.

To Michael Burch:
The Hillbilly Voice of Liberalism

Mike Burch hates the stuff we write,
Abuses us at his website,
Spouting venom, bile, and spite
Like some manic troglodyte.

Here’s my answer to the prick
(I hope it cuts him to the quick).
Mike, you’re envious and sick
And stupid as a common brick.

If we say something you don’t like
You simply have to take it, Mike.
Our comments make your heartbeat spike?
Well, that’s too bad—hop on your bike

And leave old Nashville—that’s no place
For scions of Jed Clampett’s race.
In Nashville you’re a damned disgrace—
Spare the town your hee-haw face.

Go back to where the hills are raw
In Tennessee and Arkansas
Where you can wet your rustic jaw
With moonshine and tobacco-chaw.

Your poems suck, your prose is hokum.
Your Hypertexts? You ought to choke ’em.
Hang around the hogs and stroke ’em
Like Snuffy Smith and Mammy Yokum.

That’s the life you ought to try—
Working in a shit-fouled sty,
Chowin’ down on possum pie,
And yelping the hillbilly cry.

I’ll tell you what you need, you fool:
Forty acres and a mule,
A good supply of wood for fuel
To cook your cornpone and your gruel.

Trap your rabbits, shoot your coons,
Twang your banjo and play tunes—
Eat your grits with mismatched spoons
And sleep away the afternoons.

And take your singing consort, Beth,
Whose donkey-yodels bore to death.
Tell her she should save her breath
And try a hit of crystal meth.

You’ll both get lots of that out there
Along with nice fresh country air,
Chickens, pigs, and cows to spare,
In your rural pied à terre.

You’ll like it better in the sticks
With country drawl and barnyard tricks,
Where you’ll get haystack fleas and ticks
And inbreed with your fellow hicks.

.

Poet’s note: This poem is for Michael Ray Burch, the hillbilly computer software salesman in Nashville who thinks he’s a poet, and is endlessly trying to convince the world of it. He has taken it upon himself to attack the SCP, over and over. It’s done out of sheer hatred and envy, since Burch’s has-been website (which we will not mention here) looks like chopped liver next to Evan Mantyk’s highly professional and readable SCP. Also, Burch is terrified that more and more published poets, professors, and young students are coming to the SCP, in preference to his sprawling and unnavigable website, which is a place filled with his endless rants against Israel, his obsessive fixation on the idea of Hell, his shameless promotion of his own boring work, and his cribbed translations from languages that he can neither speak nor read. He’s essentially a Bible-Belt yahoo who has abjured his fundamentalist background to become a spokesman for the more trendy religion of Left-Liberalism.

.

.

Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


Trending now:

19 Responses

  1. James Sale

    Well, Joe, I have to admit your poem made me laugh out loud and the invocation of the Beverly HillBillies was a welcome reminder of my youth. Tough on Burch? I guess so, but it is disappointing that he seems to have learnt nothing from this wonderful site – there are so many ideas, insights, tricks and techniques for the new and not-so-new poet to learn from here, and all he has done is attack the good, belittle the sincere, and congratulate himself. His ‘defence’ of Walt Whitman (on the grounds that to attack Walt now would upset one of Walt’s descendants – presumably unaware that he was homosexual and had no offspring and anyway, died 100+ years ago) was one of the most mind-numbingly inane pieces of literary criticism I have ever read. Was it Dryden or Pope who wrote: The rest to some faint meaning make pretence/ But Mike Burch never deviates to sense?

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, James. It’s sad that Burch cannot recognize the multiplicity of fine work here at the SCP, the intelligence of the discussion threads, the support that Evan gives to younger aspiring poets, and the sheer excitement that many poems here generate. Do we have amateur work? Sure — why is that to be ridiculed or scorned? At least we give some useful criticism, advice, and the chance to be published. And there isn’t a poetry website elsewhere that has presented the kind of serious, unfettered literary commentary that is found here.

      Burch has gone after you, me, Susan Bryant, Evan Mantyk, Sally Cook, LTC Peterson, and several other poets with a venom that can only be attributed to sheer hatred, and envy. This site has become an obsession for him.

      Reply
  2. Mike Bryant

    From Wiki on the “Michael R. Burch” article:

    This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
    This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. (August 2013)
    This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject. (August 2013)

    Also, on his own website there are pages filled with soft porn photos of women. Those pages produce over a third of his organic traffic. Not surprising, I suppose, for someone who supports “new” women competing with actual biological women.

    Dr. Salemi is correct that Michael Ray Burch’s (AKA Kim Cherub) old, tired, creepy website has seen better days. How sad that this addled has-been must put others down in order to imagine himself a Poet God.

    What I’d like to know is, how did Evan so seemlessly photoshop Kim Cherub’s likeness into the Beverly Hillbillies photo…
    Now that is art!

    Reply
  3. Priscilla King

    Though Burch deserves some punishment,
    For rural life he was not meant.
    Though on hill farms real men might thrive,
    A lefty poser can’t survive,
    And will descend from bad to worse,
    Pursuing grants to write free verse
    And boosting lefty credibility
    By nurturing mental disability.
    While some hardworking factory man
    Can’t activate his pension plan
    For laboring till he broke his back,
    The well-connected never lack,
    But what the laborer’s work deserves
    For Burch the Welfare State reserves
    Until the laborer has lost all,
    And then the Left begin to bawl
    For money, more tax funds to feed
    The laborer’s need and Burch’s greed.
    No, though it’s pleasant for the present
    To picture Burch as working peasant,
    I’d rather send him, without pity,
    To a housing project in the city
    Where soon someone will surely beat
    Him up and leave him in the street.
    Then “Help! Police!” he’s sure to shout,
    But leftists cut their budgets out,
    So no policeman prowls the beat,
    And, lying bleeding on the street,
    Burch will remember things he’s said,
    And mightily, before he’s dead,
    Seek out ways to take them all back.
    If at that moment help should come,
    Then Burch indeed might undo some
    Of falsehoods uttered and harm done
    Before life’s race is fully run.
    The chance is long, I must agree;
    No hope that Burch reforms I see;
    But God, who can do all good things,
    May save his soul a pair of wings.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Wow, Priscilla! That was a lot to compose on the spur of the moment! Yes, liberals should live in cities, where they can fully experience the consequences of their ideology.

      Reply
  4. Roy Eugene Peterson

    I was unaware that such a hillbilly with such a last name could ever think, if that is what one calls it. Furthermore, such a leftwing and left-out troglodyte existing in Nashville is unthinkable. I am surprised he has not been skinned alive. Joseph, your poetic range greatly expanded in my mind with this amazing poem encompassing so many redneck hillbilly words, thoughts, and deeds. Your marvelous poem at once engendered my anger, brought out my humorous side, thrilled my satirical bent, and achieved my admiration.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Nashville is a university town (Vanderbilt), so it has a lot of academics and yuppie liberals. It hardly represents Tennessee. This is part of the thrust of Priscilla King’s excellent tetrameters.

      Thank you for your kind words, LTC Peterson.

      Reply
  5. Lannie David Brockstein

    Joseph S. Salemi’s roasting of Mister Bitch and his Hypertits is well-done, and like something that I suppose one of my favourite 19th century poets, Arthur Rimbaud, might have written had he been evil enough not to have died young.

    Reply
  6. Shaun C. Duncan

    Nicely done, Joe – some might see it as mean-spirited or unbecoming of “classical” poet, but personally I think it’s exciting to see such vicious and personally-directed satire being produced in this day and age. Modern “classicism” is too often little more than warmed-over Victorian era prudery and any who have a problem with work like this would do well to read Martial, Juvenal, some of the spicier epigrams of Catullus or perhaps the Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedie. I also see no reason to play nice with people who seem to think the SCP should simply not be permitted to exist.

    I’ve had no personal dealings with Burch but I have perused his site and the fact that he apparently feels no shame in REPEATEDLY slapping a new title on some nonsensical epigram about dead children to capitalise on the latest far-flung tragedy tells me all I need to know about the man.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      My father was a professionally trained boxer in Golden Gloves. One of the things he told me was this: “If someone hits you, never wait or consider or ponder the issue. Always hit him back TWICE AS HARD, and do it immediately.”

      I felt that we here at the SCP had taken enough crap from Burch, and it was high time to deliver a counter-punch.

      I’m honored that you mention me in the company of Catullus and Martial and Juvenal. Those guys really knew how to kick ass.

      Reply
  7. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    This is a highly amusing poem in its own right… but having witnessed the machinations of this hate-fueled hyper-griper, it’s even funnier.

    What isn’t amusing is the fact that this sanctimonious scoffer – a man who is in full support of “assistance” (hormone blockers and genital mutilation) for children whose “brains don’t match their genitals” is fine with using salacious images of women to boost his numbers on his “poetry” site. All well and good, Mr. Burch, unless you decide to haul the SCP over the proverbial coals for dishonesty and to stalk and slate poets who deviate from your warped world view.

    Joe, in my callow youth I may not have agreed with your father. Today, I appreciate his words of wisdom.

    Reply
  8. Joseph S. Salemi

    Yeah, I expected that from Burch. I published several mediocre poets in my magazine simply because I was in contact with them, and I often awarded a “Pushcart Prize” nomination (a meaningless gesture) to anyone who was new to the publication. Big deal.

    I was interested to find out, from Mike Bryant, that nearly a third of the traffic to Burch’s website is due to the soft-porn pages he maintains there. Here are the titles of some:

    Famous Beauties with Small Breasts
    Visible Panty Line
    Unmentionable Upskirts
    Visible Bra Cups and Straps
    Slips and Bras
    Famous Full-Figured Women

    These pages contain scores of high-definition salacious photos of ladies who fit the bill, along with endless lists of names that give their actual measurements. I wonder if his feminist readers know about this sideline.

    It’s one thing to have a sexual fetish. It’s quite another to splash it all over one’s website in technicolor closeups.

    Reply
  9. Joshua C. Frank

    Love it! I laughed at every stanza. I remember hearing about him when he made fun of another poem here… I bet this one will really stick in his craw!

    Reply
  10. C.B. Anderson

    I can’t believe that once I almost became friends with this cretin (around the time of Richard Moore’s demise), and I think that, if anything, you give this churl too much credit. I can only imagine what Leo would have thought of this worm, and what I imagine may not be said in polite company.

    Reply
  11. James A. Tweedie

    A red hot, top-notch, hot-shot pot shot at a classic example of a pea-pickin’ progressive whose only self-righteous and self-cancelling virtues are a selectively inclusive exclusionism, judgmental unjudgmentalism, and an intolerable intolerance of tolerance.

    Reply
  12. Mike Bryant

    I find it interesting that Mike Burch decided to write under the anagram “Kim Cherub,” I wonder what their pronouns are…

    Reply
  13. Joshua C. Frank

    Joe, I just had to come back and say: the poem is delicious, it rolls off my tongue, and the insults are great, especially “Spare the town your hee-haw face.” I’ve been reading it to family and friends, and we’re all in hysterics every time! Thanks for the fun!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.