Poets Deluge Newsrooms with Attacks On Jews
By Scott Ott, Editor-in-Chief, ScrappleFace.com
News Fairly Unbalanced. We Report. You Decipher.
(2002-11-21) — Poets around the world have deluged news organizations with anti-Semitic screeds in hopes of emulating the success of their colleague Tom Paulin.
The Irish Poet captured headlines in The New York Times and elsewhere when he was disinvited to speak at Harvard University due to anti-Semitic remarks he once made to a reporter.
In April, Mr. Paulin was quoted in a Egyptian newspaper as saying Brooklyn-born Jews who had settled in the West Bank “should be shot dead,” adding, “I think they are Nazis, racists; I feel nothing but hatred for them.”
Harvard’s on-again, off-again, invitation to Mr. Paulin sparked news stories and spiked sales of his books, which had generally languished under a patina of bookstore dust next to the tiresome tomes of even lesser-known poets destined for the “blowout sale” table .
Other poets hope to copy Mr. Paulin’s success formula.
“I have a reading scheduled at the Barnes & Noble next month,” said an unnamed poet from Berwick, Pennsylvania. “If I can just convince them that I hate the Jews, maybe they’ll cancel the gig and the local paper will do a story. You can’t buy ads on the front page, you know.”
“This is a dream come true,” said another young poet in Danbury, Connecticut. “I used spend hours agonizing over a line of verse that would lay bare the coils of my soul. Now, I’m just emailing newsrooms with hateful limericks about Jews.”
Mr. Paulin has since been re-invited to speak at Harvard, which he described as “a crushing blow, both personally and professionally. This could undo all I have worked so hard to achieve.”
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