{"id":422,"date":"2007-09-22T19:08:31","date_gmt":"2007-09-22T23:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/09\/22\/painful-alice-walker-poetry\/"},"modified":"2010-01-17T19:18:59","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T23:18:59","slug":"painful-alice-walker-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/09\/22\/painful-alice-walker-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s More Painful Than Alice Walker&#8217;s Poetry?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Alice Walker&#8217;s poetry, <i>illustrated<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"alice-walker-war-bad.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.beatrice.com\/alice-walker-war-bad.jpg\" width=\"425\" height=\"324\" border=\"0\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Actually, in all fairness, this is one of the better examples of Stefano Vitale&#8217;s artwork for <i>Why War Is Never a Good Idea<\/i>, which is about as good as it can be considering what he&#8217;s being asked to work with. Because Walker&#8217;s poetry really is as bad as all that, a classic example of what Thomas Disch dismissed as &#8220;snapped prose in slim volumes.&#8221; And, sure, I feel a teensy bit guilty ragging on a kid&#8217;s book meant to honor the United Nations International Day of Peace, but let&#8217;s face it, sucky literature will not bring about world peace. Here&#8217;s the &#8220;best&#8221; part, which I&#8217;m going to render as the prose it is, to save space:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Picture a donkey peacefully sniffing a pile of straw A small boy holds the end of its frayed rope bridle. They do not see it They are both thinking of dinner The boy is hoping for polenta &#038; eggs maybe a carrot or apple for dessert. Just above them something dark big as a car is dropping.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><i>Bleargh.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alice Walker&#8217;s poetry, illustrated. Actually, in all fairness, this is one of the better examples of Stefano Vitale&#8217;s artwork for Why War Is Never a Good Idea, which is about as good as it can be considering what he&#8217;s being asked to work with. Because Walker&#8217;s poetry really is as bad as all that, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}