Robert Pinsky and Charles Simic

 

Below is an old aquarelle I sketched on establishment hacks Pinsky, Simic et al.  Also, I include an email to which Pinsky chose NOT to respond.  

August 2, 1998

Professor Robert Pinsky

Poet Laureate of the USA

Boston University 

236 Bay State Rd.

Boston, MA 02215

Dear Mr. Pinsky:

Perhaps you are swamped with admirers, perhaps not.  In any event, I am always interested to see who speaks at the commencement exercises at Fitchburg State College, where I taught for five years.  Last year, it was Dershowitz, the lawyer; this year, you, the poet laureate... shaking hands with Riccards, the intellectually corrupt college president.  

I wrote Dershowitz last year.  He did not respond.  Will you?  

Perhaps a person like yourself should research places before you speak at them.  The following is a letter I just sent to The Boston Globe.  No doubt, they will not print it.  I send such things for the intellectual exercise and to further prove my hypothesis that dissidents are rarely given voice in the USA... quite the opposite for academic poets of bona fide innocuousness.  I also include a poem I wrote with you in mind.  

Sincerely yours,

G. Tod Slone, Ed.  

Dear Editor:

All this brouhaha over the stateThe Boston Globe!  Indeed, we now suddenly discover that manyAll this brouhaha and no mention of the real problem obstructing the system:  objective adherence to the criteria set-up to define good teaching.  Indeed, rampant lack of impartiality in the hiring, tenuring and promotion processes has been crippling the system since its very beginnings.  For example, at Fitchburg State, where I taught for five years (91-96), I witnessed and publicly decried the institution

Over the Rainbow... at the Harvard Club

with ringside seats at the latest boxing match

(and ball game too, i suppose)

he, university professor, tenured

in his Victorian Newton home,

quite distant from the edge,

new poet laureate of America,

rhythmical words aloud that comfortsthe White House... will be present

senator Kerry of Heinz ketchup fame

to read a poem disparaging... socialites

while the friend of former poet laureate,

who, friend of former poet laureate,

shall talk about democracy in the light

of his new smiling public demeanor

new poet laureate, he

shall rap at commencement exercises,

shake hands with corrupt college chiefs

and

keyboard the Wizard of Oz in his college office,

while nobody shall question the lack 

of democratic representation 

in the selection process... for new... poet... laureates...

Franz Wright

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Why Poetry Doesn't Matter--Yet Another Example...

Above is a cartoon I sketched in 2004 on Franz Wright, who actually paid me $10 for a copy of it in person at the Emerson Umbrella for the Arts (ah, but not for my arts!) building when he saw me with signs and flyers protesting his scheduled reading at Concord Poetry Center.  He chuckled and never did comment on it.  

          I thought I should post it here for the record, since Wright just croaked.  "Award-winning poet" Michael Dickman presented his blind-poet accolade write-up in Time magazine (6/1/15).  "Award-winning" poets like Dickman and Wright of course rarely, if ever, possess the individuality to question and challenge the academic/literary established order machine handing out the prizes and accolades.   Dickman, in a typical outpouring of hyperbolic lit-dysentery, states "Franz Wright was a haunted and passionate poet, creator of some of the most devastatingly beautiful and dangerous poems written in English in the past 50 years."  Sadly, MFA poesy students will likely swallow the shit without questioning it.  And Dickman evidently needs a dictionary to look up the term "dangerous."  

          "The hole he leaves in contemporary American poetry will not, as Wright once wrote, be 'scarlessly closing like water' anytime soon," concludes Dickman as if somehow making an objective statement, which sums up the entire canon-making machinery, which inevitably performs its hocus-pocus and voila subjective becomes objective.  Just swallow and say ahh, just like Dickman has been doing all his life right up the ladder to the safe penning of a Time mag obit hagiography.  Dickman, by the way, briefly responded to my critique of his hagiography (see below for correspondence).  I'd mistakenly written that Charles Wright, current Lit-Innocuity-in-Chief aka Poet Laureataster of the US Congress, was Franz Wright's father.  In fact, the two are not related.  Sadly, that was all Dickman had to say.  

          Regarding my Concord protest, Franz Wright, of course, unsurprisingly, did not give a damn about it, and I doubt he possessed the capacity to understand the cartoon he'd purchased.  The protest concerned, not just him, but also the Concord Poetry Center, who's director, Joan Houlihan, had aberrantly stipulated that if I stood before her center in protest, she would not permit me to teach a workshop on dissident poetry and poets.  Where most poetasters like Wright would probably have said, well, ok, I won't protest, I certainly did not.  Below is the letter I wrote to Wright, who never responded...

.....................................................................

                                                                                                      October 17, 2004

Franz Wright, Pulitzer Poet

74 Parmenter Rd.

Waltham, MA 02453

Dear Franz Wright:

We met Saturday night quite briefly (see my poem on that encounter).  I was/am the lone poet protester of Concord (I spent a day in a Concord jail for protesting the absence of free speech at Walden Pond several years ago).  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all dialogue, rather than chuckle at each other?  Wouldn’t it be nice (generous) if the academic lit journals, workshops, classes and poetry centers opened their scope to other possibilities and even manifested CURIOSITY?  Yes, I am aware that you are not an academic… but I suspect, if you are not already, you shall soon be with workshop opportunities, adjunct courses, and offers of tenure from the nation’s poetry department heads.  

Anyhow, enclosed is a copy of the literary journal I created as a result of academic corruption at Fitchburg State College (MA).  I was a professor there (5 years) and am now a blacklisted unemployed professor with a PhD… for whatever that is worth.  

Enclosed also is a self-published chapbook (who else would ever publish such a thing?) of my poetry and especially my literary manifesto.  The latter is what I’d really like you to examine.  Over 40 academic journals have rejected it.  I thought it might be interesting if you simply contemplated for a moment how impossible it is for a dissident poet to find a publisher in today’s society.  Indeed, recently reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf, I could not help but compare America’s Academic-controlled literary scene (the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex) with that of the Soviet Writer’s Union.  

Thank you for helping to support The American Dissident with your $10 contribution.  

.....................................................

From: todslone@hotmail.com

To: mdickman@princeton.edu

CC: lewiscenter@princeton.edu

Subject: Adjudicated: Insufficiently Deferent

Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 11:16:51 -0400

To Michael Dickman, (Academic) Lecturer in Creative Writing, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University:

Yesterday, I read your obit on Franz Wright, while waiting for my car inspection at Toyota.  My comments with its regard, including a cartoon I’d sketched on Wright ages ago, have just been posted on my blog site here:  wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com.  Why not take a gander.  After all, as I've always said, curiosity did not kill the cat, careerism did that.  

In fact, why not manifest unusual openness and expose your creative-writing students to it?  Pipe dream?  Most likely, and despite the following deceptive statement of implied inclusivity:  “The Lewis Center for the Arts is designed to put the creative and performing arts at the heart of the Princeton experience. This mission is based on the conviction that exposure to the arts, particularly to the experience of producing art, helps each of us to make sense of our lives and the lives of our neighbors.”

Ah, but which “creative and performing arts” are to be included… and which are to be excluded… in the name of inclusivity of course? Which poets are to be included and which shall be excluded?  Do you teach your students that?  Do you teach them to question and challenge the lit canon?  Do you teach them to wonder about the faceless judges concealed behind the scene who choose this poem but not that poem?  Do you teach them to wonder why those faceless Pulitzer judges chose Franz Wright?  Did they choose him because he was harshly critical with their regard?  

Finally, why not get Princeton to subscribe to The American Dissident (only $20/year) or better yet order copies for your students.  After all, where else might they read criticism of lit icons and their acolytes?  Where else might they be able to examine satirical cartoons, poems, and essays on those like Wright… and even you?  Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Buffalo, and a few other universities thankfully subscribe.  To date, only one professor has been willing to open up his classroom to opposing viewpoints and invite me to speak about The American Dissident.  Professor Dan Sklar (Endicott College) has been doing that for almost five years now.  For all student comments, see http://theamericandissident.org/students.html.

Thank you for your attention.

...........................................

From: mdickman@Princeton.EDU

To: todslone@hotmail.com

Subject: RE: Adjudicated: Insufficiently Deferent

Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 15:36:17 +0000

Mr. Slone, 

Charles Wright is not Franz Wright's father. 

Good luck,

Michael Dickman

............................................

From: todslone@hotmail.com

To: mdickman@princeton.edu

Subject: Adjudicated: Insufficiently Deferent

Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 20:21:59 -0400

Michael,

I stand corrected!  I always thought he was the father.  Somebody must have told me that a while ago.  I shall note on my blog that I erred.  Now, too bad you are not OPEN to different viewpoints... too bad for your students.

G. Tod

Ron Charles, Barbara J. King

Notes on Lapdog Hagiography and the Three Charlies

Fed, paid, and pampered by the very men

By whom his muse and morals had been mauled:

He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,

And more of both than anybody knows. […]

—Lord Byron, “Laureate Southey’s Presumption”

What crap ye write on poesy, Ron Charles!  And they call you a journalist?  Your WaPo essay, “A Pair of U. S. Poets Laureate for the Price of One,” was absolutely mind-numbing.  How did you manage to question and challenge nothing at all?  Rather than journalism, that’s lapdog hagiography!  

You illustrate the fundamental problem with literature (and journalism) today in America:  the absence of hardcore questioning and challenging of celebrity literati and the academic/literary established-order machine that rewards their conformity, groupthink, banality, and general innocuity—the safe lubricant of literature-as-usual wrapped in a tube called BRILLIANT.  How can you and the two laureatasters idolized in your essay, Charles Wright and Charles Simic, be so blind as to what it takes to climb the literary ladder:  kowtowing, cronyism, backslapping, self-congratulating, and all those other dubious traits that should NOT be rewarded? 

One should expect wisdom from poets laureate.  Instead, we—or at least I—have come to expect banality and poesy-as-usual.  Your article clearly fails to manifest any wisdom at all.  Instead, all it presents is hot- air inanity (i.e., pomp).  

“The only rule for the poet laureate of the United States is that there are no rules,” you state either as a blatant ignoramus or a willful participant in that Congressional sham.  Rules, of course, do exist, especially Basic Rule #1:  see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.  The triumphirate of the monkeys is indeed the true credo of ladder-climbing poets laureate.  In fact, it is evidently yours too!  After all, how else can one rise to lit critic for the Washington Post… if not by not criticizing the diverse hands that feed you to keep your mouth shut?  

To back your first statement of “no rules,” you note, “So when retiring laureate Charles Wright decided he didn’t want to follow tradition by delivering a closing lecture this month, nobody called the Capitol Police. And besides, he had a better idea: a public conversation with his friend Charles Simic.”  Wow!  What courage!  What a fabulous illustration of the “no rules” observation!  

Awe-stricken you fawn:  “But it made the star-power of Thursday evening’s presentation at the Library of Congress all the more impressive. There was the 20th U.S. poet laureate sitting on stage with the 15th U.S. poet laureate, their Pulitzer Prizes tucked discreetly behind them.”  How nauseating!  With all the crap going on in America, they (and you) sit in pomp and circumstance in the court-jester limelight of an out-of-touch elitist utopic cocoon, o poetasters of the U. S. Congress!  Bravo!   And again, as a journalist, how can you not question and challenge the literary prizes like the Pulitzer?  Who were the judges behind the scenes who awarded the prizes?  What prejudices regarding poetry do they hold?  

And then things get oh-so exciting in your reportage when lit-hack host of the event Don Share, editor of multimillion-dollar Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Magazine, asks: “What the heck does the poet laureate do, anyway?”  Oh my, how did he get away with saying, “heck”?  And how can you not wonder aloud, what Poetry Foundation’s $200 million dollars can do and has done to the public face of poetry, including outright castration and overall high-brow bourgeois palatability?  

And then Wright unintentionally sums up the sad reality of the inanity illicited from Share’s question:  “You don’t do much.” And when Share pushes for a longer or better response, Wright adds “Every state has a poet laureate—snore—so you might as well have one for the whole shebang. It’s been fabulous. I mean, people bow to me as I go down the street.”  And you pump it all up by describing the response as “wry disregard for the position’s pomp,” as if somehow Wright in a position of pomp was not pompous, but rather noncoformist.  Insane!  How do you guys get away with it?  Both you and Share should have instead asked why so many Americans knee-jerk open wide and swallow the crap and actually “bow” to it?  In fact, why doesn’t Wright have the intelligence to wonder about that… and openly?  As for the laureateship, you note he simply said:  “What does it mean? You’re loved. What’s better than that?”  Well, I (and hopefully others who think for themselves) sure as hell do NOT love that embarrassing suckup.  

And how to explain Wright’s blather about his writing “private kind of poetry,” while climbing right to the top of the ladder of public kind of poetry and public recognition—anything but private?  Ah, a little self-slap on the back explains it:  “But the best of private poetry eventually becomes public knowledge.”  Yes, I see.  Sure, that makes sense.  What wisdom!  

Finally, at least Simic got it right when asked where poetry will likely be in 50 years:  “It probably won’t change at all: ‘I’m all alone; nobody loves me; it’s always raining.’”  Ah, again what wisdom!  And then Wright’s response to it:  “I’ve written that!”  And to top it all off, your conclusion:  “Two jokers, two brilliant poets.”  Ah, the hackneyed term “brilliant” to describe less than brilliant academic poetasters!  How original! But you did at least hit the bull’s eye with “jokers” as in court jesters… of the U. S. Congress.

Dwight Garner

Question:  Now, what poetry magazine out there would ever publish a review like the following? 

Answer:  The American Dissident.  Period.

Review of an Unusually Lame Review 

Ever read the poetry reviews in the Washington Post and New York Times?  If not, take a gander.  You might be surprised by the level of innocuousness… or perhaps not, that is, if you’re familiar with the poetry establishment.  “‘When our souls are happy,’ Charles Simic has written, ‘they talk about food.’  When my soul is happy, often enough, I want to talk about Mr. Simic,” states Dwight Garner in his latest New York Times review on several new Simic books. 

My review here is not about Simic, but rather about one of his blind fawners.  In fact, one must wonder if Garner is a paladin for publishers:  his review is scarcely longer than a lengthy back-cover blurb.  I’d copied it several weeks ago with the thought of sketching a cartoon on Simic, but I’d already done several, so that thought quickly evaporated.  Finally, I got down to looking at it.  Garner notes Simic’s stuff is “comic and elegiac” with a dash of “old world sensibility.”  Now, wouldn’t it be nice for once to read about a poet who’s stuff was hard-core truth telling and quite upsetting to the literary established order?  Sure, tell me about it.  The beginning sentence of Garner’s review should have been a line from Simic’s most potent verse.  Well, perhaps it was.   

The next indication of Simic’s potency, or rather impotency, as admired by Garner, is the following:  “In his very good new book of poems, ‘The Lunatic,’ for example, a spring day makes him so happy that, even if he had to face a firing squad, he’d ‘Smile like a hairdresser/Giving Cameron Diaz a shampoo.’  Oh, yeah, now I really want to read that book!  I’ll have to run down to the local library to see if it has a copy.  But am I dreaming?  For such verse, Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a MacArthur fellowship!  Ah, but Garner informs that earlier Simic had written a “nearly perfect collection” in 2007 in celebration of his having been anointed Poet Laureataster of the US Congress.  Talk about a dysfunctional Congress!  In fact, the latest GAO report on the Library of Congress seems to have indicated precisely that!   Too bad, Garner does not provide a “nearly perfect” line of verse from that collection to entice us to read it.

Finally, the other book reviewed is a prose collection, The Life of Images.  “Yet what’s really special about this book is that it demonstrates what a melancholy baby this poet is, in all the best ways,” notes Garner who is perhaps so blinded by his love of Simic that he doesn’t even realize the inanity pouring out of his own pen.  Perhaps he too is a “melancholy baby”?  How not to LOL.  Perhaps a cartoon of both of them in diapers singing Van Morrison’s “Melancholia” might be a good idea.  Hmm.  So, Simic was “an early foodie.”  Whoopee!  One really has to wonder how someone like Garner manages to get his hagiographies published.  Oh, yeah, I forgot, the high standards of the New York Times… and paladin of publishers.

Charles Simic

Poet Laureate of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce

Charles Simic

Poet Laureate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce