"Regard the Scuttlebutt as True" ---> Social Security Administration head, Michael J. Astrue outed -

[Petrushka]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Astrue

Outing as A.M. Juster
In the June/July 2010 issue<3> of First Things magazine, Astrue was profiled by poet Paul Mariani, who revealed him as the personage behind the pseudonym A.M. Juster, the award-winning poet and translator
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from the June/July 2010 issue of First Things:


Regard the Scuttlebutt as True
Paul Mariani

In the hot Washington afternoon, in one of those endlessly bustling government offices, there sits a man named Michael J. Astrue, the fifty-four-year-old head of the Social Security Administration. Competent, organized, bald, and busy, he is not a politician, exactly, but one of those people who has to live in a highly political world, trying to make what the politicians come up with actually work.

Groomed by the American system for some job like the one he holds—high school at Roxbury Latin, undergrad at Yale (and president of Yale’s prestigious Political Union in his last year there), law school at Harvard—he belongs to a type of quiet and careful civil servant that Caesar Augustus would have recognized. As would Phillip II and Napoleon and Gladstone, for that matter. Powerful governments have always needed this kind of man: the senior administrator, the superior public official who (to reverse the entropy the Irish senator W.B. Yeats feared) makes the center hold and keeps things from falling apart.

Across the city, in the only slightly less hot Washington evening, in an apartment overlooking Georgetown, sits Astrue’s opposite, a man named A.M. Juster: formalist poet, comic versifier, and classical translator. Eight years ago, Juster won the Richard Wilbur Award for his collection The Secret Language of Women (2002), besides publishing book-length translations of Petrarch (the 2002 Longing for Laura) and Horace (the 2008 Satires).

His poetry can be astonishingly gentle, as in his moving sonnet “Cancer Prayer.” Dear Lord, the sonnet begins:


Please flood her nerves with sedatives
and keep her strong enough to crack a smile
so disbelieving friends and relatives
can temporarily sustain denial.
Please smite that intern in oncology
who craves approval from department heads.
Please ease her urge to vomit, let there be
kind but flirtatious men in nearby beds.
Given her hair, consider amnesty
for sins of vanity; make mirrors vanish.
Surround her with forgiving family
and nurses not too numb to cry. Please banish
trite consolations; take her in one swift
and gentle motion as your final gift.


On the other hand, Juster’s verse can also be cruel and unforgiving. The sonnet “On Remembering Your Funeral Was Today,” for instance, seems to be composed entirely of darkness. When I first swore to tap-dance on your grave, it begins, and ends this way:


For while my daily rage maybe diminished,
I assure you we are still not finished.
I bet by now you have stolen time
To edit The Beginner’s Guide to Hell.
I trust you’ve cheated Charon of a dime
And somehow brought a blush to Jezebel.
I see you basting in satanic slime
Before deep-frying in your cockroach shell.


<-snip->

Read complete article at:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/regard-the-s ...