Poems of the Week

The Old Man and the Legasea

by Alex Steelsmith

“We saw the poisonous, toxic nature of Hemingway’s self-created myth… racism, intolerable anti-Semitism, bad treatment of wives, a toxic environment for kids at times and unnecessary cruelty
to friends…”
—Ken Burns, on the new Burns/Novick documentary, Hemingway

Smashity bashity,
Ernest M. Hemingway
might be abashed if he
knew that we learned

all of his weaknesses
documentarily—
or would he Ernestly
feel he’d been Burned?