By Rego Park
Contributing Blogger

All right, everybody, shut up. Just listen.

No, really — listen.

Matt was so pissed off last night, so bitter and rabid over Warren Buffet’s remarks on not investing in America, he reminded me of a substitute teacher who flew so far off the handle over a classroom prank that it ruined the fun of provoking him. So I’m glad he had a copy of Camille Paglia’s book on poetry to calm him down a bit.

Today’s pretty pink image on Drudge Report is courtesy of Break Blow Burn, Paglia’s new work in which she takes on the poetry establishment and the hypercyber world we live in that’s making the art obsolete.

“In our voracious 24-hour news cycles, we’re rafting down the roaring river of media. It’s exciting and exhilarating, but it’s good to remember that SOME things last–and they’re in art!” Paglia is quoted on today’s Drudge exclusive. “Poets must remember their calling and take stage again!”

My kinda gal, Camille.

My kinda guy, Matt. The resurgence of poetry beats a big old boring tsunami any day.

Oh, hush, now! I’m being serious here. (Maybe because I’m about to submit a book of poems for publication consideration myself.)

The ENTIRE poetry establishment, all the honored, famous, adulated major living poets are excluded from the book!” Drudge reports. “Poet laureates, Nobel prize winners teaching at Harvard, none of their poems made the cut; Paglia’s choices of contemporary poets are obscure or unknown.”

A sign of a slow news day? Not for Drudge, not with Rather going off the air and Buffett going off at the mouth. Camille, like Ann Coulter, is a friend whom he considers stimulating and newsworthy with whom he’s at least friendly enough to grant a special Drudge exclusive when a new book’s out. You can catch a 2003 interview between Paglia and Drudge here.

But snagging a Drudge exclusive takes a little more than cronyism. Matt actually has to find you interesting. Betcha didn’t know he was into all that artsy-fartsy stuff, didja?

If you check out Paglia’s interview with Matt, he’s a bit more of a hipster than you might think. Some of the first articles of Drudge in the early days mention his affinity for Krishnamurti. According to New York magazine in 2000, Matt asked his publisher to record the audio version of Drudge Manifesto with bongo drums and flutes playing in the background “in the style of a Beat poet.” He’s even indulged in what he gallantly refers to as “performance art” - donning a T-shirt bearing the photo of Elian at gunpoint in front of Janet Reno at a White house dinner.

Anyway, this will go down as one of my favorite Drudge exclusives ever. PAGLIA WARNS INTERNET: ONLY ART LASTS. Even Drudge’s misspelling of the plural of cosmos (”cosmosess”? Is there more than one cosmos out there? ) adds to the flavor.

As Drudge says at the conclusion of this report, “Impacting…”

RegoPark is a writer with a background in marketing communications. A published poet under her real name, she is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.