America's new Poet Laureate is anti-DP???

Courtesy of Abe Bonowitz, we discover some truly amazing news. Yesterday, a guy named Ted Kooser was named America's 13th Poet Laureate. Kooser is from Nebraska, which, as the discerning abolitionist knows, is the only remaining state to use the electric chair as its only means of execution.

Kooser once wrote the following:

Electric Chair

Ours in Nebraska is not as nice as some,
but Omaha is, of course, not Boston,
and most of the furniture here was made
heavy enough to endure a long ride
on the United Pacific. Ours is, I suppose,
Mission Oak, its blocky design straight out
of the Arts and Crafts movement, but not
as nice as a Stickley or even a Morris.
really, yet one that would comfortably fit
in a high-ceilinged Victorian parlor
somewhere in Bellevue, next to a window
creamy with lace, looking out over
the smooth Missouri; the kind of chair,
straight-backed and hard-seated, that a person
might choose to sit in to work on a speech
on the meaning of life, a chair that means
business. And yet, despite its blockiness,
it's a handsome thing, with its open arms
gleaming with oil and the black straps draped
like doilies. One can imagine a matching
smoking-stand with a rack for pipes,
a leather-bound volume of verse on one arm,
a few poems marked by red ribbons of silk.
It's a chair that belongs to the ages;
a chair, as we decorators say, that makes
a real Statement; a chair that should sit
in each Nebraskan's house, for it is a part
of our dark, oppressive furniture,
and does not have a drip-pan to clean
as those in some other states do.

To read more about Kooser, go here.