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...

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young

Intrinsic Intellectual Corruption and Disdain for Democracy in the Poetry Milieu… And Not Just Regarding the Prizes

To possess personal experience actually testing the waters of democracy in the academic/literary establishment milieu will render a poet very different from the mass of poet wordsmiths.  

"On Poets and Prizes," written by Mills College poet professors Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, published in the BLM-ideologically-bound ASAP Journal (Association for the Study of Arts of the Present), reveals through extensive research just how corrupt the poetry milieu is, though only with regards the prizes.  Oddly, the two authors avoid using the term “corrupt,” though did use the term “nepotism.”   They state that “A few years ago we began a project to understand the literary prize. We were interested in this question of whether the literary prize was impartial or not, who is favored, who left out.”  

Yet it is egregiously evident that rare poets—irrespective of skin color and ethnicity—who criticize the machine will certainly be left out.  In fact, featuring POC poets seems to have become the new ploy of magazines like Poets & Writers and organizations like the Academy of American Poets to divert attention away from the real fundamental problem—the proverbial elephant in the room—confronting the poetry establishment.  And what is that problem?  Well, read on.  

Mills College, by the way, is extremely ideological.   Simply read its webpage statement, “The Power of Community:  Mills Stands with Black Lives Matter,” to discover just how ideologically-bound it is… and NOT to freedom of expression.  Why, one must wonder, have the two poet professors accepted that status quo?   Shouldn’t poets stand for freedom of expression, more than for BLM or anything else?  Well, clearly, poets in general do not!  

Spahr and Young begin their article with a picturesque image of poets:  “Some days we think of poetry as a dead antelope and poets as the wolves, hyenas, and coyotes who come to fight over the innards, teeth bared, growling.”  But I’m not quite sure which poets the authors are referring to.  From my personal experience, poets don’t growl at all, but rather baaa like sheep, write for recognition, and often dwell in academic safe-space cocoons.  Also, many of them are parrots, echoing identity politics and critical-race theory.  Poets, in general, are cattle, as in a stable of writers, certainly not lone growling wolves howling rude truths!  That would be nefarious to careers!  

Spahr and Young provide valuable data that underscores egregious nepotism, as well as friends promoting friends, akin to the revolving door of lobbyists and politicians.  In that sense, they do counter the norm, which has been one of regarding the poetry prizes and their winners with total unquestioning and total awe-stricken admiration.  But somehow the authors seem to think the modus operandi of intrinsic corruption can be repaired, an evident pipe-dream not unlike Biden’s vacuous call for unity.  The two authors do name names and should be given kudos for doing so.  They cite a number of noteworthy examples, reflecting the academic/literary establishment’s intrinsic nature as an insiders club.  The Academy of American Poets Fellowship, for example, is awarded by a Board of Chancellors, nominated by prior Chancellors.  The MacArthur Foundation uses a selection committee of “approximately 12 people” who serve anonymously.  Lack of transparency obviously encourages intellectual corruption and absence of accountability.  And yet somehow Spahr and Young argue, “As liberal organizations, they value transparency and inclusion.”  But “inclusion” has really come to mean promoting the right skin-color and ethnicity, while excluding dissident voices.    

The two authors state that “Prizes are often the only way that poets will ever receive any meaningful compensation for their writing.”  Yet many poets are academics, who are well-salaried and job-secured.  They do not need additional money from their poetry.  Poets, in general, are certainly not living in poverty, desperate for prize money.   That is an absurd thought.  The two authors note that some poets like Adrienne Rich reaped nearly a million dollars in prize monies (examine the cartoon I sketched on Rich in 2010:  www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/239569862679528067/1316347216818343863).  They evoke Robert Pinsky, who has been a judge in nearly 40 prizes.  In essence, criticize Pinsky, as I certainly have done (examine my 2010 cartoon on him:  www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/239569862679528067/2682697761995933479), and forget about winning a Pinsky-judged prize.  The two authors mention Louise Glück, as yet “another poet with both a strong prize record and close-knit connections to other prizewinning poets.”  They state that “Pinsky, Phillips, and Glück all awarded prizes to a small, overlapping group of poets, many of whom in turn awarded them a prize (or vice versa).”  As for Glück, read my editorial and examine my cartoon (wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2020/11/louise-gluck.html).  And again, I cite my own work because, as a poet, I am a firm believer that poets ought to personally test the waters of democracy in the poetry milieu.  

“We present them as examples of how the system works, not as frauds,” somehow state Spahr and Young.  And yet clearly they (“them”) are frauds!  I think of Pinsky delivering a speech at Fitchburg State University, where I was a tenure-track professor, and his absolute refusal to respond to the issues of corruption at the college, of which I informed him prior to the speech.  Pinsky is simply a corrupt academic of the machine.  How to perceive him and any other poet laureate of the US Congress as anything but that? 

The two authors praise Foetry.com (now dead) and its librarian founder Alan D. Cordle for outing corruption, in particular, regarding Jorie Graham, who directed prizes to her current and former students.  But Cordle is/was by no means a knight in shining armor.  Read the transcript from foetry.com of a forum held to discredit The American Dissident and its editor (i.e., me), initiated by David James Callan, Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, Maytag Fellow, two-time Academy of American Poets prize winner, two-time Bowdoin Poetry prize-winner, Forbes Rickart Jr. Poetry prize winner, Associate Member of the Academy of American Poets, and foet member of now defunct Foetry.com.  As editor, I’d rejected Callan's submission to The American Dissident because Callan had not taken the time to read the guidelines, especially regarding self-congratulating credentials normally forwarded to other poetry journals.  Reading the transcript, one will discover that the foet cohort believed it had succeeded in fully trashing The American Dissident and me.  The cohort felt sad for Callan, concluding I had bullied him. 

In any case, Spahr and Young aberrantly conclude:  “So what is to be done? We are not purists who want to do away with prizes entirely, especially not at the moment they are finally being distributed to a more racially diverse group of writers.”  How original!  Diversity 101… which in reality is nothing more than Diversion 101.  As noted in my cartoon satire of the three Poets & Writers magazine honchos, why should skin color be more important than rare truth-telling individuals apt to stand up and criticize the in-lockstep poet herd?   It appears that race has indeed become far more important than truth and the courage to speak it.  Is that really progress?  

“But nor do we wish to agitate for a further reformed prize,” state the authors, “If there is anything our research has shown us, it is that even as they do their best to course correct towards transparency, equity, and inclusion, prizes will still be prizes.”  Equity and inclusion, perhaps, but only in the Orwellian sense!  Well, I wrote both poet professors Spahr and Young.  Needless to day, they never responded.

From: George Slone

Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2020 10:36 AM

To: syoung@mills.edu <syoung@mills.edu>; jspahr@mills.edu <jspahr@mills.edu>

Subject: Your ASAP article

To Juliana Spahr (Professor of English, Dean of Graduate Studies) and Stephanie Young 

(Adjunct Professor of English, Director of Creative Writing, Director of Graduate Programs, Literature and Languages), Mills College: 
A subscriber of mine just sent your ASAP Journal article to me.  I will likely be dissecting it later today.  In any case, you might wish to examine The American Dissident website and blog site, which essentially specialize in hardcore criticism of poets, artists, academics, journalists, and the academic/literary establishment in general.   

Check out my cartoon on one of the “10 Poets Who Will Change the World” (see wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2020/11/chen-chen.html), which I just posted this week, though sketched in 2018.  In fact, why not share it and the website with your students?  Likely, they have not been exposed to such raw criticism.  Indeed, what other poetry journal presents such criticism?  What other journal would actually criticize BLM?  What other journal would not only encourage criticism against its editor (me) and publish the harshest received in each and every issue?   

Note that for quite a while now (perhaps two decades), I have been criticizing poets for not wondering who the faceless judges behind the poet anointments and prizes.  BTW, once upon a time, I too was a professor… but free-speech advocacy KO’d me… though only in academe… and I do NOT regret an iota NOT having achieved tenure and emeritus status.  Rather truth than those career adornments!  Career and truth simply do NOT mesh…  

As noted in that email, The American Dissident website lists and examines numerous instances of intellectually corrupt cogs of the academic/literary establishment, which is precisely why organizations like NewPages.com, Poets & Writers, NPR, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, The Brecht Forum (NYC), Art & Letters (The Chronicle of Higher Education), Poets House, and the Poetry Foundation have chosen not to include the journal in their listings, as if it simply did not exist.  By intellectually corrupt, I mean ad hominem, circular reasoning, insiders club, lamb silence, and full rejection of valid criticism.  What is remarkable is the utter inability of poets (artists, editors, librarians, and journalists) to deal with such criticism.   The big taboo in poetry is, of course, thou shalt not criticize the poets and their organizations, publications, events, anointments, etc.. The usual (i.e., acceptable) criticism tends not to be criticism at all, but rather publicity under the guise of criticism, as illustrated by the Washington Post columns of its poetry editor Elizabeth Lund and the New York Times columns of David Orr (for my Lund and Orr cartoons, see wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2014/07/david-orr.html, wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/05/can-poetry-both-challenge-and-uplift.html, wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/03/gregory-orr-and-elizabeth-lund.html, and wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2016/11/elizabeth-lund.html).  

When poets respond to real criticism, which is rare, ad hominem tends to be their weapon of predilection, certainly not reasoned counterargument.  Zachary Bos, founder of the Boston Poetry Union, for example, simply dismissed me in 2011 as a “malcontent crank” (see theamericandissident.org/orgs/boston_poetry_union.html).  In essence, for him, anybody questioning and challenging authority—literary, academic or whichever—, was a "malcontent crank.”  More recently, I was called a “racist and homophobe” because I dared criticize a poet, who was gay and Chinese-American, though my criticism had nothing to do with that at all, but rather vis-a-vis the inane statement the poet had made (see wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2020/11/chen-chen.html).  

For several decades, I have written many essays regarding how intellectually corrupt and cowardly the poetry milieu tends to be.  My voice has largely been canceled, and I have largely been ostracized into oblivion.  Yet never do I make threats, nor do I have a criminal background of violence.  I have engaged in many instances of testing the waters of democracy vis-a-vis the academic/literary establishment.  And those waters have proven to be remarkably murky.  Below are some interesting instances, which are listed and examined with others on The American Dissident website.  

—In 2001, I was the only poet out of 150 invited poets to challenge the poetry organizer, Gaston Bellemare, at his government-funded Festival International de la Poésie de Trois-Rivières (Québec), for his prohibition of debate during the 10-day festival.  I was never invited back, and not one of the invited poets dared support my demand for free expression, which of course is not free when punished.  The local newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, refused to cover the story.  For details, though in French, examine theamericandissident.org/quebec/quebec.html.  

—On July 6, 2007, the Academy of American Poets permanently banned me from participating in its online forums.  Not one chancellor was willing to protest against the ban.  The Journal of Information Ethics published an article I wrote on the banning, “Censored by the Publicly Funded Academy of American Poets.”  For the actual censored transcript and rather piteous responses from several chancellors, see theamericandissident.org/orgs/academy_american_poets.html.  Below is an email I’d sent to Carl Phillips, mentioned by both Spahr and Young in their article.  Phillips never responded.  And yes, I was a bit pissed off.

Date:  Wed, 5 Dec 2007 12:27:58 -0800 (PST)

From:  "George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com> 

Subject:  Academy censorship... and YOU

To:  CPhillips@WUSTL.EDU

Dear Poet Prof. Chancellor Carl Phillips:
I doubt you'll ever respond, (Prof. Snyder has yet to respond), but I like to cover my bases, so to speak. and just found your email this evening.  The Academy of American Poets censored (banned) me from participating in its online forums last July.  My assumption is that you, as high and mighty established-order Chancellor, approve of this censorship.  For the details, including the banned transcript, see www.theamericandissident.org/AcademyAmericanPoets.htm.   In July, I contacted each staff member of the Academy and have yet to receive a response, let alone an apology. 
BTW, you might like to subscribe to The American Dissident.  Your students would likely find it refreshing because of its strong stance against the academic/literary established order, which of course includes you and your poet chancellor friends.  BUT it would take a very strong person to accept such critique.  To date, I've only found two such poet professors, one of whom invited me to speak before one of his English classes ( Endicott College ).  BTW, I have a doctorate and, when employed teach as a professor.  BUT when employed, unlike the bulk of professors in America , I am actively, unabashedly, and courageously vocal, so often find myself unemployed.  

 

—In 2004, Concord Poetry Center director Joan Houlihan wrote an aberrant reply regarding a suggestion I made.  It still echoes in my mind today:  “The idea of your teaching a workshop or delivering a lecture on the art of literary protest or poetry protest, or simply protest (Concord is where it all started!) occurred to me even before you mentioned it, so, yes, it’s something I will consider as we progress (this is only our first event).  However, I must say I don’t favor having you teach at the center if you protest the reading.”  Needless to say, I chose to protest the Center’s opening and choice of Pulitzer Prize poet Franz Wright as speaker.  For details (and cartoons), see theamericandissident.org/orgs/concord_poetry_center.html.  

—In 2004, I applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which rejected the request and refused to provide any useful feedback at all, simply stating, “The artistic merit of the publication is low; the design and readability of the publication is [sic] poor.”  For cartoons, an essay, etc. regarding the rejection, examine theamericandissident.org/orgs/national_endowment_for_the_arts.html.  

—In 2012, Sturgis Library, my neighborhood library, refused a free subscription offer to The American Dissident.  Due to an open letter I wrote to the directors of the Clams Library System of Cape Cod, regarding their collection development statement, in particular, “libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view,” the director of Sturgis Library, Lucy Loomis, permanently banned me without warning or due process.  For more on that despicable authoritarian decree, see theamericandissident.org/orgs/sturgis_library.html.  No threats were ever made.  And the director never stated that there were any threats.  

…………………………………………………………….

NB:  This essay was sent to Spahr, Young, and ASAP Journal.  No response was ever received.

Bards of a Feather Flock Together… 

At the Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown

[This essay, as well as a few satirical cartoons, was sent to FAWC staff and a handful of workshop poet instructors.  Nobody responded.  It was sent to Provincetown Arts and Cape Cod Poetry Review.  Nobody responded.  A vastly truncated version was also sent to the Provincetown Banner.  It was not published, despite Assoc. Ed. Edward Miller's BS:  "We are interested in your opinions."]  

  

Cape Cod, where I’ve been living for eight years, hates criticism of art and poetry.  For its art curators, poetry editors, writing professors, art-center executive directors, and cultural-council apparatchiks, criticism simply doesn’t exist.  If you stand up to criticize what needs to be criticized, as I have done, then you simply don’t exist.  If you never test the waters of democracy, then you will never know just how murky they are.  

In poetry, vigorous debate is dead. Ideology has coopted poetry (and art).  Inevitably, ideology runs counter to reason and truth.  Poets (and artists) ought to be staunch individuals with the courage to stand alone and speak truth to power (i.e., ideology) and not reside in groupthink ideological clusters.  Poets must put reason and truth first, even at the expense of money, prizes, recognition, tenure, and especially cherished ideology. 

“Generative” seems to have become the poetry workshop monkey-see, monkey-do term of the day.  Perhaps, I thought, the Urban Dictionary might have a special PC-meaning for it, but, well, it doesn’t.  So, “generative” means what it’s always meant:  producing and reproducing… ad infinitum and sometimes ad nauseam.  Regarding her workshop, Solmaz Sharif, for example, writes:  “leave with a ton of ways to generate poems.”  Patricia Spears Jones notes, regarding hers: “this workshop is designed […] to help to generate new work.”  The copycat examples abound in the Fine Arts Work Center catalogue:  “this class will utilize daily generative writing exercises” (Craig Morgan Teicher), “both generative and a workshop” (Brenda Shaughnessy), “workshop focused and generative” (Jennifer Tseng), “this generative workshop invites participants to write new poems” (Major Jackson), “once a poet locates an approach that makes quick work of the generative process” (Marcus Wicker), and “Revising & Generating: A Poetry Workshop” (Martha Rhodes).  When paid poets spend too much time with other paid poets, they inevitably end up producing generative BS.  

Grocery stores often stock tourist pamphlets, brochures, free newspapers, and other chamber-of-commerce-friendly innocuity in their entranceways next to their weekly ads, bottle-return machines, and garbage buckets.  Thus, I picked up the 73-page glossily-expensive “Creativity [i.e., Generativity] Thrives Here” catalogue from one of them, thinking I’d likely come up with a couple of critical cartoon ideas from it.  And sure enough, I did, though there was more in it with that regard than I ever could have expected.  In fact, the catalogue seemed to incarnate the mind-numbing world of poetry workshops, which serve, more than anything else, to propagate the recognition status of workshop poet-instructors, to “generate” more money for them, and especially to “generate” more reams of vacuous, establishment and ideology-friendly verse.  

How to make great brouhaha out of great nothingness?  Poetry was once a solitary activity.  Now, it’s become pervaded by groupthink groups and groupies, lack-of-originality hip-hop jazz poesy readings, poetry tourists, and increasing pervasive self-congratulating and backslapping ad nauseam.  “Fine Arts Work Center Writing Fellows have won virtually every major literary prize awarded in the United States,” boasts the staff (Executive Director Michael Roberts, Writing Coordinator Sophia Starmack, Online Writing Coordinator Jill McDonough, Marketing and Communications Director Cary Raymond, Associate Director Bette Warner et al).  Throughout the catalogue, the boasting (i.e., backslapping and self-congratulating) is echoed over and again.  “This extraordinary group of poets and writers will be celebrated throughout 2018 in a series of readings and conversations in and around Provincetown.”  “The caliber of our Summer Workshops faculty is unparalleled.  Nightly readings and artist talks offer students a rare opportunity to learn from and interact with faculty at the highest levels of their disciplines.”  “Work Center fellows have gone on to number among the most accomplished artists and writers working today, winning MacArthurs, Whitings, Pollock-Krasners, Tiffanys, Prix de Romes, Guggenheims, National Book Awards, and eight Pulitzer Prizes.”  

But what does “accomplished” really mean in the realm of poetry, if not 100% coopted by the academic/literary establishment?  The true purpose of FAWC is exposed in the last sentence of its own introduction:  “Our programming also offers 100 public events, bringing 10,000 annual visitors to Provincetown…”  Tourism!  Money!  Tourism!  Money!  Those visitors will pour money into the restaurants, motels, and souvenir shops.  The entire June 10th to August 24th FAWC workshop event really does incarnate the business of poetry and art:  the selling of accommodations ($800/six nights), books, artwork, tickets to see singing poets, etc., as well as the very selling out of renowned poets and artists.  

Immediately after the introduction page, a handful of pages are devoted to FAWC’s other purpose, which is really the same purpose:  money.  “Our 50th Anniversary Campaign 1968-2018:  The Goal—Raise $5 Million.”  And of course the wealthier FAWC becomes, the more it will reward unquestioning and unchallenging poets and artists, who toe the line of inoffensiveness, with fellowship grants. 

Somehow, prizes and popularity seem to cast a faux-air of objective determination of brilliance upon certain poets.  But poetry, like art, is entirely subjective, no matter how much the machine wants us to think its objective.  Might any of the poet and artist FAWC “faculty” possess the capacity to even contemplate when poetry and art become tourist attractions, they’ve inevitably become castrated or coopted?  And for that to occur, something intrinsically wrong must occur in the very heart of poetry and art.  In reality, FAWC’s “renowned faculty” of poets and artists have been well-trained like donkeys.  Hold a carrot (i.e., money, fellowships, tenure, prizes, renown et al) in front of their snouts and they’ll move toward the carrot in an innocuous waddle.  

Of the numerous (I avoid the term “diverse”) workshops offered in the catalogue, many, if not most, are in poetry, each lasting six days and costing $600 to $725 to attend (There are also a number of online workshops offered lasting up to two months.).  Now, what kind of poet is going to spend that kind of money to attend a poetry workshop?  Well, a trained poet will do that because he or she feels the need for more training.  He or she also wants to rub elbows with renowned workshop poets and make connections, which will hopefully lead to increased recognition and even prizes.  Perhaps also he or she is being supported by grants of public or university money, so it’s not coming out of his or her own pocket.  And, after all, isn’t “recognition” the goal of the poet today?  It certainly isn’t rude-truth telling, as in “go upright and vital and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson).  Indeed, you ain’t gonna find that at the FAWC, nor are you going to find poets apt to go against the grain of the poetry machine, as in “let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” (Thoreau).  

But, of course, you’ll find plenty of ideologically-correct (i.e., PC) variety poets and artists, especially during FAWC’s “Social Justice Week” of “Writers & Artists as Activists,” or rather as Blind-Ideologues of Democrat-Party-line propaganda.  So, poets, who don’t share the party-line views on global warming (uh, climate change), open borders, gun control, #me too, BLM, anti-white racism (i.e., white privilege), islamophobia, hate speech, and so on, will have to adorn an additional muzzle, that is, if they wish to keep their recognition status and teach future poetry workshops at FAWC. 

“Writing the Forbidden: A Poetry Workshop” seemed to take the prize, amongst all the workshops, for contradictory absurdity.  After all, the rude truth regarding “writing the forbidden,” as in this very essay, would be forbidden at FAWC.  Earlier this year, I had already written the forbidden regarding Provincetown Arts magazine and received this memorable response from its brilliant editor, Christopher Busa:  

Silly Slone, I was trained in literary studies during a decade in graduate school with some of the foremost critics of the time. Your idea of criticism, from the shrillness of your rants, excludes any sense of illumination. Please do not contact me again.

And when I wrote back regarding that comment, Busa continued with his, uh, “rant.”

Clearly, your eyes are too clouded to read excellent writing, let alone understand. You are a silly pest that sucks blood from living things. 

And so, what was the monstrously horrible thought crime that merited such a response from the high-and-mightily educated Busa?  Well, below is the email I’d sent.   

To Christopher Busa, Founder and Editor, Provincetown Arts, “An annual magazine devoted to art, writing & theater since 1985”:  

Might I humbly suggest that you insert the word “establishment” in front of the word “art” in your subtitle?  After all, should not art and writing be concerned with rude truth?  

I attach a challenging aquarelle because it stands at the crux, at your very problematic crux.  Examine it, that is, if you still have an iota of curiosity regarding things exterior to your art-establishment safe space.   Why will nobody publish it?  Is that a problem?  Yes!  It is a problem.  It is at the very crux of the art problem… to the extent that any artist even capable of contemplating it will likely experience problems in the world of the art establishment, your world.  I also attach the old aquarelle I did with you standing in the background.  

“Go away troll,” had written one of your poesy-establishment cover girls, Eileen Myles.  And indeed that seems to be the extent of permissible debate in the establishment world of poesy and art today.  Rude truth is not permitted in such safe spaces!  Only ideological echoing is permitted.  The crux!  Think!  Now, why not one little page in your journal devoted to criticism of you and your journal?  Pipe dream?  You bet!  The crux!  Think!

The two aquarelle (and a cartoon on Myles) can viewed on the American Dissident blogsite (http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/05/sebastian-smee.html, http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2016/08/eileen-myles.html, and http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/07/kevin-howard.html).  I also posted the cartoon I sketched on Busa after receiving his response of raving indignity (see http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/07/christopher-busa.html).  

Criticize the establishment and it usually goes whacko… or more often reacts as if you didn’t even exist (i.e., deafening silence, though with eternal ostracizing).  

Well, I do not digress because Busa is likely as tightly linked with FAWC as he is with the Chamber of Commerce and its diverse cultural councils and art centers.  One must wonder if any real dissident poets or artists even exist in the tightly-bound Provincetown community.  And what happens when “dissidents” become the establishment?  Well, clearly they were never really “dissidents” to begin with.  Think of Ai Weiwei, darling of the art establishment today and FAWC “special guest.”  

Anyhow, “award-winning poet” Jennifer Tseng, the instructor and creator of the “Writing the Forbidden” workshop, declares in a not very forbidden statement, “What’s forbidden to one writer may not be forbidden to another.”  She then puts forth the supposed taboo-breaking purpose of the workshop:  “Whatever your forbidden territory is, visit it with curiosity and attention.  We proceed as risk-takers together.”  It would be quite surprising, of course, if Tseng and her adult poet students could even fathom the real great taboo, let alone risk breaking it:  thou shalt not question and challenge the academic/literary establishment, including its icons, literary prizes, awards, judges, cultural apparatchiks, and various organizations like FAWC itself.  After all, doing so, might really entail risk, that is, risk of no more paid FAWC workshops, of career destruction, of diminution of recognition and eternal exclusion.  And so, I sketched my first cartoon from the catalogue on Tseng.  Does that mean I’m racist or misoginist and not a worshipper of identity politics?  Perhaps.  And, if so, I don’t give a damn.  My purpose is truth, not recognition, not obtaining a prize, award, fellowship, grant or workshop to teach, and especially not obtaining PC-certification.  Truth.  Nothing but the truth.  And for that, you shall never hear or read of my existence in Provincetown Arts or Poetry magazine.  

Now, Tseng might very well be a nice person.  But how can a dissident poet like me not call her out for helping the establishment give the false impression that it is somehow open to criticism and risk-taking poets who really dare go against its grain?  Yes, for the truth, I have sacrificed teaching jobs, publication possibilities, invitations, and grants, as well as the very right to enter my neighborhood library.  Indeed, my very civil rights are being denied today because I am not permitted to attend any cultural or political events held there, thanks to the permanent trespass decree issued by Sturgis Library director Lucy Loomis (see theamericandissident.org/orgs/sturgis_library.html).  Might any of the renowned FAWC poets give a damn about that?  Of course not!  Perhaps Tseng might wish to consider working for Xi Jinping as a propagandist.  Well, she’s already working for Michael Roberts.  

One thing these poet characters seem to have in common is their worship of the poetry prizes.  Don’t-Bite-the-Hand-That-Feeds Poet Cornelius Eady—NEA, Guggenheim, Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Lamont Prize and Pulitzer nominee—boasts, for example, “I read a lot—manuscripts I’ve read for contests have turned into Nat’l Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners.”  He and his ilk seem entirely incapable of questioning and challenging the prizes (e.g., who are the judges? what are their ideological and stylistic prejudices?) or perceiving their precise role in the cooptation (i.e., castration) of poetry.  A poet who is fed by the establishment like Eady is a poet of the establishment.  

FAWC poets are clearly lost in verbosity, which can only create superfluity and general lack of originality.  What to think of poet assistant professor of Creative Writing (Kansas State University), NEA Fellow et al Traci Brimhall’s statement:  “We will focus on how to create a balance of tension in poems between clarity and wilderness, narrative and music, emotion and intellect.  Using models and exercises, we will generate [oh, yeah, generate!] new work that tries to balance our inherent strengths by employing vocabulary, syntax, and tonal choices we normally shy away from.  Sign up for a tune up.”  Mind-numbing!  Anything but rude truth!  The poetess as filler of reams and reams…

The brouhaha in the catalogue is deafening… and utterly dumbing.  “Artist as Activist: Ai Weiwei.”  Oh, yeah, but Weiwei is certainly not an activist against the bourgeois art and poetry scene that’s been feeding him royally or rather as royalty.  “Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project.”  Yes, imagine the poems that tenured-academic, government-anointed poet laureate Pinsky would choose.  

(see wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2010/06/common-citizens-plea-for-justice-equity.html).  Or how about tenured academic Fred Marchant, who has kept the doors of his Suffolk University Poetry Center  hermetically closed to the poets published in The American Dissident (see 

http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2012/05/fred-marchant.html)?  Yes, his poetry workshop, “Writing the Water Songs,” will surely make waves in the poetry establishment.  Oh, yeah.  It’s enough to make a thinking, unattached poet puke.  Or how about “we will have a good time” workshop poet Eileen Myles, who dismissed me as a “troll” because I dared criticize her identity-politics inanity.  Her “Basic Tools:  A Poetry Workshop” will surely highlight how safe-space cocooned poets like her cannot bare to be criticized.  

The descriptions of the workshops not only echo tedious repetition, but also absurdity and silliness:  “Keep Your Foot on the Sustain Pedal:  Writing Long Poems” (Ed Skoog); “Delightful Duos:  Collaborating Poets” (Laura Madeline Wiseman) [How not to think of the French collabos during WWII!]; “The Poet as Spy:  4 Tricks from Espionage” (Jillian Weise); “Anthro-Poetics: Living, Seeing, and Wonder” (Nomi Stone); “I Am Trying to Be Marvelous:  The Poetics of Body Positivity” (Emilia Phillips); and “Griffins, Harpies, and Jackalopes:  Hybrid Poetics” (Sarah Rose Nordgren).  Why are these superfluous workshops even created?  To fill available space at FAWC?  Ross Gay describes his exciting workshop:  “In this generative workshop, we will stoke our imaginations by (often collaboratively) writing and performing mini operas, puppet plays, poem-type things, making books, studying flowers, and making a way together.”  And shouldn’t poets expect more from FAWC Board of Trustees workshop instructor and poet laureate of New York, Sarah Lawrence College professor Marie Howe, who begins the description “Intention & Discovery:  Form as Portal, Form as Path” with “This workshop is primarily generative”?  For poets of the machine, forme always takes precedent over fond (substance).  In fact, for many of them, poetry does not even need fond.  

Why is criticism of the poetry machine conspicuously absent as a workshop possibility?  Surely, it would provoke ample discussion and even thought amongst the poets.  “Against the Machine:  An Unusual Poetry Workshop.”  In this workshop, poets will not be encouraged to generate or fill reams and reams of paper with vapid theme-based verse.  Instead, they will focus on questioning and challenging all things poetry, including FAWC itself, poetry prizes, fellowships, other monetary lures, and what it really means to be a recognized poet.  They will be encouraged, by the instructor, to question and challenge the instructor himself.  Pipe dream?  You bet!

Money serves to tame poets and artists.  “The ambitious goal will grow our $1.5 million endowment by $3.5 million which will underwrite our residency program and provide additional resources to bring senior and mid-career artists and writers to Provincetown, offering our Fellows essential mentorship,” notes FAWC.  So much money will surely serve to further muzzle and fully control poetry by enhancing the already insurmountable propaganda machine led by Poetry Foundation’s $200 million endowment, managed by investment bankers of course.  

“Fellows are accepted entirely on the excellence of work submitted,” notes FAWC.  But who determines what “excellence” constitutes?  Can criticism of the bourgeois writing industry ever be considered “excellence”?  Of course not!  FAWC then quotes one of its obedient backslapping Writing Fellows, Ann Patchett, who seems to incarnate the vacuity of bourgeois writers of the writing industry:   “It is quite easy to bet on a horse that you know has already won.  What the Fine Arts Work Center does is it bets on the horses that haven’t run yet.  And to give the gift to people who need it, in order to save their lives, is the difference between handling someone a laurel and handing someone a lifetime.”  Patchett, the horse, argues in The Guardian, “If writers are to survive we must take responsibility for ourselves and our industry.”  When poetry becomes an industry as it already has, then poetry is dead.  Finally, one might wish to contemplate the likelihood that no “great” poet of the past ever took a course in poetry, let alone a poetry workshop.  But that very thought ineluctably runs counter to the industry grain.  For those who I did not mention in this essay, please forgive me.  There are just far too many of you carrot-chasing poet donkeys to critique in one essay.  Opening the hermetically-sealed doors to a wee bit of criticism might provoke a wee bit of unusual debate, open the scope of acceptable poetry, and even get workshop poets to perhaps seek a wee bit of originality, as opposed to copycat generative BS.  Poet Charles Bukowski provides some rare words of poet wisdom:  “A writer is going to get resistance to his work always unless he feeds the mass mind the pap they [sic] want.  The only thing you can do is write the way you want to write and to hell with everything else.  It’s better to fail your way than succeed their way.  […] If you fail to make anybody hate you, then you haven’t done your job.”  Well, then I guess I sure as hell have at least done my job…

Paul Muldoon

Below is a cartoon I sketched in 2003, over 15 years ago.  I post it now because I am once again contemplating the pitiful, blind, coopted and castrated, open-wide-and-swallow poets of the establishment.  In fact, I am trying unsuccessfully to locate the Pulitzer judges for the poetry prize for 2018 in an effort to out their likely egregious bias.  

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Elizabeth Lund

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Poetry-as-Usual:  A Brief Review of a Brief Review

“The key reason for the smallness of the audience for poetry is that people associate poetry with school…”

—Billy Collins

What to scribble when famous poets and their hagiographers have nothing to say and never dare transgress the space space of literary careerism?  Well, Elizabeth Lund, publishing house pusher, uh, literary critic at Washington Post, illustrates the problem in her brief essay, “Best poetry of the month: New collections by Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky,” where not an iota of criticism… just the kind of praise one might expect from a court jester introducing a poet laureate to a Hillarius, the First.  In this case, it’s two poet laureates.  

Well, at least Lund didn’t take the leap to best poetry of the century.  However, she still piles it on.  For Collins’ The Rain in Portugal, it’s “dry wit,” “subtle twists,” “fanciful landscape,” “richness,” “biting moments,” and “evocative and lovely.”  The subjects Collins writes about, anything but critical of the academic/literary hand that feeds him so royally, include conversations with an imaginary sister, thoughts of Shakespeare on an airplane, Keith Richards holding up the world, a weathervane, a “veggie platter that suggests the impermanence of life,” and “an encounter with a brown rabbit that could be the late Seamus Heaney.”  Yes, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud!  No, I am not making these things up, nor apparently is Lund, who argues:  “The constant shifting in these pieces provides both pleasure and a vivid example of how one’s thoughts, when unrestrained, can lead to unexpected destinations.”  Allow me to paraphrase with a touch of hard-core critique: “how one’s thoughts, when restrained, can lead to expected destinations… of utter fluff.”  

As for the other academic careerist and distinguished fellow, Pinsky—you know, that working-class guy from New Jersey—, it’s always quite safe to write about subjects distant from his little cocoon in the intellectually corrupt academy, in this case, Boston University, which was accorded the worst rating for freedom of speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (see 

https://www.thefire.org/schools/boston-university/ and https://www.thefire.org/speech-code-of-the-month-boston-university/).  Does Pinsky care about that rating?  Not in the least!  Yet how can a poet survive chained down by speech codes (i.e., without freedom of speech)?  Well, Pinsky apparently has no problem at all with that!  

His latest book, At the Foundling Hospital,” concerns “infants, slaves and immigrants.”  Perhaps a plea for open borders or support for Black Lives Matter?  Again, Lund lauds with unoriginal high-brow laudanum:   “tremendous range of thought,” “ability to weave together complex ideas into resonant poems,” “sophisticated,” “refined music,” “gives voice to various gods,” and forces “readers to rethink the wisdom they know.”  Man, Pinsky must be a god himself to be able to do all of that!  Lord, I better get down on my prayer rug.  Hmm.  And brilliantly Lund decides the poems themselves are foundlings.  Oh, she’ll surely bring a smile to Pinsky!  

Yes, poet laureates Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky not only have the stamp of Congressional approval, but, according to Lund, provide fascinating, if not brilliant, examples of… absolute fluff.  

Collins is wrong regarding the key reason for small poetry audiences.  The real reason is gutless, boring poets, not to mention gutless, boring poetry reviews, and poetry devoid of purpose.  Well, he gets it right with that regard: “Poetry is aimless, not purposeful. The poem is dancing with itself.”