Twaddle exhumed: two poets and a president

The difference between politicians and creative artists? I hope to be lied to by people I like, not people I don't like.

By like, I mean people I admire who produce likable twaddle as opposed to unlikable people who produce pure lies which are unlikable.

For instance, the dialog in letters circa the mid-1950's between Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, a selection of which appear in Poetry mag, September, 2017 (From an Open Map: The Correspondence Robert Duncan and Charles Olson) is the kind of high-falutin unmitigated twaddle I happen to admire--regardless that this sort of banter led to the twaddle now known as "language centered poetry."

Duncan to Olson: Old Man Mose you are with your stone tablets. For me, the desired extreme is that form be made in the air, or delivered up to a forgetting ear, or written, at best, on paper on its way to the fire. I mean, if I went mad, this might be my madness. A lucid sense of what the word is made actual.

Olson to Duncan: I am puzzled as to how much I take it the psychic is also recaptiulatory. I think i take it very much, if the 20th century's revision of Haeckel's law is let in: that ontongeny can just as well create phylogeny.

And so on. Twaddle, but lovely twaddle, twaddle between two men talking about poetry, the high language of truth. I admire both of them, I'm happy that they're writing to one another with such enthusiasm about things that have virtually no meaning to life other than a sort of inner meaning, a reassurance that intelligent, well-educated people are more capable of producing likable twaddle than unintelligent, under-educated people who use the registers of lower language to express themselves.

The cover story of The New York Times Magazine, September 3, 2017 by Nicholas Confessore (How to Influence the President: The Art of Lobbying in Trump's Washington) contains a particularly poignant example of dislikable twaddle, and the twaddle-like behavior of the chief executive:

As for protecting clients from Trump's Twitter howitzer--well that had turned out to be easier than it looked. Several lobbyists told me: Just show up in person, promise the president you'll create some jobs and publicly give him credit. "You make it about Trump and you link it to jobs, and you could be Russia or China and he will support you," one told me. "It is that unsophisticated."