Blagojevich goes to the poetry well one more time

Rod Blagojevich pauses too much on line breaks

I just returned from Florida (80 degrees)–with a little side trip camping in the mountains (8 degrees), and still Illinois governor Rod “Blagy” Blagojevich is reciting poetry.

Or, more accurately, bits of really, really long poems. He didn’t read any of my three suggested poems though. Hey man, it’s your career (or impeachment, as the case may be). Here is the whole, weird press conference:

I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, Blago is a top-shelf turd, and who wants this guy to become the face of poetry? On the other, when’s the last time you heard anybody reciting a poem, especially on CNN? The only time we hear poetry is when we elect a Democratic president and have to pretend for a couple minutes on a frigid January afternoon that we’re listening to some poem someone has whipped up like a special-order birthday cake.

You know what I’d like to see at the next Blago press conference? I’d love it if he abandons poetry for the novel. Imagine: the governor and his hair take the stage–along with seven people he has randomly chosen from the South Side or Michigan Ave or Gary, Indiana or Greenbay, Wisconsin wherever his travels take him–and without an opening statement choose a page in the middle of Gravity’s Rainbow and give a dramatic reading, singing the songs in the book in a rich, distinct baritone.

Let the media make something out of that, my friends. Can you imagine columnists wrestling with 15 pages of Pynchon, trying to decode what the embattled governor, obviously batshit crazy at this point, is trying to do?

It, in and of itself, would be straight out of a Pynchon novel. And I suspect no one would enjoy that more than Mr. “Postmodern, No Photos Please” himself.

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