The HyperTexts
Susan Jarvis Bryant
Susan Jarvis Bryant is an alleged "poet" who publishes alleged "poems" with an
alleged group of "poets" called The Society of Classical Poets, who are better
known as The Keystone Scops.
This is a limerick written in the over-alliterative style of Susan Jarvis Bryant, who
specializes in unintentional doggerel.
Skip, scop, skip to my loo
by Michael R. Burch
A skippered scuppered scop
longed to lounge straight to the top;
thus Ms. Bryant en brief
flung away her fig leaf,
then,
sans clothes, snoozed and schmoozed in pig slop.
Skippered, because Ms. Bryant’s brain has evidently been captained by
right-wing brainwashing of the Tarzanish variety: "White man good, heavy burden.
Migrant bad. Very bad. Tarzan squash itty-bitty children. Great danger, mighty
Tarzan! Tarzan good Christian, squash baby Jesus, mother Mary, they show
up at border! Jesus reward Tarzan, not call Tarzan goat!"
Scuppered, because Ms. Bryant has sunk her own ship by abandoning art for
self-parody. Thus a fig leaf has replaced the true poet’s laurel and even that
has been cast aside in order to wallow in the mire.
Ms. Bryant also specializes in peevish poems in which she attacks actual poets
in mediocre verse.
Ms. Bryant has written a peeve.
Ignore it, she’s out of her league.
—Michael R. Burch
Due to truth-in-advertising regulations The Society of Classical Poets should consider a name change. Being the
helpful soul that I am, I have come up with The Keystone Scops, for reasons that will
quickly become obvious. Mostly, I just quote the top scop, editor Evan Mantyk,
and certain other Key Stoners, such as the alleged poet Susan Jarvis Bryant, happily assisting them as they hoist their
self-immolating petards ...
by Michael R. Burch
In her alleged poem "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" to write it. People who make the very difficult
decision to change their sex have enough problems without invoking a
fictitious monster. When will the "preachy lunatics" admit that the earth is not
flat, that tomatoes are not poisonous, and that the Bible is wrong about the order of
creation, the Garden of Eden, the "Devil," the "fall," the great flood, animal
sacrifices, slavery, witch hunts, women's rights, homosexuality, etc.? We know
thanks to brain science that some babies are born with female brains in male
bodies, and vice versa. Many such children know something is deeply wrong at
very young ages. They face enormous challenges if they receive help and
understanding, and even greater challenges if they're condemned for wanting to
change their gender. 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."
Bryant starts off with an unwieldy title: "A Rebuttal to Michael Burch and An
Encouragement to Poets, by Susan Jarvis Bryant." One wonders why she couldn't
come up with a better title and why she capitalized "An" but not "to" and "and."
But one should never expect the Keystone Scops to pay attention to
details. It's not their gig, not their style, and probably not within their
mayfly-like attention spans.
Bryant sounds positively hysterical, calling my criticism "scathing" and
"brutal." Apparently Bryant, who used the term "preachy lunatic" in her poem,
can say anything about people she disagrees with, but if I use the term she
came up with, that is "scathing" and "brutal." But didn't Bryant just tell us
that she is "scathing" and "brutal" and is therefore the hypocritical
pot calling the kettle black? What must Jesus Christ think of his disciples who
practice such hypocrisy when he saved all his sternest criticism for hypocrites?
In her comically bad poem "A Rebuttal to Michael Burch" the
writer of 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 pens, as with the five
lines above that resulted in my alleged "brutality." But what is really
brutal is publishing such terrible "ideas" with the goal of forcing children
whose brains don't match their genitals to live according to the precepts of a
book, the Hole-y Bible, which commands the stoning to death of children, a ghastly
method of execution for anyone, much less a child (Deuteronomy 21:18-21); the
ghastly stoning to death of child brides
for bleeding insufficiently on their wedding nights to prove their virginity
(Deuteronomy 22:13-21); the ghastly stoning to death of rape
victims (Deuteronomy 22:23-29); slavery (many verses in both the Old and New
Testaments); sex slavery, including mass-murdering mothers and male babies,
infants and boys while keeping only the virgin girls alive as sex
slaves (Numbers 31:9-18) and Moses saying "men of God" could sell their own
daughters as sex slaves, with the option to buy 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 slaves for life along with their daughters (Exodus
21:7-11); infanticide (Psalms 137:9, Numbers 31:17, Hosea 13:16, 2 Kings 15:16,
1 Samuel 15:3); matricide (Numbers 31:7-18); ethnic cleansing (Zechariah 14:1-2) and genocide,
the mass-murder of entire nations, tribes and cities (Deuteronomy 20:10-14).
But who can doubt that the barbaric authors of the verses above 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 answer: 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.
Who is the real brute here? Of course the real brutes are those who would
condemn children to misery-filled, tormented lives while the preachy lunatics
attend churches where they profess their "faith" in a book far worse than Hitler's Mein Kampf in
numerous passages.
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.
***
This is a typical Susan Jarvis Bryant couplet:
Our enemies are armed to snip and slice
The budding bodies of our brainwashed youth.
Here we have the mindset of the typical right-wing fundamentalist Christian.
Transgender children are being "brainwashed" into being "snipped" and "sliced."
Who would want to do such things to them? Their mothers and fathers? Their other
family and friends? Never mind facts or logic, just embrace the insanity, as
Susan Jarvis Bryant apparently does.
But it gets worse:
Our enemies are perverts with a ploy
To butcher every preyed-on girl and boy.
Rather than having sympathy for children who are born with their brains not
matching their genitals, and rather than accepting their unfortunate reality,
Susan Jarvis Bryant evidently sees a conspiracy between Old Nick (i.e., the
fictitious demon Satan) and human perverts who long to butcher children for
inexplicable reasons.
How is this not sheer lunacy, sheer insanity?
In my opinion Susan Jarvis Bryant is sickeningly wrong in her belief that
perverted human butchers have conspired with Satan to "slice and dice" children
who know, themselves, that their genitals do not match their brains' sexual
identities.
Rather, compassionate and understanding medical professionals want to help the
children figure out what is best for them in a tremendously difficult situation
that most of us cannot hope to fathom. No human being will go through sex change
operations lightly. The pain will be enormous. The castigation of people like
Susan Jarvis Bryant will be enormous. The lack of compassion and understanding
by "Bible believing Christians" will be enormous, perhaps unendurable. Some of
these children will commit suicide. Others will struggle for years to find
something like equilibrium, something like normalcy, something like happiness.
How can so many people who claim to be Christians and who have incorporated the
name of Jesus Christ into their religion, be so unfeeling, so lacking in
understanding and compassion, so un-Christian?
I find it unfathomable, and I find the alleged "poetry" of Susan Jarvis Bryant
to be not only un-Christian but foul and loathsome.
Anyone with a heart would have it break for these children who were born with
mismatched brains and genitals. Anyone with a heart would shudder at the thought
of what they have to go through, to correct what God (if there is a God) and
Nature so mismanaged.
But to the colossally uncaring Susan Jarvis Bryant, the victims are "trannies"
and those who would listen to them and help them are "perverts" and "butchers."
The fact that Susan Jarvis Bryant is an abysmally bad poet is neither here nor
there, in the grand scheme of things. The fact that she seems to be entirely
lacking in compassion and understanding is far more unfortunate.
Related Pages:
A Review of the Society's Literary Journal,
Laureates 'R' US,
Joseph Charles MacKenzie: Poet or Pretender?,
Evan Mantyk's Poetic Tic,
James Sale's Blue Light Special,
Bruce Dale Wise or Un-?,
"How to Write a Real Good Poem" by R. S. Gwano,
Salemi's Dilemma,
Salemi Interview and Responses by other Poets
The HyperTexts