The Illinois Death Poem: Myth or Fiction?
July 1, 2013 12:12 PM   Subscribe

The Wikipedia article on Illinois claims that the official state poem is The Death Poem. This can't be for real. Right?

This particular factoid is hiding in the minimized "State Symbols" sidebar. Look under "Inanimate Insignia," and you'll see this:

Dance: Square dance
Food: Gold Rush Apple ยท Popcorn
Fossil: Tully Monster
Mineral: Fluorite
Poem: The Death Poem
Slogan(s): "Land of Lincoln"
Soil: Drummer silty clay loam
Song(s): "Illinois"

You'll note that there's no contextual link for The Death Poem, and that the linked list of U.S. state poetry makes no mention of Illinois or official Death Poems thereof. Nor does Google turn up anything on the relevant terms but scattered references back to the Wikipedia article.

Now, this isn't my first Wikipedia vandalism rodeo. I know quite well that the Death Poem is probably a hoax. And yet, if it is a hoax, it's an oddly specific and morbid one...

I put it to you, then - is there any iota of reality about the Illinois Death Poem? Could it be a confused reference to the Spoon River Anthology? Did some obscure state legislator have a thing for Asian death poetry?

What, if anything, is going on here?
posted by Iridic to Media & Arts (9 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
There's no mention of a State Poem on the State Symbols Page.
posted by zinon at 12:17 PM on July 1, 2013


If it's not by Carl Sandburg (and there is no such poem by him) it seems unlikely it'd be the Illinois state poem. Seems like someone taking a liberty with a less-strictly moderated page.

I see it's already gone -- I presume you did that?
posted by aught at 12:30 PM on July 1, 2013




The information is still there, aught โ€” it's in the "Illinois State Symbols" infobox below the main Infobox โ€” collapsed by default, so you have to click "Show" to see it. (Which may make the vandalism less obvious.) As I write this, the most recent edit to the page was 02:59 June 27 (whatever the default Wikipedia time zone is).
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:33 PM on July 1, 2013


A Google search limited to "site:il.us" (which encompasses a whole passel o' official Illinois-sanctioned site on Ye Olde Web" returns NO hits for "death poem", "state poem", or "official poem". So.. yeah, it incorrect. But why? And why so creepy?...
posted by julthumbscrew at 12:41 PM on July 1, 2013


If you're trying to verify information in Wikipedia and are having trouble because Wikipedia and lots of copies of Wikipedia articles keep coming up in the search, adding "-wikipedia" to the search eliminates most of those, at least the exact copies.

"death poem" illinois "state poem" -wikipedia doesn't seem to pick up any reliable sources for the fact, the top hit being a fairly recent Quizlet card which I suspect was just copied from Wikipedia. (Looks like anyone can add cards to Quizlet.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:49 PM on July 1, 2013


Best answer: Here's the revision that added it โ€” 22:19, 19 April 2010(!) by an anonymous editor. I'm going with long-time unidentified (until now) vandalism.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:02 PM on July 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


My state general assembly archives are limited (unless I get up and go to the library, which I kinda don't feel like doing right now, sorry) but a quick search confirms that no state poem has been adopted in the last few years, so I'd agree it's wiki-hoax and would love to know what spawned it.

Illinois does have a Poet Laureate (the official site is not working for me right now) but I could not find a "death poem" attributed to any of them.
posted by crush-onastick at 1:12 PM on July 1, 2013


According to the Library of Congress, only five states have official state poems. Illinois is not one of them.
posted by bgrebs at 1:53 PM on July 1, 2013 [3 favorites]


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