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