If you need a new shovel, let me know, yours seems like it may be worn out by now.

In recent months, The Stranger has had...
• A music writer who didn't know why the Foo Fighters played Letterman's last show.
• A political writer who thought Washington Democrats had only 34 delegates.
• A literature writer who doesn't know who Calvin Trillin is.

Where the fuck do you find these people?

I've crapped out better poems than this. Regardless of content, the poem is just awful. It reads like something a freshman would submit in a composition class--a freshman who isn't any good at writing poetry.

Why is The New Yorker publishing a crappy poem that reada like a poor knock-off of Lewis Carroll (without the humor and absurdity) that can easily be construed as racist?

A lot of crap coming out of The New Yorker recently. I guess it's just following suit with the rest of the country.

I eagerly await the New Yorker's response to your response to their response to your response to Trillin's poem. This whole matter is so genuinely trivial I hope you never stop writing it.

3 - because the guy's been writing for them for literally over 50 years and they probably don't look too closely at whatever he sends them.

He's really written a lot of very good work. I don't think any of that was poetry, though. It'd be a bummer if this is people's first association with him. (Not that I'd turn down a New Yorker paycheck for some crappy poetry when I'm 80.)

Rich: ignorance isn't really an excuse. You missed more than just a bit of irony. You can choose either to prolong the embarrassment, or learn from your mistakes.

Jokes are never funny if you have to have them explained to you.

I'm 33, not particularly well-read, but I knew Trillen was being satirical, so I laughed with him, and then laughed at you.

my headline isn't meant to reflect the poet's intention. It reflects my reading of the poem.

Which in turns reflects your navel-gazing self-absorption.

If you don't care about Trillin's intentions, why should we care about yours?

I'm tempted to say you could write a better article than this, actually critiquing the poem instead of leaning on "when this joke I didn't get is spelled out to me, it's not funny!" But the poem isn't worth it, and I sure don't want to read your attempt.

I'm willing to forget about the whole thing if you will stop writing about it. Deal?

Even if you miss the satirical aspect, the poem obviously doesn't even cast China or Chinese cuisine as the problem or butt of the joke, but rather the foodies who have to jump on each trend.
It's not good poetry and that's the point. Calvin Trillin is relying on that forced rhyme tone deaf poetry to make the joke.

Mr. Smith could've improved his standing considerably with short, sharp, simple self-administered verbal dope-slap, and instead we get ... this???

Doug @2 -- This year's "Regrets" issue will be delivered by the now-unemployed individuals who used to bring us the Yellow Pages. Win-win!

To my dear Messr. Smith:

You are a writer of stunning incompetence and negligible imagination. My yearning today is that you may leave The Stranger under cordial terms and that they may replace you with a person capable of abstract thought and creative discourse.

Yours most sincerely,
a guy on the internet

@14 - nails it.

Rich,
Why not just admit your failure and ignorance as a reader and move on?
It is particularly puzzling to me that you are not even willing to educate yourself.
Writing this kind of doggerel is one of Trillin's metiers!
Read a little of his past contributions to The New Yorker, or better yet, read his "deadline poet" poems for The Nation. It is supposed to be crappy poetry. It is a feature, not a bug.
Let it go.

Imo it was just (pretty obvious) observational humor. Remember when there used to be 2 kinds of toothpaste at the store? Now there's like a million! Not hilarious, just standard dad humor.

The young "poet" doth protest too much.

You cannot let it go, can you Mr. Smith? You HAVE to have the last word.... You are clearly so intellectually deficient that you don't even realize that, by your newest ridiculous self-congratulating tirade, you are just prolonging your embarrassment, as #6 points out. You cannot even come up with decent rationalizations for your incompetence and blunder, let alone a genuine assumption of responsibility. What on earth happened to you and you turned out this way?

Extreme narcissism, combined with utter ignorance, is a lethal poison for the mind, Mr. Smith. Get a grip.

I couldn't make it through this... @1 sums it up well.

Pay him to shovel shit, but please lay off the writing--if you can even call this boring litany of half-baked justification that.

Since I last wrote, somebody has pointed out to me that something called "satire" exists and Jonathan Swift wasn't actually suggesting that we cook and eat children, like I suggested in my previous column.

Hey, I confess I'd never heard of this Swift fellow before. But, look, even if the guy is well-known for writing satires of various sorts, it doesn't mean it was right for him to publish "A Modest Proposal" because people like me had to have the "joke" explained to them. Mr. Swift really should have thought about this, so as not to upset people who don't know who he is and require constant reminders from kindly professors about things like this, what was it... oh, yes, "satire."

I mean, look, it's not about Swift's intentions, it's about MY reading of the text. It IS possible that somebody could have read that essay and thought he really was suggesting that we cook and eat children, so the essay is a problem. And also I read an Irish writer who tied a message to a pigeon's toe [18th century equivalent of Twitter] claiming that Swift was being viciously anti-Irish, even though now some are suggesting that is actually the opposite of what Swift's so-called "satire" was attempting.

So I'm still right. And I'm not saying anyone who says I'm not is a cannibalistic, Irish-hating child-murderer like Mr. Swift probably is [why doesn't he just retire, BTW?], but it does make you think, doesn't it?

Man, as the dominatrix on ‘Sherlock’ posted on her website, “Know When You’re Beaten.”
It was a lazy, sophomore-grade article the last time around. I’ve done some rationalizations in my time, mostly along the lines of ‘Why yes, I DID invent the idea of travel by rocket car,’ but you ain’t helping yourself here.
And think of all the (future) editors who’ll be reading this shit, going, man, I think I maybe posted something like this first article, on Facebook onetime on a Molly hangover, but the dude is doubling down, getting spanked trying to be sensitive on the Stranger’s notoriously over-sensitive/liberal readership, do I NEED this degree of intellectual laziness?
You had a poor appreciation of a poem, by a poet more famous than you’ll ever be, that was written in a style obvious anyone not coming off a glue-huffing bender to be a certain way, and looked to score points by getting your Righteous Indignation on., with all the grace, dignity and style of Gary Oldman in True Romance, because presumably in your earlier life you learned that crying ‘Old White Guy is making fun of this minority!’ was a sure ticket to glory and fame.
Except that wasn’t what Trillin was doing
And it’s not White Boy Day.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/def…

One gets the sense that there are a lot of jokes you miss. Sad.

To the people in Rich's life who love him: It's time for an intervention.

If Rich is any kind of decent person, the day will come when he will remember this whole business with painful embarrassment.

Mr. Smith, you may literally be the stupidest person on the internet - and I'm including Trump supporters in this assessment.

You can instrumentalize the equally bullshit responses of some Asian people on twitter all you like, but you're still a fuckwit participating in the dumbest manufactroversy since #cancelcolbert.
I long for the day when you and your ilk are replaced by algorithms.

Really funny comments.
Is The Stranger publishing awful articles like this to goad Seattle's true satirists into providing free content?

I confess that I hadn't ever really heard of Trillin . . . .

And there you have it in a nutshell. You're like the Republican legislator who railed against the $8 billion Planned Parenthood abortionplex he read about in the Onion.

I'm sure in the circles in which Mr. Smith seeks to travel it is less embarrassing to not know who Calvin Trillin is than to have failed to fawn over the tweets of the esteemed author of "Comefarts."

It's nice to see that the Right haven't completely stolen Zhdanovism from the Left, as numerous examples on alicublog in recent years seemed to indicate, and nice to discover a nearly pure strain of the virus—immune to context, irony, satire, knowledge of form (e.g., 'doggerel doesn't even try to be "good" after the manner of poetry')—to serve as a warning to the rest of us on that side of the spectrum.

(You know, «...pour encourager les autres.», as a dead, white, patriarchal, anti-Semitic, male once wrote.)

"A little embarrassed, I updated my post to show that an ironic reading was possible and that I had missed the joke."

No one reading that update would have been able to divine any of this alleged embarrassment, Mr. Smith. It reads as yet more snark, tacked on to the previous heap of snark, and if I'd been this old professor of yours I'd have been mildly insulted. All readings aren't equal. His was correct, as well as being sand-poundingly obvious. Yours was (and still is) breathtakingly dimwitted. Everyone but you seems to see that.

That you have so little control over your own language and such a lack of understanding of what your words mean when written down does not bode well for any poetry you may write. Take some time off to reflect and read some good writers. (Trillin wouldn't be a bad guy to start with, in fact.) Take some more classes. Get into the habit of researching your subject before you write about it, and of looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary before you attempt to use them. Write your professor a contrite letter, and think long and hard about what you've done before being tempted to do it again.

This is good advice and you should take it.

I agree with Rich's reading of this, but Jesus H Fucking Christ, is the Stranger *that* hard-up for content that their writers can't do *basic fucking research* on the subjects on which they write?

Because right now, the only difference between the knee-jerk comments in the comments section and the actual blog is the length and their prominence. My comments on here of late have been a lot more mean and angry. But when my ass is just as golden for non-researched screeds as the Stranger writers, then can you pay me instead? I'll happily provide content off the top of my head, without having to actually think about it.

Some things never change. 30 years ago a soi-disant poet was bitching to me about the quality of poetry in the New Yorker. His writing was no better than our dear Mr. Smith's, but at least he knew who Calvin Trillin is.

@32: Hell, sign me up for that too. I'd love to get paid to shitpost in creative ways.

@2 & 32 God. I know. It's embarrassing.

The paper has seriously been in a steep nose dive in the last two years. When even Fnarf abandons The Stranger it's got problems.

I find myself skipping about 80% of the articles. If it wasn't for my habit of checking the calendar I'm not sure I'd ever come here anymore.

"To take offense on behalf of ___________ suggests that I have the authority to determine what is offensive or painful to them in the first place. I'm a white person, so I don't have that authority, and to pretend that I do makes me no more sensitive than the person I'm accusing of being insensitive." Make this your credo, white savior SJW types.

@9 FTW, as the young people are saying these days.