And while I'm at the Guardian

Here is a poem that Jen Hadfield selected for her Anti-praise workshop in April.

Rapprochement: a Lunch Poem by Ryan Ruby

1.

Among liberals, it is a truism that one ought not judge entire
groups
on the basis of a few offending individuals: the nation of
France,

for instance, is not as boorish as the wait staff at the Café
de Flore, nor are
all Americans as barbaric as its patrons; a father's sins
belong

to him alone, and you should not think poetry dead because
one
woman returned
your youthful hymns to her beauty with corrections in ink the
color of desire.

2.

The exception to this rule is the goose,
which is despised even by its fellow fowl
for turning serene riverbanks, lakeshores
and other polite, pastoral settings
into enraged Hobbesian landscapes
complete with the tuneless gridlock bugling
of black-shirted paramilitary skeins
armed with psychopathic, lunging beaks

3.

And so,
it is with particular relish
that I sit at the Café de Flore,
fork in hand,
and remember how,
as a boy of four or five,
I was viciously attacked
attempting a charitable
breadcrumb offering
to a goose
not unlike the one
that is now a circle of paté
on my small, civilized, porcelain plate.

The rest of the anti-praise poems here.