Frank Bidart

Question:  Will just one poet staff member of the Academy of American Poets respond? 

Answer:  No.

From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: jbenka@poets.org; gcoletta@poets.org; adimitrov@poets.org; engleson@poets.org; aference@poets.org; agaleo@poets.org; mgannon@poets.org; pguzman@poets.org; slasner@poets.org; plegault@poets.org; bmerrell@poets.org; mnesmith@poets.org; rquigley@poets.org; ksugar@poets.org
CC: mediarelations@wellesley.edu; fbidart@wellesley.edu
Subject: Bidart Satirized: Open Letter to the Academy of American Poets
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 14:53:13 -0400

To Staff Member Poets of the Academy of American Poets (Jennifer Benka, Alex Dimitrov, Eric Engleson, Audrey Ference, Mary Gannon, Patricia Guzman, Stacy Lasner, Paul Legault, Billy Merrell, Meghan Nesmith, Gerard Coletta, Amber Galeo, Richard Quigley, Kate Sugar):

Please forward this email to the high-and-mighty Chancellors, since their emails are not available (i.e., Victor Hernández Cruz, Toi Derricotte, Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Juan Felipe Herrera, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ron Padgett, Marie Ponsot, Claudia Rankine, Arthur Sze, Anne Waldman, and C. D. Wright).

Might there actually be a freedom-of-expression proponent amongst you and/or the Chancellors today? Might one of you actually be capable of thinking and acting exterior to the group-think, established-order poesy box? Have things changed at all at the Academy of American Poets since it censored and banned me in 2007 from commenting on its forums, or is it still censorship and indifference to censorship as usual? Your likely silence will serve as a response to that question. If just one of you is curious, for further details regarding the censorship incident, including the transcript of the censored comments, consult http://www.theamericandissident.org/orgs/academy_american_poets.html.

For cartoons of former chancellors Bidart and Hejinian just posted today on my website, consult http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/. This letter with your names will be posted under the Bidart cartoon. Thanks to the Internet, dissident poets like me do have a voice and freedom of speech scorning poets like most or ALL of you can still be publicly denounced. Finally, as Bukowski perceptibly wrote,“Poetry has long been an in-game, a snob game, a game of puzzles and incantations. It still is, and most of its practitioners operate comfortably as professors in our safe and stale universities.”