This "Green Reich" debacle is a bloody mess, and the integrity of the SFPA has been harmed as a result. I find it most unfortunate that it moved people to quit the organization; likewise I find it unfortunate (and DEPLORABLE) that the strong emotions elicited by the poem moved particular parties to impugn the character of Marge Simon—whose service to Star*Line and the SFPA is without question and who is, as others have already said, quite gracious.

I have a few observations:

1)      Satire, as our vertically-challenged and scoliotic friend Alexander Pope once said, damns (its subject) with faint praise. To what extent is “Green Reich” satirical in that regard? And what, for that matter, is the subject of this piece? My friend Jonas pegged it as a “one-dimensional pseudo-satire of an imagined hodge-podge strawman liberalism.” As liberalism champions social and environmental progressivism, the take-away here would be that it has eventually conquered the Earth—become the dominant mode of government. Hooray for pinko-commies! Free hemp and biodiesel for everyone! So the poem lampoons liberalism by extrapolating its doctrine to the logical extreme—a hyper-ethnic all-inclusive sort of fascism which prosecutes dogs for urinating on grass.

What is being poked with a stick? My interpretation is that it seems to be warning against the spread of hyperactive political correctness; it likewise seems to poke fun at a government so large, controlling, and convoluted that is borders on absurdity (“your Whateverness”). Environmental protection also takes a hit, as evidenced by the protected patch of grass, and the poem’s title associates the Green movement to Hitler’s Third Reich.

Does the satirist express this well in the poem? Not really. But that’s my opinion. Poetry is subjective.

One line in particular seems to be fueling the bad feelings around this poem: a description of the beaurocrat officiating the case against Pooch:

a young black hispanic disabled tri-sexual
      manFEM/cybiotic jewslamic skinhead.

  The wordplay is salty and meant to imply ultra-diversity as a result of an extreme liberal reality. Is it offensive? Is it, as many of its detractors have alleged, hate-speech? Wikipedia defines hate-speech as “any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic.” With that in mind, can any overt disparagement be found in this poem? Is there anything here that denigrates a race or gender? The overall tone is abrasive and Juvenalian, but not, in this writer’s estimation, hateful. What’s being burned here is an ideology. The multiethnic/sexual/transhuman being is the apex of a PC Borg-like Combine that seeks to melt all peoples into an amorphous blob (the author plays with this by confounding his pronouns). And the narrator has a problem with this. It’s a very ancient sentimentality—espoused by the Greeks—that deplores ambiguity.

2)      It is a poem. Love it, hate it, print it out and wipe your ass with it. Whatever—but to say that “Green Reich” isn’t poetry is a slippery slope to a very dark place.

3)      There are suddenly dichotomous fractures in the community. Many on both "sides" (ugh) have adopted a tone which brooks no possibility of discussion; a tone which declares theirs as the righteous side, and the “opposition” is intolerant, immature, or otherwise morally/ethically deficient. This is bad, m'kay? The author of this poem and the editor who published it have been insulted. I cannot condemn this disrespect strongly enough. So, c’mon, folks—let us reason together. We’re poets, not politicians. I'm a card-carrying liberal from a Jewish/Catholic family who fully supports the rights of LBGT persons to marry / adopt; I belong to the WWF, Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife and fully support everything this poem is against. But I'm a poet first, and I see a poem -- a speculative poem, no less-- and not some greasy back-alley manifesto. And if I get labeled an "apologist" for this, well. I can only shrug my shoulders and continue to disinterestedly read poetry for what it is. 

Stone Telling 3, of which my poem "A Dreamed Zodiac" is a part, went live today. My favorites so far are Sonya Taaffe's "Persephone in Hel" and Eliza Victoria's "Sodom Gomorrah."  Looking forward to reading more, especially the non-fiction. 

Other news: Marge Simon and I placed a collaboration to Cast Macabre and ChiZine -- to be podcasted and zine'd, respectively.