New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1936, The Goose on the Capital. From Post-Obit for Post-Depressionists:

 Ill fares the land, swift hastening to her fate,
 Where wealth decays and boobs accumulate;
 Where a declining demos must be courted
 And those who venture naught must be supported;
 Where wisdom is supplanted by loquacity
 And there’s a premium on incapacity.
 That’s why we have by popular consent
 Such Representatives to represent.
 It’s hard to grant such origins of tosh
 Represent anything at all, by gosh,
 Indicate our tendency and our direction,
 Afford of us a tolerable cross-section.
 No! In the Senate when the windbags blare,
 The men we have elected are not there.
 Herd impulses are sweet. But those unheard
 Are sweeter, where our actual spokesmen gird
 Their loins in labs, or on far railway lines,
 On the walls of dams, in the corridors of mines.
 Our spokesmen! Who, in paths beyond our knowing,
 Keep an exanimate republic going.
 I’ve done my bit. I’m weary of the task.
 Now a quick exit’s all the prize I ask.

 That’s why I’m bound where gentle Ocean shuts
 Sweet isles apart, to live on coconuts.
 If better men can do it, why not I,
 When Roosevelt’s levanted to Hawaii?
 I flee ‘a world each morning obsolete,’
 A world of pasteurized milk and shredded wheat;
 A world bright only with a morbid slime
 Of dull society and stagnant crime;
 A world that staggering to destruction walks
 And talks and talks and talks and talks and talks.
 Stay if you like. I’ll never balk your wish.
 Go shoot your bandits. I’ll be spearing fish.
 Treat your pale leprosy and scratch your scurf.
 Somehow I like the notion of warm surf
 And brown girls singing in a moonstruck arbor.
 To hell with Newport! Devil take Bar Harbor!