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.
///
