I’ll be the first to admit that I am a recovering Sting fan. Having been brought up on the collected works of The Police, and having then duly gone out and bought Sting’s first two solo albums, and then having shelled out fifty bucks to see the man in concert, I can safely say we’ve got some history.

So it should come as no surprise that I’m feeling a bit ambiguous about this blog post calling Australian poet David Musgrave for his one-line demolition of Mr Sumner in a poem published in The New Yorker.

Musgrave’s poem, which consists of a very long title followed by the afore-mentioned single line, seems to have earned the wrath of We Who Are About To Die’s Richard D. Allen:

Appropriation and originality in poetry and in fiction have been hot topics on this weblog of late. What are we to make of a poem that, setting aside the fact that Sting jokes were old hat before the Berlin Wall fell, consists entirely of a joke that was used as a headline in the Washington City Paper in 2007, the Guardian in 2006 and New York Magazine in 1999?

Personally, I suspect that if this poem hadn’t appeared in The New Yorker, no one would be giving it a second thought.

On the other hand, being one of the legions of writers who’ve sent ‘serious’ poems to said magazine, its publication of “On the Inevitable Decline into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age” suggests that maybe I’ve been setting my submission standards too high.

What I find most hilarious is that The New Yorker categorises its poetry under ‘fiction’.

If you’d like to read a poem by David Musgrave that doesn’t mention Sting, check out Snow, from our Pastoral issue.