Comments on: Foetry! Get it? Faux-etry!

By: Lee Stern

Lee Stern — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:29:54 +0000

Cider Press Review has published three of my poems over the years. I think they are very nice people. They never did anything bad to me.
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By: Ron Paul Supporter

Ron Paul Supporter — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:37:52 +0000

oh for pete’s sake
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By: Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:35:07 +0000

Bill Knott is right. I have a Modest Proposal here:
http://joanhoulihan.blogspot.com/2008/09/modest-proposal-for-poetry.html
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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:13:01 +0000

Who/What/Where are our common enemies?
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:09:18 +0000

on the other hand, it’s no wonder poets won’t unite
and fight their common enemies,
when they have so much fun attacking each other——
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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:49:49 +0000

Would it be casting aspersion on foetry’s persons to say that they all sound a little like Ron Paul supporters?
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:29:07 +0000

the house slaves squabbling with the field slaves,
name-calling and casting ass-persion———
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:11:01 +0000

Well, FYI and to get back to the topic of Travis Nichols post above:
Bookforum website links today to this interview on Foetry in Left Curve magazine:
http://www.leftcurve.org/LC30WebPages/Foetry.html
Kent
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:15:14 +0000

Sorry, meant to provide URL for that Dorn issue:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/index_4934_501.shtml
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:04:25 +0000

Some suggested reading on Dorn:
Special issue of the Chicago Review, *Edward Dorn: American Heretic*, from a couple years back.
(from web page) This triple issue features a long overdue 250-page section on the late Edward Dorn, entitled EDWARD DORN, AMERICAN HERETIC, which includes:
late poems by Dorn
correspondence with Jones (Baraka), Raworth, and others
an interview
transcript of a 1977 poetry workshop
Jennifer Dunbar Dorn on ROLLING STOCK
Alastair Johnston on Zephyrus Image
Dale Smith on THE SHOSHONEANS
David Southern on Dorn’s correspondence
Keith Tuma on Dorn’s late poetry
John Wright on interviewing Dorn
Kent
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By: Daisy

Daisy — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:44:23 +0000

Chelsey Minnis, Preface 1 from Bad Bad:
“The poet I worship is Edward Dorn, because I adore his disgust.”
–Daisy
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By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:01:45 +0000

He can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Clover was talking about poetry when he called Dorn a prick. He was talking about online pseudonyms, and how he wouldn’t use one associated with someone he thinks was not a nice person. What’s the big deal? Besides, Kent, since you named all those other people’s faults, do you deny the prickness of Dorn?
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:42:05 +0000

Thom Gunn was a fan of the TV show Friends…
(what is Badiou doing in that catalog?)
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By: jane

jane — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:35:39 +0000

Yes, Kent, many people have been unpleasant. Some of them poets. One of them Ed Dorn, a prick (“a man regarded as stupid, unpleasant, or contemptible”). Nothing you’ve said changes that. Don’t know what you’re talking about. But if it makes you feel more grownup to say “homophobe” or “gaybasher,” neato. Done with this. By all means continue, though. Good comedy.
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By: Boyd Nielson

Boyd Nielson — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:24:52 +0000

To be sure, Dorn’s “award” for Steve Abbott was monstrous. That needs to be clear, and it can never be too clear. Just as obviously, using it as a measure of his poetry or, it may be, anything more than his chance of being a posthumous presidential candidate is misguided. I was tempted to say something earlier, but I was sure that Kent was more than capable of response. Perhaps Kent’s most incisive observation is that “Spicer was an anti-Semite (also hooray for half of radical Modernism)” etc. To put it differently, when can we has systemic analysis?
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:39:20 +0000

Joshua (sorry to have gotten your name wrong, there),
Who said Dorn, a great poet, was a nice guy? Do you think I endorse his abhorrent statements about AIDS (which he didn’t hold at end of life, by the way)?
I’m talking about the silly sanctimonious smear language, which takes one down a slippery road, indeed. Want to score some more “prick” points and show how really righteous you are? Williams snidely cheered the bombing of Hiroshima; Stein was a Vichy sympathizer; Spicer was an anti-Semite (also hooray for half of radical Modernism); Neruda (along with all kinds of hallowed poets) was a hard-core Stalinist (aided Siqueiros in first plot on Trotsky); Villon was a murderer and scumbag; Olson a misogynist coke-head and drunk; Rimbaud an arms merchant and slave trader; Whitman a champion of the Indian wars and the conquest of Mexico; Baraka an anti-Semite; Zukofsky a misogynist philanderer (forced Niedecker into aborting their child); Allen Ginsberg a defender of pedophilia; Pound, Eliot, Yeats, well, forget it; Stevens a racist; Brecht a misogynist, Stalinist hack; Marinetti a fascist; Sexton an abusive drunk; Wilmot a perverted creep, Spencer an unapologetic promoter of genocide; Jeffers a fascist sympathizer; Larkin a racist, misogynist jerk; Millay a narcissistic, manipulative drunk; Badiou (one of your heroes, I believe) an apologist for the Cultural Revolution; Popa a Serb nationalist avant la lettre; Burroughs a pederast and nihilist; Kerouac a cheerleader for the bombing of Indochina; and etc. etc. (Let’s not get into the avant’s sacred cows from the other arts!).
This is all old, tired stuff. Talk about it, yes; criticize, yes. But avoid the sophomoric self-righteous language.
Kent
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By: Dale Smith

Dale Smith — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:28:38 +0000

A little more “coked-up misogynistic narcissi[sm]” might help keep whining over poetry contests and career platforms to a minimum. But Michael, if you were at CU during Dorn’s “last years,” it was probably the chemo and not the coke making it seem as though he were treating you like a man-bitch.
“Jane,” here, here: keep kicking against it….
Dale
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:23:08 +0000

Kent, you know you my dawg, but Dorn was a particularly vicious bastard. I was at CU during his last years. He was a coked-up misogynistic narcissist, & good riddance to him. (I think some of Slinger is pretty great though.)
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By: jane

jane — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:23:08 +0000

Kent, who doesn’t seem to know my name but wishes for some familiarity, has a curious measure of the “somewhat sophomoric” — perhaps the word arouses in him a youthful feeling. Be that as it may, Ed Dorn remains the dude whose journal awarded Steve Abbott the “AIDS Award for Poetic Idiocy”; Steve died of AIDS a few years later. As Kevin Killian wrote, far more eloquently than I could:
I write on behalf of one on whom a beaker of poisoned blood was
poured by the talented staff artists on “Rolling Stock,” one who on his
deathbed still strove to understand the motives behind this attack, one who
tried to forgive, one who tried so hard to forgive it broke my heart. He
is no longer alive, but I am, and why shouldn’t I say exactly what I feel?
Kent, you can choose your own suitably mature adjective for that prick Ed Dorn, and ascribe it to whichever sphere or intellectual tradition intrigues you.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:40:43 +0000

I’d said to Josh Clover, in response to his somewhat sophomoric insult of Ed Dorn:
>Nor would you probably say something like that, I’d wager (knowing what was best for your posty-avant theoretical fanny), if Dorn was still alive and kicking…
I actually have nothing against Josh’s, or anyone’s, employment of theory, so I withdraw the “theoretical” adjective, with apologies.
Much better just to say “knowing what was best for your posty-avanty fanny.”
Kent
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By: Daisy

Daisy — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:15:04 +0000

Sina–The contest system should be interrogated, of course!
Stacy Lynn–congratulations on your book getting picked up elsewhere; I’m glad there’s a happy ending to this story.
Best to all,
Daisy
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 11:18:17 +0000

It’s Alan Cordle’s wife who’s the poet – Kathleen Halme.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 06:30:57 +0000

Also, none of the writers Gary mentions had Facebook accounts. Nor, to my knowledge, did any of them take Zoloft or enjoy The Sopranos.
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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 02:38:05 +0000

Sorry, Alan. My mistake. And please, no more Mr. Nichols! That’s my cousin’s name.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:53:37 +0000

People who read poetry make poets great, not publishers.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:47:29 +0000

Well, as for me, I just self-publish. Always have. I have four books now and people actually buy them.
Here are some of my ‘non-contest’ colleagues:
Alexander Pope
William Blake
Walt Whitman
E. E. Cummings
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
Edgar Allan Poe
Robert Bly
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Robinson Jeffers
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Percy Bysshe Shelly
Robert Service
Carl Sandburg
Not to mention,
R. Kipling
H. D. Thoreau
W. E. B. DuBois
W. Cather
T. Hardy
N. Hawthorne
E. Hemingway
V. Woolf
O. Wilde
D. H. Lawrence
Jeez! Go figure.
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By: Alan Cordle

Alan Cordle — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:06:03 +0000

Mr. Nichols,
Please! I’m not a poet. Where’d you get that?
And though I like the Foetry Years suggestion, I actually prefer Foetry! Get it? Faux-etry!
Mr. Knott,
It would be an honor to use your [censored] and [libel] comment as a blurb for my forthcoming memoir.
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:29:44 +0000

Sounds like we need a state publishing house and a Writers’ Union.
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:19:15 +0000

. . . don’t know if you’ll run my previous comment . . .
the date of the “fulmination” entry mentioned is August 27 on my blog———
i’m appending it below, but it’s probably too long and too splenetic to reprint here:
How I Created and Then Published My Collaborative Chapbook with My Own Micropress and Made All My Chapbook Dreams Come True
is the headline of a long post today in the blog of young poet Reb Livingston (google “Home-Schooled by a cackling jackal”)——
I should admire and applaud her efforts,
but I’m sorry to say I think private individual projects like hers are largely shortsighted and misguided:
one might say they treat the symptoms, not the disease.
The problem is systemic, and should be attacked on a systemic level——
poetry is the least-funded of the arts,
and that underfunding occurs in a culture/society
which of course underfunds all the arts to some degree,
but poetry suffers the worse——
in today’s NYTimes Arts section, extensive reports appear on the New York City Opera and the MTV Video Awards etc, in other words the important arts are covered in depth and detail,
whereas as usual not a word about poetry or poetry news (Cider Press brouhaha, anyone?)——
page B2, below the fold:
“Guggenheim to receive $1 Million Award”——
“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced that it has been selected for a $1 million special award from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its coming exhibition ‘The Third Mind: American Artists contemplate Asia . . .’ at the Guggenheim Museum” . . .
Livingston in a recent post estimated the amount paid by USA poets (USAPOs for short) to enter book contests is yearly one million dollars . . .
USAPOs whine complain about paying these fees to little-press publishers . . . the publishers whine complain about having to charge these fees in order to pay for the cost of printing the books . . . it’s a vicious circle-jerk where no one gets off . . .
and nobody in USAPO it seems gets frustrated enough to actually attack the root problem,
which is the normative underfunding of poetry by the cultural powers and dominions . . .
The foundations and institutions have the money, but they’re not giving it to poetry——
that’s the basic cause. And USAPO won’t do anything to change that——
they won’t unite and fight for their due.
They won’t picket the Guggenheim Museum/Foundation (or the NEH) in protest, they won’t urge a boycott of this exhibit, they won’t plaster this event with leaflets demanding equal funding for poetry——
which incidently I’m only mentioning because it’s in today’s paper, it’s only an illustration, an example of so many other misappropriations——
Yes, misappropriation, because this million bucks should be the million bucks Livingston speaks of——
this million (and so much more) should be going to USAPO——
but hey, USAPOs don’t want that money, really, do they, they want to live via the old virtues of self-reliance,
look at Livingston for example——
she’s not a lazybum welfare-queen waiting for a handout from the government, she’s not sitting on her duff waiting for a topdown endowment,
no, she’s doing it the good-old-fashioned American way,
the “small business model,” the “mom-and-pop shop” that made this country great,
she’s doing it solo, she’s being an entrepreneur . . . and how apt the title of her blog:
“home-schooled” . . . home-schooling: yes, that’s the philosophy advocated by the Christian Conservatives that lead this nation,
isn’t it? (check next week’s Republican convention for further extollments of this ideal.)—
As opposed to public enterprise, collective economy . . . ?
*
as I say above, I’m plucking the Guggie exhibit out of today’s paper and using it as an example
(check tomorrow’s paper for more news about the nonfunding-of-poetry: it’s a daily feature)——
and ditto I’m using Reb Livingston as an example plucked out, for which I apologize——
and I hope she won’t be offended when I say I think that that million dollars now going to the museum
should instead be going to her
and to other young poets like her——
*
PS.
and to those of you saying, What good is picketing the Guggie going to do——
see the opening of this exhibit, our Borgias there in their Medici masks,
in their pride,
and that’s where you have to hit them, in their pride——
because their pose is to be patrons of the arts,
they self-esteem themselves on how highminded how elite that patronage proves they are——
it’s part of their PR—
but now a picketline of poets screams curses at them,
a gauntlet of poets hurls leaflets and posters and gets handcuffed mass-arrested
for disturbing the hauteur of smug Maecenas——
for puncturing that complacent aura of Kultur——
and if you reply, Well that won’t work, that will just make them hate poets——
really? Hey, they already hate you, in case you didn’t notice——
or did you imagine their policy of having poetry be the worst-funded of all the arts
is because they love you best of all the arts,
is that your ironic theory?——
Attacking them with protests at the museum or the concert hall or the opera house,
lying down in those aisles and galleries with passive resistance nonviolent refusal to move (we shall not be moved)——
no, that may not work——
but what you’re doing now, does that work?——
sucking up to them, petitioning them, filling out their insipid applications, is that effective——
is that getting poetry funded at the level it deserves——?
Instead of kissing their asses, start kicking them——
they’ll never love you, but maybe you can make them fear you——
and if they fear you, they’ll fund you ——
maybe.
*
I say unto the Guggenheim Museum:
If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poets.
*
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:08:19 +0000

“the problem” is that the funding for the arts
in this country is being misappropriated:
the other arts are getting most of the
money, and poetry is getting the least . . .
my solution (sit-ins, pickets, boycotts and all the other forms of protest
used by underclasses to gain their rightful share)
(see my blog for further fulmination)
may not work
but i don’t see any practical ideas from anybody here
for how to fix this shameful inequity . . .
climb down from your theory clouds and come up
with some dollars and cents schemes . . .
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