You're right. Reading this text without having heard it, it reads like a speech. The only thing that gives it the poetry sheen is the same tired slam poetry delivery that you can't escape now.
I never saw the delivery and it may have been awesome. (There were a couple of good lines that I can imagine sounding great - "It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit./It’s the past we step into and how we repair it." Punchy, to the point, and a nice, surprising rhyme.)
Speech can change things. I once heard a brilliant reading of someone's translations of Mickiewicz (Poland's national poet). I bought the book and it was disappointing how the stuff didn't stand up on the page. Really good work - at least in poetry - should be able to cope with being read as well as being listened to.
That is irrelevant. Pointing out that unions have effected negative changes or engaged in discrimination internally in the past is not an argument against the idea that they're necessary to force positive change.
"The term 'glen,' a Gaelic word that means 'narrow valley,' is not specifically included in that protection."
Well, the Scottish Gaelic word is actually gleann, and glen in Manx (a Gaelic language) actually means clean. Glen is an English borrowing of a generally Celtic word (compare Welsh glyn and Cornish glynn; both Brythonic languages, not Gaelic). In fact, the only modern Celtic language where the word is spelled glen is Breton, which is spoken in France.
The Idiot is one of my favorite books of all time. Reading it in high school was definitely a formative experience. It was my first introduction to many existential concepts; particularly the parts about the painting by Hans Holbein the Younger.
Happy to see a Welsh translation, but I'm interested where the word for hovercraft came from. The hofren part comes from hofran (which is just a borrowing of hover), but what about fad?
Not to downplay the influence that the classical music tradition has had on popular music, I think it's incorrect to say that rock and pop are direct descendants of classical music. Rock music, for example, is very clearly directly descended from folk music traditions.
