Larry David has said that Alton Benes is based on the novelist Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), the father of his ex-girlfriend Monica. Elaine is more closely based on Jerry Seinfeld’s ex-girlfriend Carol Leifer, a comedian who contributed to the show as a writer.

Richard Yates was a huge figure in the life of David Milch as well, and for the novelist Tao Lin who named a book after his book, and thus a huge figure in the life of Genius

A reference to a frequent target goal of Teach for America corps members, “80 percent proficiency in,” but advanced by an order of magnitude (80 x 100, to keep oneself real, but made to sound tossed off and arbitrary). So it’s written like mathematics. Unfortunately it comes off like bad slam poetry with the line break.

Think of this poem as a Biblical lamentation

A political writer I really like always writes “three (3)” to emphasize corporate buffoonery even when the thrust of the piece isn’t financial. This gets at that. I like unreliable narrators (who doesn’t?)

Written around the time (Rap) Genius got in trouble for possibly exploiting Chief Keef, but a poem attempting to counteract that exploitation and really unrelated to it except in its tangential engagement with the problems with poor children

A college friend thinks jokes work better in twos than in threes, and I tend to agree (she is from Hoboken, so northern New Jersey like William Carlos Williams)

Also a “so so def” Jermaine Dupri allusion, meaning “money ain’t a thang”

This poem was inspired by me seeing a Skeeball board scored on a scale of 10,000 rather than the 100 I remembered growing up. I was playing late at night and was the only white person there, and there were all these kids around even though it was so late at night. Some inflation motif.

The earlier draft spent an entire stanza enumerated a bunch of rich bankers like the de Rothschilds and Sandy Weill along the lines of Lil B the Based God comparing himself to myriad celebrities

An allusion to Reese Witherspoon telling Will Ferrell, “Believe you me, the hoo-hah’s all mackerel!” during a Saturday Night Live Little Mermaid parody. This episode aired around 9/11 and was about bringing humor back, which this poem is supposed to be doing. Teaching in the New York City school system inspired a massive crisis of faith in me, and I experienced a deep depression after quitting that was analogous to survivor’s guilt. I had to believe in something, so I began to believe in children rebelling against their teachers. The most successful moments in this poem for me are when the youth slang takes over the boring allusiveness.

CROWD-SOURCE: What is he not?