“Another Poetry Reading at Hoosier University” by Dan Grossman

Photo by Steven Van Elk (@stevenvanelk) for Unsplash

Dan Grossman recently published a volume of poetry titled Mindfucking Roundabouts of Carmel, Indiana—for sale on LULU.com—which he describes as “an autobiography in fever dreams” as well as an exploration of the Indianapolis art scene, of the perils of Uber driving, the stupidity of mixing love and politics (at least in the way it’s done in this volume’s love poetry), of parenthood challenges, and of the price of dwelling on unrealized ambition. In these poems and works of short prose, our narrator meets two podcasters named Bagel & Lox (think Diamond & Silk, the Jewish version), has an encounter with James Whitcomb Riley in White Castle, has another with Kurt Vonnegut in Waffle House, and contemplates the phallic, low-orbit swordplay between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos before coming to terms with his own existence as a resident of Carmel, Indiana — the city shunned by the great majority of Indy hipsters. The poem below, which comes from ‘Mindfucking’, is something of a sidelong glance at the state of poetry today, at the Hoosier University-supported level. Hoosier University isn’t one of the better know universities in the greater Indianapolis area, but it certainly has a better name than IUPUI, at least according to the author, for whatever it’s worth:)

Another Poetry Reading at Hoosier University

No, I’m not talking about Raymond Dennis,
the poet who shot his best friend when he was 13 
in a hunting accident. (His father, who had given him 
the shotgun, had accidentally killed
his own brother when he was 14 years old.)

I’m talking about DeWayne Sebastian, the poet
who one-upped Dennis by killing his Jewish 
mother with a boomerang while hunting rabbits 
in Australia.  (His dad was a Black civil rights icon
who’d worked with Jesse Jackson in the 70s)

Just like Dennis, Sebastian started his reading at Hoosier University
with his accidental death poem, titling it “Momslaughter.” 
But unlike Dennis, whose poems mostly made me yawn, 
Sebastian got more provocative as the night went on,
reading a pro-Palestinian poem titled “Go home, Jews”

followed by the incendiary “It’s your baby’s uterus too.”  
Naturally, he had both left-wing and right-wing 
protesters disrupting the reading and getting 
ejected by police. Others were just there for the fireworks.
Some people called him the poetic Drake,

which didn’t quite fit, as he praised both Frost and Stevens
in his diatribes while taking potshots
at “the so-called rap poetics.” He brushed off
comparisons to Dennis as well, but he had to cop 
to his shotgun approach to attracting an audience, as it were.

— Dan Grossman