News that stays News | Susanne E. Hall

The poem of note will be a poem that I have deemed noteworthy. Thus the name.Poems of note may be notable for numerous reasons, perhaps for their nimbleness, their newsworthiness, or their even their noxious qualities. Or for their horrible abuses of alliteration.Today’s PON, “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator” is from a recent collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s uncollected works, Edgar Allen Poe & the Jukebox.The poem caught my eye firstly because of its most excellent title. But I post it here because of my interest in mid-century poets’ relationships to mass media. The idea of language rubbing off from newsprint onto one’s fingers suggests a connection between the material world and the mediated world that the poem later underlines by suggesting that though it seems like headlines write themselves, they are actually written by the pedestrian acts of, well, pedestrians.I think that a Bishop poem makes a great first entry into this new blog, since the first research paper I ever wrote (in high school) was on Bishop, and it was notable in that it went over like a lead balloon with the teacher, which was something to which I was not accustomed. And so I submit for the record that I have proceeded to dedicate my intellectual life to the kind of study that produced the most underwhelmed reaction I ever got from a teacher. Luckily, things have improved since then.