Former Poet Laureate Pens Poem Telling Scott Brown To Scram

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., speaks to reporters after voting on the JOBS Act on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 22, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
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Donald Hall was born in Hamden, Connecticut in 1928. He has published books of poetry, non-fiction, essays, and children’s stories. He has edited textbooks and anthologies. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Caldecott Medal, two Guggenheim fellowships, and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver medal. In 2006, he was appointed the Library of Congress’s fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He lives in Wilmot, New Hampshire. And he does not like Scott Brown.

The octogenarian published a poem in the Concord Monitor this week, weighing in on the former Massachusetts senator’s bid for a Senate seat in New Hampshire:

Get out of town,

You featherheaded carpetbagging Wall St. clown,

Scott Brown!

Hall told The Boston Globe in an interview Wednesday that he stopped writing poetry a few years ago “because I got too old.”

“This is a joke, obviously,” Hall said, of the Brown poem.

Joke or not, the Brown campaign felt moved to respond in a statement to the Globe.

“It’s not surprising partisan poets and loyal Obama supporters are lining up behind Senator Shaheen because she’s a blind vote for President Obama and Democrats in Washington,” Brown spokesperson Elizabeth Guyton said in a statement to the newspaper. “Scott Brown’s focused on earning the support of grassroots leaders across New Hampshire, and later today he will roll out his statewide list of county chairs.”

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