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Monday, July 17, 2017

Mount Rushmore of Poets: Who would you carve on the Big Rock?

In a continuing effort to build the Don's Basement brand (db™) I partnered with Amazon, a company based in Seattle to create an author's page.  One of the options is to share video of "interviews, book trailers, and book signing videos." 

In April of 2015, Jennifer Dotson, the founder of Highland Park Poetry, interviewed me for the program 'Poetry Today. '

The interview runs for 29 minutes and 17 seconds and relates to the Poetry Pentathlon sponsored by Highland Park Poetry and which I won in 2014. In today's 'instant this/instant that world', 29 minutes is just too much of me!

I know, hard to believe. But it's true. I decided instead to take one of the poems that I read for the Pentathlon and create a video.

Poetry Pentathlon Chalice 
'The Mount Rushmore of'....is a concept used to immortalize the greats of any particular field of endeavor.

WrestlingThe Undertaker, "Stone Cold Steve Austin, John Cena and Hulk Hogan

Comedy: Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Lenny Bruce
Country Music: The Highwaymen: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferon.



The Mount Rushmore of Poets has been addressed as well. On the web site Genius, there is a thread also from 2014, on which community members posts their Mount Rushmore of poets.

(Sample comments from anonymous posters)

"I’m taking Eliot, Whitman, Frost, and Cummings. How about y'all?"

"Dante, Shakespeare, Pound and Beckett for me."

"Basho, Eliot, Rimbaud, Byron."

"My personal four-poet pantheon is found in Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams.

But since I don’t think they’re the types who would appreciate being carved into a big rock, I’ll say my Mt. Rushmore has Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton."

"Objectively, I’d put up Milton, Dante, Virgil, Chaucer. (because Shakespeare will get mentioned to death)

A more personal list: Cummings, Tennyson, Yeats, Donne."

Here is my Mount Rushmore of Poets.  Basement readers....who would you carve on the big rock?


2 comments:

  1. Is anyone having difficulty reading this post? Aside from its normal goofiness. Someone mentioned big black squares over some images and text.

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  2. Looks good on my phone in the Nevada range. I'd carve you on rock, if I could sculpt, and you went in for that kind of thing. Maybe Robert Creeley; he's dead and can't complain...

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