The Rumpus offers light-hearted yet subtly mocking illustrations of the past forty-three presidents of the United States by a one-and-a-half-year-old and her father.

Last week, we spoke of when poetry and politics converge, and now we give you a brief sampling of how the poetry blogs have been responding to the state of electoral politics.

The Poetry Foundation’s website delivers a fairly comprehensive list of poems and essays concerned with politics. Though the list could provide a little more contemporary experimental, or extremist poetics, it does succeed at providing a sampling for anyone interested in exploring the history of how the two disciplines spar.

For a nuanced deconstruction of the stuff, you can check out Montevidayo, the blog-extension of Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney’s Action Books, where Ken Chen discusses the media’s obsession with the candidates’ body gestures during the debates.

Chen notes how the New York Times and the Daily Beast even hired a body-language expert, and how the resulting “paradoxically mechanizing commentary reads like Kraftwerk writing the play-by-play to a Pokemon battle”:

‘Obama shows an endearing HEAD-TILT-SIDE to Romney’s vertically held head.’

‘Obama uses COMPRESSED-LIPS cue. Disagrees.’

‘Romney shows Dan Quayle’s ADAMS-APPLE-JUMP as Obama talks about Obamacare. Fear.’

Joyelle has a follow-up post about the spectre of rape in the rhetoric of newscasters and politicians:

All that is mentioned is the pregnancy and the rape—as if rape is the absolute (though hypothetical) circumstance which gathers women into its murky wing; all other bodies are contingent, are made more or less actual, in relation to this circumstance of rape.

HTMLGIANT suggests, rather cheekily, that we forget both men entirely and elect Ann Romney instead because:

While Obama has nothing in common with Baudelaire, Ann and the bellicose Parisian poet are strikingly similar. Baudelaire compared the poet to an albatross, a bird who can only function in the sky, far away from vulgar earth. Ann, too, supports bird. While appearing on CBS This Morning, Ann sported a Reed Krakoff shirt featuring, you guessed it, a bird!

David Lehman’s Best American Poetry blog invited Julie Shehan to discuss her perspective as a poet-bartender on Romney:

In Mitt Romney’s Bar & Grill, he’s pouring a secret jobs potion that’s going to jump-start our economy without even a sideways glance at the actual human beings behind economic transactions like ordering a Fuzzy Navel. The only people in his post-Citizens United worldview are corporations, who will pay less tax and follow fewer rules. To make up for that generous gift, he’ll slash “wasteful” government spending on such whatchacallems as:

teachers
inspectors
auditors
analysts
secretaries
scientists
researchers

Prepare to get fired, bureaucratic slackers, at which point, you’ll cease to be a customer—i.e., person. But don’t worry, that small business called St. Mary’s, just down the block from your out-of-work ass is sure to use its windfall tax break and freedom from regulation to hire more priests and nuns, folks who don’t need the contraception not covered in their health insurance. Ask your parents to send you to Divinity School. You’ll clean up in that libertarian dreamscape, that model of trickle-down economics, that no-tax, low-regulation utopia where the secret jobs potion flows freely through every empty pew.

Whether poet, publishing house intern, or resident of the northeast, it may seem like yes, we’re fucked, but at least the internet’s there to let us bare our teeth.