Joyce Carol Oates

I'm the greatest genius in the world,
she may say,
I make fun of Faulkner
who's a rip-off of the OLD TESTAMENT:
he probably read the Bible with a bottle
of hard liquor, being
that simple man he is: hyprocrite,
a drunken man:
he got the noble prize --

There was Sartre who didn't even write
very good novels, but he got the noble prize
for literature, instead
of philosophy.

My ideas about Shakespeare have been
bamboo-sizzled by Harold Bloom
who passed it on to others
who make Jello out of it,
as Bill Cosby might and if might makes right,
I inspire even the...

I even go into pop culture,
unlike others of my kind, and
I write elegant essay
that even farts may read,
and yet
I am not even mentioned in
periodicals.

Criminals may say
they've had a hard life
so do writers
without a wife,
but look I've achieved
and I'm just a girl
who made my father proud.

They said, "Nothing good
could come out of Detroit."

THEY WERE WRONG.