To be honest though, while I don't like what Martin did to the poems, and while he should never have taken those liberties with them, I sort of get what he was

To be honest though, while I don't like what Martin did to the poems, and while he should never have taken those liberties with them, I sort of get what he was trying to do with the example Phillips gave. By changing "ancient" to "medieval" and "dirty" to "vulgar", he's trying to invoke the switch from Church Latin to the vulgate. I mean, there's the organ music in the background, the red wine like the blood of Christ. And then he's saying, "Look at Charles Bukowski, he writes in the language of the common people". He then reinforces "no vulgarity" later. An addition about "clean[ing] up my act" is also there, to go with the "cleaning the shit stains" (now also explicitly "cleaning"). Which is about devulgarifying the poems. To go along with all this he makes the poem about why he writes "like" that, not just "why he writes". To make clear that it's about why the poems are vulgar specifically, not why the poems exist at all. And then he emphasizes that Bukowski is pleased with the result (he puts "pleased" in twice). So there's a logic to it. It's a little pedantic and a little pretentious. And it changes the meaning of the poem. And it does some of the very devulgarification it's talking about. But it's not totally dumb.