Oh, hey. Here's a fresh new flavor of bullshit coming out of Nebraska. Andy Towle writes:

Michael Barth, a student poet from Gordon-Rushville High School in Nebraska who won the Class C1 poetry division at the Nebraska School Activities Association with a poem that combined lyrics from Macklemore’s "Same Love" and a slam poem called "Swing Set" by Andrea Gibson, has been asked to perform a different poem for an NET Television program because the NSAA says it does not want an LGBT agenda promoted, the Lincoln Journal Star reports...

According to the Journal Star, the executive director of the NSAA, Rhonda Blanford-Green, says she denied Barth's poem from the show because “We want to keep it as it was intended, to be a showcase for talent, not a platform for individualized agendas."

And holy fuck, but that's one of the two dumbest sentences I've read all day. (I'd say it's a tie with Chief Justice Roberts, if you're interested.) What is poetry, if it's not an individualized agenda? Poetry without an individual voice, without an agenda, is just pretty writing about rocks and trees and beaches. That kind of toothless poetry is why people don't care about poetry anymore. Poetry should be nothing but individualized agendas.

Blanford-Green is not just some one-dimensional anti-gay bigot. The Journal Star says that last year she lost a battle to "introduce a non-discrimination policy for transgender students." Now, she says, she just doesn't want to "create controversy." But I disagree with her wording there, too. Barth's poem would not create controversy. The controversy would be created when bigots see a young man read a poem—a poem, mind you, without any swears or sexual content—and decide that they're offended. Those bigots would create the controversy, not the poem. All a poem can do is speak about an experience. The controversy comes when some asshole decides that one person's experience shouldn't be shared with the rest of the world. And you know what? Those assholes can go fuck themselves.