PITCH endorse

Were those tenterhooks starting to sting? Apologies, readers, but when as much is riding on your preference as on ours, to decide conclusively the angle of your dangle is tricky, and the decision to advertise that decision trickier still.

It took something wonderful to dislodge us, Library of America Hart Crane and all, off the drystone wall of vacillation — to push us arse-first into certainty's well.

On Saturday, during his Jefferson-Jackson Dinner speech, which was at the same time a victory speech and a condensed recital of policy, Mr Obama said:

We also have to make sure we are not having teachers teach to the test, because I want our students learning art and music and science and poetry and all the things that make an education worthwhile.

Poetry's no afterthought here. Mr Obama incants his list in rousing crescendo: therefore I take it — it is rhetorically implied — that the first importance of poetry in his pledge finds recognition by its ultimate place.

With this in mind the PITCH review, formerly indeed a blog of conservative allegiance, endorses the cause and resolves to assist the campaign of Mr Barack Obama. Raus, versifiers, and sing him to his seat!

Edit. Via MSNBC, we read:

Tom Buffenbarger president of the machinists' union (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers) was the the latest in a string of Clinton junkyard dogs unleashed upon Obama.

[...] Channeling Howard Beale from the movie Network, he yelled into the microphone, "Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter."

It's true Pushkin died in a duel. But what of Hart Crane, and the fussing gendarmes he lamped, before one conked him with cowardly baton?

If Buffenbarger's poetry is articulacy, and entails a faculty to win arguments with feelings (the power to combine two senses of the verb, 'affect'), Hillary Clinton is perhaps discovering that such is all too earthly a weapon.