down the current rapidly accelerating trend.
Most species that ever
existed are extinct, a word to the spectacularly unwise who would do nothing.
And according to Earthly.com, the extinction rate today is 1,000 to 10,000 times
faster than natural. According to the World Wildlife Fund, animal populations
have declined 69% since 1970.
Tweedie is a retired pastor, so how would he explain Noah building
an ark, rather than gracefully accepting climate change in the form of excessive
water? Then, as now. Are Tweedie and the scops wiser than God Almighty?
Didn't the biblical God command human beings to save earth's creatures rather than
twiddling thumbs and letting them perish? Aren't human beings supposed to be
caretakers of Nature, not its destroyers?
And what about building houses, creating medicine, and all the other things we
do to prevent Nature from killing us prematurely? Should we let Mother Nature do
her thing with the ice caps and glaciers, when we don't allow her to imperil us
in other ways, as long as we have better options?
As for the climate change deniers, they should consider the history of the
Northwest Passage. Famous explorers like Columbus, Champlain and Henry Hudson
were looking for waterways to the Orient. Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis
and Clark to follow the Missouri River northwest on their famous expedition,
hoping it would empty into the Pacific and prove a commercial gold mine. (Alas,
there was a tiny barrier called the Rocky Mountains in the way!) Roald Amundsen
discovered a precarious sea route north of Canada in 1905, but it required a
small, shallow-draft boat because the water was only a meter deep in places.
After many years of fruitless searching, it became obvious there was no
Northwest Passage suitable for vessels of any size. As a result the Panama Canal
was built at the cost of $14.6 billion (in 2022 dollars) and more than 25,000
lives (according to History.com).
But recently gigantic ships have been able to cross from the Atlantic to the
Pacific north of Canada. Ships too heavy for the Panama Canal when fully loaded,
such as the Nordic Orion and the supertanker Manhattan, have steamed north. (The
Manhattan has a 52-foot draft, a far cry from Amundsen’s single meter). Hell, a
gigantic cruise ship, the Crystal Serenity, ferried 1,700 passengers and crew
from Vancouver to New York City! So there is now a commercially viable Northwest
Passage, due to the enormous amounts of ice that have melted. And the passage is
at least 50 feet deeper, give or take, than it was before. That is helluva lot
of unfrozen ice, in a relatively short period of time.
Sea levels are rising and regions like Venice, Bangladesh, the Maldives, New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and New York and the East Coast, are increasingly
threatened. As are all lower-elevation coastal regions.
Hell, here where I live in Nashville the ducks and geese grok global warming and
have stopped migrating south. We have sandhill cranes moving up from Florida and
Mississippi. The ducks, geese and cranes know global warming is real, but the
scops seem to be of the ostrich variety.
Roy E. Peterson, another non-Einstein on climate change, proved yet again that the scops are clueless about apostrophes and have no ear for meter:
Blame volcanoes for ash and dust,
It makes no diff'rence, you can trust.
Bees and wasps and hornets' [sic] sting—
You can’t control everything.
One must pronounce "volcanoes" as "VOL-ca-NOES" to keep the metronomic meter.
The apostrophe in the third line should go, or it would be "Bees' and wasps' and
hornets' stings [plural]." These are grade school mistakes. Why is the SCP
publishing "poetry" that would fail a fifth-grade grammar quiz?
Another scop waxed poetic on things scientific:
... each man must not only eateth for his health,
But for the probiotics of his microbiome's wealth.
— Lannie David Brockstein
"You cannot categorically label our poetry 'doggerel' and write us off,"
top scop Evan Mantyk
once declared, defiantly. Well, perhaps not, since there is such a thing as good
doggerel. But we can
quote
you, and write you off as categorically incapable of passing a fifth grade
grammar quiz.
Not seeing the truth they were consequently
Destroying themselves quite unchivalrously.
— Evan Mantyk
According to Mantyk, there's a way to destroy oneself
"chivalrously." Presumably that is what the scops are doing, with their denial
of climate change.
***
The scops are also staunch defenders of creationism, despite the evidence of the
fossil record that human beings evolved over time. However, one must give the Devil his due. Thus I'm compelled to tip my cap to the
remarkable consistency of the Keystone Scops. Just when we think it's
impossible for the SCP to publish anything remotely as bad as their previous attempts at "poetry" ... they produce
even more terrible clunkers. This alleged "poem" by SCP
editor-in-chief Evan Mantyk may be the one worst yet, and that is really
saying something ...
The Emerald Queen
by Evan Mantyk
A Legend from the Future.
Part I.
Have you heard the old tale of the Emerald Queen?
‘Twas a long time ago when folks would demean
We humans as animals—nothing else more!—
Evolved from bacteria found on the floor.
They forgot the Creator had made us like him,
That we’re here for a purpose and not on a whim.
Not seeing the truth they were consequently
Destroying themselves quite unchivalrously.
In this brief excerpt from a poem no one can possibly finish reading, we see how
remarkably consistent the Top Scop is, when it comes to writing bad verse. In
eight lines Mantyk manages to demonstrate all the tricks of the bad poet's
trade. He employs an archaic "'Twas" while using the wrong punctuation
mark, a left single quote. Rather than saying "nothing more" he inserts
a clumsy "else"
to maintain the poem's lackluster meter. Mantyk gets the time logic backwards,
since in the long-ago past most people accepted creationism. The amateurish
Mantyk cobbles in "floor" for end rhyme. What floor? And why a floor, when
evolutionists believe life began in water? Mantyk rebukes others for not
believing human beings were created in God's image, but who would want
to be created in the image of the amoral murderer of Adam, Eve, every human
child and all the innocent animals? What is the "purpose" Mantyk alludes to, but
to praise and worship a serial murderer, if the Bible is correct, or an
imaginary friend if it isn't? The closing couplet is laughably bad. To read L7
in meter we have to wrench "consequently" into conSEEquentLY. And Mantyk's logic
in the last line is fruitcake stuff. Is he chiding nonbelievers for not
destroying themselves "chivalrously"? Also, he's clearly criticizing the wrong
group. Atheists and agnostics never tortured and burned each other at the stake
for not believing badly told fairytales. Christians did.
Has anyone ever been more self-destructive than Christians warring with each
other over loopy interpretations of Bible verses? The English Civil War that
resulted in the beheading of King Charles I began with a Bishop's War over a
book of common prayer. The American Civil War began with Christians violently
disagreeing with Christians over Bible verses that commanded and/or condoned
slavery. Nazi Germany was a Christian nation and the Holocaust began with the
oh-so-Christian idea that the Jews murdered Jesus two millennia prior, so it was
okay to rob and murder them in the present. And so on.
Incomprehensibly, according to his bio Mantyk teaches history and English. And
we wonder why our educational system is in such a shambles.
***
Jeffrey Essmann in his poem "Babel" confirmed that Scoputopia is a leaning Tower
of Babel, a ziggurat of confused, incoherent voices:
There was a time when all the world one tongue
Among its peoples shared, and language preened
Itself with fluffed-up thoughts that oversprung
The bounds of things as yet quite unforeseen.
Man set about a city to machine
With at its heart a tower to touch the clouds
That heaven’s gate itself might be advened.
“The world will sing our praises, sing them loud,”
He thought, “and naught from now on can be disallowed.”
This sort of babble, Don Shook would have us believe, is "better" than
well-written free verse:
There is a scourge that permeates our midst
Which we cannot so easily dismiss.
Elitists strive to elevate this curse;
A type of art most poets call free verse.
Don Shook shook up Scoputopia by presenting the perfect argument for
free verse. That being, of course, terrible formal verse like his. And
yet the key stoners claim to be outdoing great free verse poets like Walt
Whitman and T. S. Eliot. I quote the SCP website: "English poetry has been in existence for at
least 1,400 years. This tradition continues alive and well at The Society of
Classical Poets like nowhere else!" Well, I can go along with "like nowhere
else." As in the Twilight Zone.
***
Meanwhile in "A
Prayer for Sanity," Susan Jarvis Bryant attributes transgender "plans" to the
Devil:
Pray let us find the fortitude to fight
The gospel of the preachy lunatic
Pronouncing chromosomes are there to spite
The grand transgender plans of good Old Nick.
Please spare us!
Please spare us, indeed, from such terrible "poetry" and from the medieval mindset
that drives "preachy lunatics" like the scops to write it. People who make the very difficult
decision to change their gender have enough problems without invoking a
fictitious monster. When will the real "preachy lunatics" such as the
Scops admit that the earth is not
flat, that tomatoes are not poisonous, and that the Bible is wrong about the order of
creation, the "perfect" Garden of Eden, the "Devil," the "fall," the great flood, animal
sacrifices, slavery, witch hunts, the submission of women to chauvinistic men, homosexuality, etc.? We
now know,
thanks to brain science, that some babies are born with female brains in male
bodies, and vice versa. Such children may know something is deeply wrong at
very young ages. They face enormous challenges if they receive help and
understanding, and even greater challenges when they're condemned for wanting to
correct nature's error. Who are we to judge them? How can we possibly know what they're
going through? Why not lend sympathetic ears and let them decide what's best for them?
This is my re-butt-al of Susan Jarvis Bryant's rebuttal of my criticism of her
poem "A Prayer for Sanity." I think a more accurate title would have
been "A Prayer from Insanity."
In her comically bad poem "A Rebuttal to Michael Burch" the
writer of over-alliterated verse and clunky rhymes accuses me of "whining." But what I have done vis-à-vis
the Scops is nothing like whining. For the most part I have merely quoted them
while pointing out their innumerable errors of grammar and logic, their lack of
attention to detail, the inability of their editors to edit, and the paucity and
medieval nature of their "facts" and "logic."
The Scops condemn themselves with every stroke of their irrational pens. They
would force children
whose brains don't match their genitals to live according to the precepts of a
book, the Hole-y Bible, which commands and/or condones the murder of children (Deuteronomy
21:18-21, Exodus 21:15, Isaiah 13:15-18, Proverbs 20:20, Leviticus 20:9,
Leviticus 26:21-22, 2 Kings 2:23-24, Ezekiel
9:5-7, Hosea 9:11-16, Exodus 12:29-30); the ghastly stoning to death of rape victims (Deuteronomy
22:23-29); the ghastly stoning to death of child brides for bleeding insufficiently on their wedding nights to prove their virginity
(Deuteronomy 22:13-21); slavery (many verses in both the Old and New Testaments); sex slavery,
including mass-murdering mothers and male "little ones" while keeping only the
virgin girls alive as sex slaves (Numbers 31:9-18); also Moses saying "men of
God" could sell their own daughters as sex slaves, with the option of buying
them back if they failed to "please" their new masters! (Exodus 21:7-8); the
freeing of male slaves but not female sex slaves, who were to remain slaves for
life along with their daughters (Exodus 21:7-11); infanticide (Isaiah 13:15-18, Psalms
137:9, Numbers 31:17, Hosea 13:16, 2 Kings 15:16, 1 Samuel 15:3); matricide
(Numbers 31:7-18); ethnic cleansing (Joshua 6:21, Deuteronomy 20:16-18,
Zechariah 14:1-2) and genocide, including the mass murder of women, babies and
children (Joshua 6:21, 1 Samuel 15:3, Hosea 13:16, Isaiah 13:15-18, Deuteronomy 13:13-19,
Deuteronomy 20:10-16, Numbers 31:9-18, Jeremiah 51:20-26).
Who can doubt the authors of such barbaric verses were speaking for a loving,
compassionate, merciful, wise, enlightened God, as they incongruously claimed to
be doing? Certainly not the Keystone Scops, who would never use their
powers of reason, such as they are, to arrive at the only possible rational
conclusion: i.e., that large parts of the Bible were obviously written by evil
nutjobs. But I knew it at age 11 when I read the Bible from cover to cover to
please my devout Christian parents. I read the Bible from cover to
cover again as an adult and came to the same conclusion:
If God
is good
half the Bible
is libel.
—Michael R. Burch, circa age 11-13
The Bible is a book
far worse than Hitler's Mein Kampf in
numerous passages.
How can the Scops with their muddled minds oppose abortion when their "god"
repeatedly ordered the mass murder of babies? Or when he did the mass-murdering
himself, as during the great flood when Jehovah personally slaughtered multitudes of
pregnant women, unborns, babies and children? But of course there never was a
great flood. There is no reason to believe such a ludicrous, badly-told
fairytale, just as there is no reason to believe primitive goatherds knew
anything about "God's will" unless he was also a clueless barbarian.
The writers of the Bible obviously created a primitive "god" in their own
primitive image. Oddly, the Scops seem near as primitive today. One can imagine
them stoning transgender children while spouting Bible verses, for instance. Nor
does their cruelty end at the grave. Joe Salemi and his lovely pal Leo Yankevich
both informed me that they would be delighted when I am being tortured in their
primitive "hell" (which oddly was never once mentioned by the biblical god
Jehovah or any of his Old Testament prophets).
I stand by everything I said in regard to Bryant and her alleged "poem." I was
writing better poetry at age 11 and thinking much better too.
Ms. Bryant specializes in inflammatory "poems" about migrants but is a migrant herself, a Brit who now lives in the United States.
Ode to an Immigrant who should be Illegal
by Michael R. Burch
Ms. Bryant has written a peeve.
Ignore it, she’s out of her league.
No native Anita,
this pale senorita
is a migrant herself. Make her leave!
***
Every now and then, in an unguarded moment, a scop will have a Kinsley gaffe and
blurt out a truth best left unrevealed. C. B. Anderson apparently had such a
moment when he confessed:
I’ve never been the type of model
An adolescent child should ever copy...
Joe Salemi has defended the SCP's publication of wretched, rigidly metronomic,
ungrammatical poems by "explaining" that the SCP is an educational enterprise.
Of course that makes no sense because if the SCP wanted to educate poets it
would use the best poems of the best poets, not the worst of the worst. But in the lines above we have an honest scop
confessing that no one should ever do as he does.
I concur.
Do the right thing and shut down this failed educational institution before it
does further damage to students and my sensitive ears!
Let this kaput kindergarten join Trump University as prime examples of how
not to teach.
***
When it comes to massacring the English language, no one can possibly outdo
top scop Evan "Antic" Mantyk:
This pristine orbs,
A fragile yet audacious batch
Seem hopeless until they reveal
A rainbow patch.
— Evan Mantyk
The scops have apparently never encountered a major grammatical error
that they didn't immediately fall in love with, proceed to proclaim the
pinnacle of art, then not only publish, but include in a training manual. Surely, you think, he jests! No, I'm
serious. Mantyk used the lines above in his how-to manual "Writing Classical
Poetry Is Easy (Technically)." Yes, in return for a donation the Society of Classical Know-Its will teach you how to
become a classical poet in ten minutes! At least that's Antic Mantyk's
Twilight-Zone-ish claim. And this is how Mantyk advises
going about the simple-as-pie task of writing classical poetry:
"Some people have raised concerns about the technical
difficulty of writing classical poetry. Actually, there is very little
difficulty behind writing classical poetry from a technical perspective.
Classical poetry is simply poetry that is metrical (also called metered), thus
contrasting with unmetered poetry, known as free verse. There is no requirement
to rhyme or have a particular number of lines or anything else. The easiest
beginner-level approach to writing metrical poetry is to simply count the
syllables. If your first line has ten syllables then your next line should have
ten syllables. Seven, eight, ten, and twelve syllables are all common lengths.
Write in this way, and perhaps make your last two lines rhyme or use
alliteration (or neither) and call it classical poetry. It is that easy. If you
don't know the number of syllables, simply look it up in a dictionary."
Of
course counting syllables does not result in metrical poetry, much less
classical poetry. Advising beginning poets to "simply count the syllables" then
"call it classical poetry" is nonsense and detrimental to beginners. As far as I
can tell, Mantyk has never written a good poem, so why is he writing a training
manual? But this is how Scoputopia operates: quality matters not a whit, just
publish, publish, publish and call it classical poetry!
There is something there that loves a wall:
The easy car trip when your loved ones' call—
No need to worry cows might block the road
And pepper it with putrid, pie-like load.
— Evan Mantyk
Mantyk claims to be an English teacher but has demonstrated once again that he's clueless
about English punctuation and grammar. When Joe Salemi called Mantyk’s abysmal
"poem" a "perfect answer" to Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," I could only
conclude that Sam Gwynn was correct when he observed that Salemi is more
politico than poet.
Here’s my answer to the prick
(I hope it cuts him to the quick).
Mike, you’re envious and sick
And stupid as a common brick.
— Joseph S. Salemi
Doesn't exactly reach the heights of Martial or Pope, does it? I would like to
be immortalized but fear this metronomic clunker won't accomplish the task.
***
Due to truth-in-advertising regulations The Society of Classical Poets should consider a name change. Being the helpful soul that I am, I came up with The Keystone Scops. Mostly, I just quote the Top Scop, editor Evan Mantyk, and certain other Key Stoners, happily assisting them as they hoist their self-immolating petards. — Michael R. Burch, editor, The HyperTexts
Do truth-in-advertising regulations apply to poetry
websites? The SCP home page is prominently captioned, "Rhyming, rhythmic, and
rapturous." A more truthful caption would be, "Force-rhymed, metronomic,
ungrammatical and tedious."
Ample evidence is provided here:
Emperors Sans Clothes.
Related Pages:
A Review of the Society's Literary Journal,
Laureates 'R' US,
Gnashional Anthem of the Keystone Scops,
Susan Jarvis Bryant,
Joseph Charles MacKenzie: Poet or Pretender?,
Evan Mantyk's Poetic Tic,
James Sale's Blue Light Special,
Bruce Dale Wise or Un-?,
James A.
Tweedie-Dumb,
"How to Write a Real Good Poem" by R. S. Gwano,
Joseph S. Salemi: How the Mighty Have Fallen
(I),
Joseph S. Salemi: How
the Mighty Have Fallen (II),
Salemi's Dilemma,
Salemi Interview and Responses by other Poets,
THE SOCIETY OF CLASSICAL POETS — A CIRCLE JERK by Conor Kelly,
Why I Am Not A Christian by Michael R. Burch
The HyperTexts