mary karr's ass

SOLD

Often, perhaps, when an artist grows older, he/she must refute the artists they admired in their youth—

they are embarrassed by that former enthusiasm, ashamed at having ever been so gauche in judgment—

these once-adulated elders must be symbolically slain/cast down/humiliated—

it helps of course if the idol was in fact false in the first place, a sham, a golden calf with hooves of clay, a boyband whose vocals/guitars were computer spawned—

it's even easier if that penny icon was a flash in the pan now universally despised or ignored, a pariah humbled and debased,

like a writer who may have enjoyed some minor notice in his youth but who now grown old and forgotten must vanity-publish his work,

or even the yecchiest echelon of all, that dantean depth wherein wanders lost that most abject of detritrals, the "blog poet" . . .

*

For an example of what I mean here, consider the strange piece which appeared in the Washington Post (10/12/08), the "Poets Corner" column, by Mary Karr—

she begins with a familiar rhetorical ploy: a sheepish admission of youthful naivete:

"Back in high school, I fell in love with Bill Knott's visionary poems . . . "

After this disingenuous gushygoo she quickly proceeds to suggest that her teenself was the victim of a "hoax" perpetrated by Knott . . . yes,

her young-innocent delusional ardour for his poetry was caused not by its intrinsic merits,

no, she was guiled and traduced by the specious notoriety his spurious frauds had cloud-hued him with:

Knott, she reveals, "became a cult figure . . . through a suicide hoax in 1966."

In fact, Karr notes, prior to this fake self-offing, this felo-de-flummery,

Knott had been "collecting rejection slips for years."

And, her implication is clear,

he would have gone on collecting rejection slips forever if

he hadn't managed to dupe and bamboozle editors with his counterfeit ruses and flimflam impostures—

the deceitful trickery of which continues to this day, she insinuates by asserting that "Knott . . . still produces . . . experimental verse,"

"experimental" being a code-word to implicate, indict his persistent incriminating caprices and morally-shoddy eccentricities—

("Experimental" meaning oddball, abnormal: not like the regular Establishment poets Karr usually praised in this [now-defunct] weekly column:

He's not like us, Karr is assuring her AmeriPo-Biz cohorts, he's an anomaly, he can be marginalized and scorned with no risk—

in such circles, "experimental" is an insult, and Karr is indicating with this pejorative

that Knott should be viewed as anathema by the mainstream of American Poetry—)

He's a crank, Karr says, quote: "He's an iconoclast."  You can't take him seriously.

In this she agrees with the eminent critic Christopher Ricks,

who in The Massachusetts Review dismissed Knott as "a malignant clown."

"Futilely" is the word Karr uses to describe Knott's vain attempts to write—

he is "futilely" trying to be a poet, as she sees it. . . .

Her final summation seems apropos:

"pathological paranoia"

is her grown-up-now diagnosis of this mentally-ill reprobate,

her older-and-wiser verdict on

his worthless life and work.

*

Karr's thinly-disguised attack on Knott is really a kind of exorcism, a ritual to expel this shadow from her sinful youth—

Yes, she confesses to her confreres in the USAPO elite,

I was guilty of letting myself be hoaxed

—and note that she uses the word "hoax" twice in her brief article,

reiterating it for emphasis, to remind her readers in case they missed it the first time—

yes, she coyly admits, I was hoaxed by the charlatan Knott,

but mea culpa, look, I here repent that adolescent foolishness,

lo, I cast the demon out!

*

Knott is the dumb donkey Karr rode into Poetryville on, back in her uneducated raw youth,

the ass she must now augeanize from her stable,

the sacrificial mule she must thrice deny before the Academy of American Poets crows and crowns her.

*

Afterthought—

I apologize for writing the diatribe above in the third person—

I was so hurt and humiliated by this article that I could only respond by distancing it from the first-person—

I think the greatest sign of Karr's contempt for me is something she didn't say:

the fact that she didn't mention even in passing my blog, whereon for the past several years

I have been posting my entire catalog of poetry for free open access:

that, to me, hurt worse than any of her subtle insults.

But, to be fair, given the space restrictions of column-writing, given the limited space the Washington Post allotted her, if she had deigned to refer readers to my blog,

then she wouldn't have had room enough left to label me a "hoax" twice over,

to relate the gossipy rumors of my various frauds and deceptions and oh yes let's not forget my "father's suicide" etc.—

And she simply had to include those sordid plums in her screed because,

after all, as she has learned so well from the popularity of her prose memoirs,

sensationalist tittletattle sells.

/// 

invid

*
I assume that Chelsey Minnis felt humiliated and mortified when she read the following words from Craig Morgan Teicher's review in Publishers Weekly of her book "Bad Bad":

"Petulant, clever, sometimes funny, sometimes irritatingly flippant, Minnis's poems will inspire questions as to whether this work qualifies as poetry at all, though some readers — fans of, say, Bill Knott, at his silliest — may find much to like."

Belittled, disparaged, snubbed, rebuked by this squelch, she must have been—surely any young poet who finds themself compared to a failure like me would suffer chagrin and embarrassment.

—But I of course felt just the opposite: I was honored and flattered to have my work (even "at its silliest") associated with hers.  I was proud to be equated and identified with

a poet whose books I've enjoyed reading and been intrigued with.  

Minnis seems to me to be a fantastic brilliant poet.  By now I've read everything of hers available, all 3 of her books, and have reread many pages in them.

I'm aware that posting this awkward note of praise for her work may further compound the injury inflicted by Teicher with his invidious contemptuous comparison, but—

If she ever sees this, I hope she takes it at face value.  After all, I'm just one of the many admirers of her writing. 

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a plagiarist confesses

As Mary Karr reported in the Washington Post, I was getting nothing but rejection slips before I duped magazines into publishing my lousy poems with a "fake suicide" hoax, and, she added, I would have continued getting nothing but rejection slips if I hadn't tricked those editors into publishing my "posthumous" verse.  Karr can tell you how I bamboozled them with my phony poems. 

And she's right of course: in fact every poem I ever wrote was a hoax, a fraud, a fake, which is why, ever since her WashPost exposure, I have had to publish them myself in vanity volumes, because no legitimate publisher would have a scandal disgrace like me on their list of authors . . . 

The poor publishers I traduced into publishing me in the past with my flimflam tactics are ashamed to admit they ever issued any books by me, and I can't blame them for being chagrinned at falling prey to my con-artist deceptions.  The joke is on them.  How embarrassed they are to have been hoodwinked by a chiseler like me, whose "poems" are all fake and in fact were all plagiarized.  I pulled the wool over their eyes: those editors/publishers who put out my books were too stupid to see through my chicanery.  They'll never live it down.

Indeed all those editors and publishers who published my poems and books prior to 2008 when Mary Karr revealed in the Washington Post that my entire poetry career was a total HOAX (she used the word twice to describe me) from start to finish, were then and are still ashamed to have published my sham poems, embarrassed to admit I had been on their lists, that my plagiarized verse had deceived them—

And as a result of Karr's expo-zay, after this revelatory bulletin appeared in 2008, after she outed me as the total fraud I am and have always been, I guess it's not surprising no legit magazine will publish my counterfeit verse, and no real publisher will touch my bogus books . . . 

My sins finally caught up with me, and now I am the pariah persona non grata I was always destined to be. The liar, the plagiarist, the impostor goes down in the end, evil is punished!

Even an editor as astute and intelligent as Jonathan Galassi was fooled by my flummery, he published two books of mine, one at Random House and the second at Farrar Straus Giroux in 2004;— in fact he expressed an interest in having my Selected Poems maybe done by FSG, but then M. Karr and the Washington Post revealed my ignominy to the world, 

following which no publisher of any standing or self-respect would ever again have anything to do with a depraved despised untouchable like me.

*

If you don't believe Karr, just ask James Tate, he'll tell you—hell, he said it to my face—that half my poems were plagiarized from his work, and the other half were stolen from others: he could make a list of them, he told me, a list of the poets besides himself whose ideas and styles I had expropriated and claimed as my own.

*

Ed Ochester editor of the Pitt Poetry series published one of my spurious books in 1989, but in the following two decades must have realized what a shameful mistake it had been to add my name to the Pitt roster: he wised up or someone told him the truth about my supposititious poetry, that my plagiarism-filled poems were all hoax faux fakes, so when he edited a "Best of" anthology of works from the series in 2007, he knew that he could not include any by me in the book: he knew that selecting any of my false verse from the 1989 book into his "Best of" anthol would delegitimize it fatally, damage its prestige and tarnish his immaculate reputation and high standing in the American poetry community.

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plague

Every war has unintended consequences of evil—

the Cold War, for example:

It was bad enough that the CIA through its support and funding

nuked us with the New York School of Painting,

but worse than that was the collateral damage,

the fallout from that AntiCommunist patronage:

the radiation-sickness known as the New York School of Poets—

///

select

Earlier this year I self-published as a vanity volume a "Selected Poems," which is now deleted due to my not being able to edit it into any final composure . . . last year I tried to hire an editor to do the Selected, but that project fizzled . . . I can't seem to do it myself, or rather I can do it but then as soon as it's done I'm overwhelmed with doubts and second thoughts—it's difficult or impossible to gain or at least to retain the objectivity necessary.  

A large part of the problem, and this is probably the chief impediment to my achieving a satisfactory compromise solution, is what to do with the short poems and the sonnets: how to situate them into a Selected Poems . . . should they be split off in separate sections, or integrated in with the rest of the poems?

Also I don't want the poems printed in a chronological or thematic order, though I know that most poets opt for the former.  

And many—for example Heaney and Pinsky—have their Selecteds laid out in separate sections each of which contains poems from one book only, book by book the volume excerpts, all dated and circumscribed.  

They're both major poets, so ergo they should be emulated, not to mention all the other published poets who adopt a similar format.

But I'm no major poet, nor a published poet either.  My books are self-published, vanity volumes.  If I could find a legitimate publisher presumably they (the publisher) would make these choices and impose their standards on any putative "Selected Poems" of mine—

but I have no such publisher.  My poems are so bad (and I am so disdained by or unknown to editors and publishers) that I can find no real publisher and must publish them myself—

And I think that the Contents pages in most poetry books are a waste of paper and ink— I never use the contents pages when I read poetry books.

And so . . . even if I could get the damn "Selected" edited, beyond that stalemate I still couldn't format it into any normal acceptable book-looking entity . . . if I can't make it resemble the books that others publish, and it seems I am incapable of creating such a clone of all the other "Selected Poems" on the shelf, then what's the use of trying . . . if I can't get my books to look like books are supposed to look, then why do them.

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FREE

FREE (OR HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL USAPO PART 2)

It seems amazing to me that in the 400 plus pages of Brecht's Collected Poetry, the English translation edition entitled "Poems 1913-1956" (Methuen, 1976), religion is so infrequently addressed or barely even mentioned in passing.  "The Tailor of Ulm, 1592" (from '5 Childrens Songs', 1934, is the only pure example I could find poring through its pages— I may have missed some things, but obviously for the Marxist Brecht, or at least in his verse, exposing the oppressive policies of the Church was not a priority.  Poems protesting against the Fascist takeover of his own country and all of Europe, yes, there are many of those.  But the Vatican's political and financial support of those Fascist coups, with Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain, its Concordat with Hitler, its refusal during WWII to condemn the Holocaust, and after the war its concealing and convoying of Nazi war criminals to safety?  Not a word.

Sadly, this seems the same with many other Socialist poets of the 20th Century.  Look at "The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse": there's almost no overtly anti-religious poetry in it.  I could only find 2 or at the most 3 examples—

or take "Red Sky at Night: an anthology of British socialist poetry"—editors Andy Croft/Adrian Mitchell, published in 2003 by Five Leaves Publications— again, I can't find a single anti-religious poem in its 300 bloody pages.  Lots of admirable agita about dictators and plutocrats and war and Hiroshima and Warsaw Ghetto and Chile Allende and Mrs Thatcher and fascist sprats in general and specific, but not a peep raised in protest against the Church which supports all these Hitlers and Pinochets and Thatchers and militaryindustrial oligarchies, the Church which justifies every pogrom of oppression the Uberstate seeks to impose on its slave populations.  The Church which, as Marx summarized religion, is a dope pusher, forcing its opiates of ignorance and prejudice down the throats of the common people, drugging them into obscene stupors of 'savage servility' (Robert Lowell's phrase) and suicidal submission.

Fascism, Capitalism, Racism, Sexism, et al:— poets seem to be willing to protest those evils and their representatives.  But the clergy, religion, no.  Church and State: poets will write poems against the iniquities of the latter, but the former gets a free pass.

*

And contemporary USA poets, USAPO?—

In theory USA public officials are free to be nonreligionist, but in practice almost none are; and USA poets, are they similarly "free"?

Don't take my word for it, take Amazon's: the last time I looked there for "religious poetry" I got 21, 915 listing; "atheist poetry" brought 44 results:

Almost 22 thousand versus less than fifty. Roughly 500 to 1. 

Those are your odds, contemporary USAPO: 500 to 1.

A democracy in theory, a theocracy in practice: USA public officials are free to be atheist, but none choose to be, which is their democratic right, they freely choose to not be atheist, 

just as USAPO freely choose to not write atheist verse 500 to 1. 

Everybody's free!  USA!

In theory poets are free to write what they want, but in practice they are 500 times more likely to be published if they write religious verse than atheist verse. 

500 to 1. You're free to write what you want, poet, but you know that if you write atheist verse the odds are 500 to one against you.  You're free.   

Just as USA public officials are free in theory to be atheists but none are, so you are free to write what you want, USApoet.

So if you choose (500 to one) to write religious poems (500 to one) you're making a free (500 to one) choice, aren't you?   You're free to write religious verse 500 to one, aren't you?   Of course you are.  Free.  You're making a free choice in a free society, aren't you?  Just like those politicians.

And all those poets in the 02/12 issue of Po(Chi)Mag, they're all freely choosing to pontificate their 'spiritual' poetry theories, they're all freely choosing to not write atheist verse, aren't they?   Free. 

They're free, I'm free, you're free. 

The fact that it's 500 times easier to get religious (antihumanist) verse published than atheist verse, surely in a free society such as ours, the fact that we have a 500 times better chance of getting published if we write 'spiritual' poems rather than atheist verse, 

surely that doesn't influence our choice in the matter, does it? —

A 500 times better chance of having our poems published doesn't effect our esthetic choices, does it?—

Especially if getting published means we'll have a better chance at obtaining a teaching job or a grant or indeed any chance of a career in PoBiz?  

/

So, obviously, the lesson to be learned here is, if you are a USAPO who wants to become or stay a successful poet, you must never risk jeopardizing your career by writing pro-atheist anti-religious verse—

And Po(Chi)Mag will print your justifications for having freely 500 to one chosen to write 'spiritually', because Po(Chi)Mag is 500 to one free to make its choices in our free society. 

Free, just free, that's all.

///

reprint

the furies

"The plagiarism Furies, idle for a time as the more clandestine and irreproachable forms of literary borrowing and imitation continue from day to day, have been unloosed again. . . . This time, the context is the British literary world, and the accused is one of its leading lights, so the indictment has taken on a moderate, even decorous tone. Ian McEwan has been called to account for using some brief wording in his best-selling novel “Atonement” that some feel was drawn too directly from, rather than merely inspired by, a memoir by the romance novelist Lucilla Andrews."

The above quote comes from the NYTimes of Dec 3rd, 2006; a subsequent report stated that "heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and . . . Thomas Pynchon [have] arisen in defense of Mr. McEwen.  Most of the writers said that [they had] done the same thing themselves."

It's interesting when these "Furies" erupt in the world of prose, as they occasionally do: because it never or almost never happens in poetry.  There are certain poets who assimilate and appropriate biographies, and then present that culled material, sometimes with little or no alteration, as poems.  Yet no one ever confronts these poets, no one ever asks Frank Bidart where the plagiarism ends and the poetry begins.

Prose is important, prose writers are important, and so what they do is covered and reported on by the major media.  But poetry?  Nobody cares.  The New Yorker, which is what, supposedly the mag every literate USAer reads, pays infinitely more attention to pop music than to poetry.   Almost every music event in NYC appears in their listings, and almost none of the poetry events. . .  

Think of the money spent by governments/societies to support music, as opposed to poetry.  They support music because music supports them; it facilitates their tyrannies.  In the case of the USA, the Pentagon's budget as opposed to human services; the culture's stipends for music compared to what it piddles out to poets.

Scientists who tolerate their enemy, religion, have a death-wish; poets who don't attack the hegemony of music, who don't protest against its disproportionate and unwarranted dominance of the cultural sphere, are similarly defeatist.  The assets available for the arts are limited, and music gobbles up more resources than it deserves.  Poets who support this, and who make excuses for the sovereignty of music over poetry, are suicidal traitors.  Just as scientists like Richard Dawkins and others have begun to actively oppose and combat the evil of religion, so poets must work against the dictatorship of music, and must use every means to denounce and denigrate it.

*
The New Yorker manages to review prose books every week; why can't they review at least one poetry book per week?  If poets weren't such lickspittles and wimps they would boycott and refuse to submit their work to The New Yorker until it paid regular attention to poetry.  And boycott every other semi-literary journal, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Bookforum, the TLS, the LRB etcetera, until they start giving regular attention to verse.  Hell, the New York Review of Books reviews more music than it does poetry, and more books about music than books about poetry.  Why do poets put up with such neglect and disregard?  Why don't they fight back?

*
The disparity between the funding for music and the funding for poetry is insane.  Poetry is the most important art.  Ergo, poetry should receive more funding than any other art.  More attention should be paid to poetry than any other art.   For every printpage and webpage devoted to music, a dozen should be allotted to poetry.  For every dollar that goes to music, poetry should collect a hundred, a thousand!

*
In reality, of course, poetry is the most abject, the lowest of the arts.  The most ignored, the least recognized and honored, the least rewarded.  Count the millionaire novelists around the globe, the millionaire painters and scriptwriters, the multimillionaires of music . . . the wealth that accumulates around all the arts but poetry.  And ask yourself, poet, what you have in common with them.  They hate you, you know it: they despise you.  They have nothing but contempt for you.  All the other arts look down with disgust at poetry.  When will you turn that contempt back at them?  When will you scorn them, and deny them the commendation they refuse you.  (Oh yes, they all offer lipservice specious praise to poetry, smirking behind their hands at the hypocrisy of the gesture that costs them nothing.)  Even poets (you know this too) hate poetry, and disdain poets.  How can we not hate ourselves and hate each other; we're poets, we're slaves: Genet said it best, in The Maids: "When slaves love each other, it's not love they feel."  Poetry is the slave of the arts, and poets are slaves to the prosewriter and the painter, and even more to the molochs of music.  What kind of slave reveres and worships its oppressors?  The masochist kind portrayed by Genet: the poet kind.

*
But what's the real plagiarism story here, the one that won't be covered by the Times or any other organ of the Masters?  Plagiarism: theft.  In the realm of the arts, who are the ones most stolen from? who are the ones robbed everyday of the prestige and recognition and respect they deserve?  Whose true-earned recompense is snatched away by fictionwriters and painters and musicmullahs?  And more than that, more criminal than that, whose ideas and concepts are historically and always and still today are the most plagiarized?  Daily, hourly, poet-slaves produce goods which are expropriated and exploited by the other arts.  That's the ongoing plagiarism scandal hushed-up and suppressed by every media. No famous novelist or filmmaker or rockstar or painter is going to do an Op-ed about that inequity, or band together (like those "heavyweights" mentioned in the Times article quoted above) to write letters of protest against that iniquity.  These are the crooks who steal the work of poets, and they aren't going to confess or atone or make reparations.  They're going to keep on plagiarizing poets every chance they get, yesterday today and tomorrow.  (Have prosewriters ever been capable of original thought; haven't they always stolen all their ideas from poets.)

*
But hey, don't let me stop you, poets.  Go on, go ahead and kiss-ass praise the millionaire Pynchon, the millionaire Jasper Johns, praise all the success-practitioners of the Master arts, the crumbs from their tables may fill you yet.  It's your duty as slaves to curry favor with those above you, to flatter and obsequiate your betters. And praise most those writers who began as poets but abandoned poetry, who betrayed poetry for the chance to move up the foodchain of the arts, after all if you could hum a tune you too might get rich like Leonard Cohen and fuck moviestars; you'd do it if you could, wouldn't you.  Of course you would.  Because, let's face it, who would want to be a poet when they could be a novelist or a songwriter or a screenwriter or a rockstar or a Cindy Sherman or a what's his name, that Brit artist who cuts sharks in half,—who would want to remain a poet, the lowest puke on the cultural totempole?  Only a fool, a masochist, a scumbag, who can't weasel their way into any of the real arts, who has to sink to the bottom of the bard-barrel, the pegasus-dregs.  Poetry, the most ignored, the least compensated of the arts. . . but you already know this; why am I wasting my time telling you what you already know.

*

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