A Note From Dash MacIntyre On His Upcoming Poetry Book
I’ve been publishing some poetry lately, and that’s because I’m working on publishing a book of my prose poems, which I’ve been editing since college. It should be finished and published in a couple weeks. It’s called Cabaret No Stare, and, if you like my satire, I think you’ll enjoy these thoughts and tiny poem fictions.
It’s coinciding with a break I’ve found I’ve needed from politics both because my other jobs will have me traveling around the country for most of January and February, and because the intense week of Kevin McCarthy and George Santos absurdism earlier in the month kind of burned me out on politics. I was on fire that first week of the House getting back into session, constantly mocking both McCarthy and Santos hourly for a week, and I was glued to the television watching the breaking news coverage of every failed Speaker vote.
And it was actually a little depressing. McCarthy has given up all the Speaker gavel’s dignity, and he needs George Santos’s vote because Santos would likely be replaced by a Democrat if he’s expelled from the House, which would make McCarthy’s tiny majority even smaller and more blackmailable by the Freedom Caucus. Meanwhile, the Freedom Caucus jihadists are promising to make the US default on its debt, so the next two years are going to have real yikes vibes. It’ll be great for satirists like me professionally, but terrible for Americans and America.
But my burnout came at a fine time because I’m spending lots of nights in hotel rooms finishing up this book. I’m still tweeting regularly @HalfwayPost and posting political satire here on Medium, but I’m hustling to edit this poetry book to as close to perfection as I can get. Once I publish Cabaret No Stare, I’ll start sharing more poetry here on Medium to gin up interest in it!
I’ve been writing these poems for years, so let me know what you think of them. Are they interesting, do they make sense? I hope some of them are even funny and amuse you.
I wrote this poem about publishing my poetry:
The Poet’s Fear
I write write write must write everything
all that comes to me with obsessive compulsion
and not slow myself down with questions of whether it is right
just singularly accept that it all must be written
for better or for worse
and hope that the consensus from my audience at large
of my mausoleum words is not that I’m deranged.
…So let me know if any sound deranged!
— Dash MacIntyre
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