OntheWilderSide

Maxwell C. Wheat Jr was proclaimed the Poet laureate of Nassau County by the Long Island poetry community. The event took place at Cedarmere, the historic home of poet William Cullen Bryant in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island. This section of the video contains Max Wheat’s acceptance speech. Ian Wilder, Videographer. Kimberly Wilder, Director.

See also: Poet, Snubbed, Still Every Inch a Laureate, New York Times

upon Nassau poets naming Maxwell Corydon Wheat Jr as their Laureate

three weeks ago
legislators
hoped to confirm
the self-promotion of Whitman
and the nature essays of Thoreau
on his plains they found a question:
Why are you standing out there?
and rejected him as chaff.

today Wheat proclaimed
what politicians forfeited
the poet community reclaimed
when politicians fail to act
poets will

so we replaced bullets
with stanzas
depleted uranium
with enjambment
troops in Iraq
returned in a haiku
rather than an epic

healthcare
taken from the drawer
of unfinished works
insurance companies
red-penciled out
lines shortened for all

villanelle
on oil skin
workshopped
to replace creationist-tobacco-doubts
with tithing for windmills
and waxing of solar cells

-isw

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