The New York Times is finally get­ting around to a story that I’ve spent some time track­ing: why the Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute–an offi­cially non-​partisan, unof­fi­cially Repub­li­can orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to pro­mot­ing “freedom”–with­held the results of a Kenyan exit poll that showed Raila Odinga (and not Mwai Kibaki, the even­tual winner) had won the 2007 pres­i­den­tial elections.

My sug­ges­tion, which I first noted last Jan­u­ary in response to an Alex Halperin arti­cle at Slate, was that the IRI didn’t release the poll because they didn’t want Odinga to win. This was essen­tially con­firmed by a Nation arti­cle that came out a few months ago.

The front-​page Times piece (by Jef­frey Get­tel­man–who is gen­er­ally good–and Mike McIn­tyre–whom I don’t rec­og­nize) doesn’t offer much in the way of new infor­ma­tion, but it does throw cold water on the IRI’s offi­cial excuse expla­na­tion for with­hold­ing the exit poll:

I am hum­bled to report that genius has appeared in the com­ments stream of my recent post on the old grump and the sen­si­tive plant.  It seems that Mr. Franz Wright’s sug­ges­tion that we, the chil­dren of the eight­ies (and in some cases late sev­en­ties), “sodomize” our­selves with the icicly knowl­edge of his last­ing laurel crown has inspired an admirer to take up his golden plume.  The author, if not the one and true Donati, is mys­te­ri­ous to me.  For all I know, he could be the editor of this site.

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Glory Spire: Or, the Mid­night Cry of Franz Paul Wright

By Forese Donati

I have cre­ated a mon­u­ment more last­ing than cap­i­tal­ism
And higher than the royal Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment,
Which nei­ther William Logan nor the edi­tors of Poetry
Can thaw, nor the count­less suc­ces­sion of com­ment streams
That run out to noth­ing, like the nobod­ies their authors are.
I will not wholly die! And a large part of me will thwart the grave.
Atop my frozen turret, I will grow in the eyes of pos­ter­ity,
While the chil­dren of the eight­ies (with a few from the sev­en­ties)
Writhe on the rug of their near nonen­tity.
I, risen to great­ness from humble begin­nings, will be renowned
As the first to sur­vive the tragedy of a famous father.
(Move over, Martin Amis, get your own icy shard.)
Look upon my works, ye worth­less, and despair!

From today’s Times:

A circus jug­gler per­form­ing for Pope Bene­dict XVI during his gen­eral audi­ence at the Vat­i­can on Wednes­day. On the same day, the pope con­demned the Holo­caust and any attempts to deny it.

I guess it’s not news that William Logan is a jerk. Espe­cially on the blog cir­cuit, he’s the critic that people love to hate. After all, it’s here that poets (and their friends) can turn the lights back on him after he’s pub­lished one of his phe­nom­e­nally mean-​spirited reviews. Usu­ally, they con­demn his poetry rather than refute his reviews, which seems like a good strat­egy: he’s a pretty bad poet.

But (and I write this with the loud, imag­ined sound of booing in my ears) he’s not such a bad critic. Really, he’s not–he’s just a lot crustier than he needs to be. Even though he loves to get per­sonal, and even though he appears to like almost noth­ing he reads, he almost always has a few really insight­ful thoughts about the book he’s got before him. I may as well admit it: he’s one of the only crit­ics I can’t resist, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. In the tepid world of public (as opposed to scholas­tic) poetry crit­i­cism, Logan is refresh­ing. When I see his name on copies of mag­a­zines at the local book­store, I pick them up, shake my head, whis­per “asshole” to myself under my breath, then read the review. Over and over I do this. Why? I think I can explain it.