Antonio Vallone - "Members of the WestboroBaptist Church Picket My Poem"

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church Picket my Poem

They line up along the one-inch margins, justified
holding handmade signs
scrawled with slogans assembled into syllogisms

God hates fags
Poets are fags
God hates poets

They must be better writers than me, minor poet that I am
I can’t imagine a god
who hates something of Its creation

A Word From the Author:
The forthcoming Red Flag Poetry postcard "PA Summers' and 'Members of the Westboro Baptist Church Picket My Poem' are from a group of poems I wrote last year, related not by their content but by their form.  Wanting to fiddle around with a strict short form but also wanting something more contemporary, I thought of tweets and how easily it would be to publish the poems through a Twitter account.  At the time, I didn't have a Twitter account--and I still don't--so I didn't realize the 140 characters allowed in a real tweet included spaces.  My poetry tweets don't.  "PA Summers" is exactly 140 characters long, and "Members of the Westboro Baptist Church Picket My Poem" is what I called a double-tweet, so it's exactly 280 characters long.  Again, that doesn't include spaces, but it does include titles.  The poems also came out of feeling a need for poetry to make a sort of social commentary, like good tweets can do."

A​ntonio Vallone, associate professor of English at Penn State DuBois, is also publisher of MAMMOTH books and poetry editor of Pennsylvania English. His collections include Golden Carp, The Blackbird’s Applause,Grass Saxophones, and Chinese Bats. Forthcoming are American Zen and Blackberry Alleys: Collected Poems.  He can be reached at avallone@psu.edu.

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