Frank Bidart

Open Letter to Poetry Professor Frank Bidart

Why the Need for Hullabaloo in the Poetry Milieu?

It is truly amazing that few, very few if any, intellectuals question the literary prizes and wonder what might be the biases of the faceless judges awarding them.  In the world of establishment literature, just that thought alone constitutes blasphemy and makes this essay unpublishable.  Raise the thought and be prepared for full ostracizing.  When it comes to the literary prizes, journalists and literati are an open-wide-and-swallow groupthink mentality.  “Finally a comic novel gets a Pulitzer Prize.  It’s about time,” noted the Washington Post; “If we valued black art, Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer would have been for literature,” praised the Guardian; “Wellesley College professor wins prize for poetry,” stated the Boston Globe. 

Poet Charles Bukowski, one of the few known poets who dared criticize the poetry establishment, 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.”  

So, Professor Frank Bidart, do you think your Wellesley College poetry students can understand the implications inherent in that statement?  In fact, are you yourself capable of understanding them?  And why didn’t Bukowski ever win the Pulitzer Prize?  The key to independent thinking is literary dissection, certainly not literary hullabaloo.  In his Boston Globe piece, Martin Finucane echoed that you, the new Pulitzer Prize-winner for poetry, are “one of America’s most respected poets."   But what does that mean?  Was there a vote?  If so, who got to vote and who didn’t?  Who is doing the “respecting” and what does “respected” by the establishment really imply?  Moreover, can one be respected if one questions and challenges the “respecters”?  Likely not!  And that is the crux. 

Privileged poets get to anoint other privileged poets, who get to distribute the prizes, who get to dish out the grants, who decide who shall be published or invited to speak, who determines who gets tenure and who doesn’t, and most importantly who shall be ostracized, silenced, and censored.  They form the poetry establishment (i.e., the “respecters”), which normally consists of well-to-do privileged academic poets with bourgeois lifestyles.  They have real faces, some of which can be examined on the Academy of American Poets website.  How does one get to be one of those privileged poets?  Evidently, as mentioned, the road to privileged “poetdom” does not normally consist of questioning and challenging privileged poets.  On the contrary, it normally consists of praising those poets and their poetry.  Open wide and swallow is the requisite modus operandi of those wishing to join the gang.  Journalists in general share that modus operandi.  Just examine the diverse poetry reviews they publish in the New Yorker, New York Times, Poets & Writers, and Washington Post, for example.  They tend inevitably not to be critiques, but rather hagiographies. 

Regarding your Pulitzer-anointed book of poetry, the Globe article notes that Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy declared it was “a volume of unyielding ambition and remarkable scope that mixes long, dramatic poems with short elliptical lyrics, building on classical mythology and reinventing forms of desire that defy societal norms.”  Canedy’s remark is in essence a flurry of highbrow vacuity with a touch of contradiction, for to be anointed, one can do anything but “defy societal norms,” unless of course those “norms” are left undefined.  What precisely have you done to defy them?   No examples are provided; no examples are demanded.  Is a lifetime career in the ivory tower a defiance? 

The principle “societal norm,” of course, constitutes, above all else:  thou shalt not criticize the academic/literary established order—its icons, its chancellors, its prizes, its literary journals, and its organizations.  You, of course, have bowed to that norm.  Your very career has depended on congealed genuflection.  The careers of aspiring poets, some of your students perhaps, depend on congealed genuflection.  

Today, poetry for the established order has come to mean anything but hardcore criticism of that order.  That has become the norm—the only real norm existent in poetry.  Break it and be prepared for full ostracizing, banning, and censorship.   The poetry establishment has no backbone.  And one can only make that discovery when one actually tests its waters, as I have done for the past three decades.   Categorical dismissal by banning, ostracizing, censorship, and ad hominem inevitably form part of those murky waters.   That has certainly been my experience.  Is the establishment open to criticism?  Certainly not!  In fact, I’d be amazingly surprised if The Wellesley News student newspaper would deign to publish this open letter. 

“I’m certainly very pleased,” you noted in that Globe article.  “When you start out as a poet, you’re very aware of older poets who have won the Pulitzer, and it very often happens that the poets I most admire won it in their old age, Wallace Stevens, for example. And I’m 78 now. So it’s very pleasing to have won before I climb into the ground.”  Well, when I started out, I didn’t give a damn about poets who won the Pulitzer… and still don’t.  Poets who win the Pulitzer are generally sellouts— highbrow bourgeois word spinners and slingers, far, far from risk-taking rude-truth tellers.   And on that note, how not to think of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” in particular, “I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges [e.g., Pulitzer Prize] and names, to large societies and dead institutions.  Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.” 

Perhaps you are teaching, via your own example, the very opposite of what Emerson had stated: “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.”  In other words, for conformity the world whips you with its pleasure.  Students of poetry should be taught to question the prizes—who are the faceless judges according them, what are their biases—and prize winners, not simply open wide and swallow in celebration!   

Finally, in 2013, I posted on my blogsite a cartoon I’d sketched on you, as well as an email written to the Academy of American Poets to which you served as one of its high-and-mighty chancellors.  Sometime later, you posted a comment.  Well, I just noticed it yesterday:  “I'm bewildered. When did I ‘favor the censoring of a fellow poet’? When did I favor censoring anybody, except those yelling fire in a crowded theater when there's no fire? I'm not without sin, but I don't recognize the incident or occasion or situation you're talking about. Your criticism would cut deeper if I knew what you're talking about.” 

And so, when did you favor the censoring of a fellow poet, me, for example?  The answer to that question oddly appeared right below the posted cartoon in that email:  “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 groupthink, 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?”  

Why didn’t you, chancellor at the time, stand up to protest the censorship (removal) of my comments from the Academy of American Poets website and the prohibiting of my further commenting on its site?  By remaining silent, you sided with and continue to side with the censors.  Is that so difficult to comprehend?  Apparently, it was and still is… for you.  In fact, do you expose your students to the critical viewpoints of those exterior to the poetry establishment like those published in The American Dissident, for example?  If not, why not?  Your college librarian won’t even respond to a request that he or she consider subscribing.  

Please note that this “Open Letter” was sent to your English Department colleagues at Wellesley in the hope that might help instigate you or one of them to respond.  It has been my long experience dealing with academics and other literati, which has led me to conclude they detest outside criticism and vigorous debate.  Groupthink echo is not vigorous debate.  Careerism, not rude-truth telling, tends overwhelmingly to be their and your m.o.  Diversity is hardly a strength with that in mind.  I’ve also sent it to student editors Jane Vaughan and Alexandria Otero of The Wellesley News, though doubt wholeheartedly they will possess the independence and courage to publish it.  In conclusion, I wrote the following in 2008 and sent it to the Chancellors, you included.  You, of course, never responded.  To this day, as far as I am aware, I am still prohibited from commenting on the Academy of American Poets website…  

Open Letter to the Honorable Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets*

Only three of you have deigned to respond to my concerns of the censorship effected by the Academy of American Poets last July, though not one of you has proven eager to engage in vigorous debate with that regard.  As an American citizen, I therefore consider all of you far more reprehensible, than honorable.  Your blacklisting me as poeta non grata is shameful, to say the least.  By the way, your responses, names, and email addresses have all been incorporated into the updated webpage created to denounce the censorship approved by you (see http://theamericandissident.org/orgs/academy_american_poets.html). Please do examine it.  In fact, why not have your students examine it?!  After all, don’t you publicly consider their interests more important than yours?      

In case you are still unaware, vigorous debate is the cornerstone of democracy. Why, one must ask, is it not also the cornerstone of the publicly-funded Academy of American Poets?  And why do all of you shun it like the plague?  After all, almost all of you are or were tenured professors.  What on earth, one must wonder, are you or were you teaching your students:  sycophancy, censorship, political correctitude, speech codes, the benefits of McCarthy-like inquisitions?  Well, tenure tends to destroy minds; it doesn’t free them.  

Finally, prize-winning poets like all of you are perhaps known for your ability to spin an ingenious line of poetry, but certainly you are hardly at all known for the courage to act alone and against the grain of the established-order milieu awarding the prizes.  And that is precisely why you are not great and will never be great.  And that is why you will never be held in high esteem by any independently thinking human being.  Sadly, you’ve all become cogs in the machine.  “Let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine,” had written Thoreau.  Well, that’s who I am, a counterfriction…

Sincerely,

G. Tod Slone, Ed.

The American Dissident, a 501 c3 nonprofit literary journal providing 

a forum for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy

www.theamericandissident.org

1837 Main St.

Concord, MA 01742

……………………………

*Frank Bidart (Wellesley College), Lyn Hejinian (University of California at Berkeley), Sharon Olds (New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program), Kay Ryan (New York’s Central Park Zoo), Gerald Stern (University of Iowa Writers' Workshop), C. K. Williams (Princeton University), Rita Dove (University of Virginia), Galway Kinnell (New York University), Carl Phillips (Washington University at St. Louis), Gary Snyder (University of California at Davis), James Tate (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), Robert Hass (University of California at Berkeley, Nathaniel Mackey (University of California at Santa Cruz), Robert Pinsky (Boston University), Susan Stewart (Princeton University), and Ellen Bryant Voigt (Warren Wilson College)

NB:  As expected, not one English professor, including Bidart, and neither of the student editors deigned to respond to this open letter.

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From: George Slone

Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2018 7:44 AM

To: thewellesleynews@gmail.com

Cc: fbidart@wellesley.edu; kbrogan@wellesley.edu; wcain@wellesley.edu; mcezaire@wellesley.edu; dchiasso@wellesley.edu; pfisher@wellesley.edu; ogonzalez@wellesley.edu; ahickey@wellesley.edu; ylee@wellesley.edu; klynch@wellesley.edu; smeyer@wellesley.edu; jnoggle@wellesley.edu; tpeltaso@wellesley.edu; lrodensk@wellesley.edu; lrosenwald@wellesley.edu; msabin@wellesley.edu; vshetley@wellesley.edu; yko@wellesley.edu; msides@wellesley.edu

Subject: Open Letter to Frank Bidart

To Co-Editors-in-Chief Jane Vaughan and Alexandria Otero, The Wellesley News, Student Newspaper of Wellesley College:
Please publish the following “Open Letter,” regarding one of your professors, Frank Bidart.  Of course, I am a realist and would be surprised if you decide to publish it, let alone respond to this email.  Why?  Well, evidently colleges have become training facilities, as opposed to educational ones that reflect democracy’s principles, freedom of speech and vigorous debate.  Also, I did contact your paper in 2013, regarding another issue, and never received a response.  In any case, thank you for your hopeful attention.

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From: George Slone

Sent: Friday, April 27, 2018 7:10 AM

To: tcushman@wellesley.edu; csowa@wellesley.edu

Cc: thewellesleynews@gmail.com; fbidart@wellesley.edu; kbrogan@wellesley.edu; wcain@wellesley.edu; mcezaire@wellesley.edu; dchiasso@wellesley.edu; pfisher@wellesley.edu; ogonzalez@wellesley.edu; ahickey@wellesley.edu; ylee@wellesley.edu; klynch@wellesley.edu; smeyer@wellesley.edu; jnoggle@wellesley.edu; tpeltaso@wellesley.edu; lrodensk@wellesley.edu; lrosenwald@wellesley.edu; msabin@wellesley.edu; vshetley@wellesley.edu; yko@wellesley.edu; msides@wellesley.edu

Subject: Testing the murky waters of democracy at Wellesley College

To Thomas Cushman, Director, and Caryn Sowa, Program Manager, the Wellesley College Freedom Project,

Please distribute this email to the other Freedom Project members.  It might or might not be of interest to you that in vain I contacted the Wellesley News student editors on several occasions.  No response was their freedom response.  Also, in vain I contacted the English professors, offering a highly critical essay on one of them, Pulitzer poet Frank Bidart.  No response was their freedom response.   Is silence the new vigorous debate at Wellesley?  Will no response be the Freedom Project response?  On yet another occasion, I contacted an English professor, Dan Chiasson, who did respond by essentially calling me a racist and threatening to contact campus police.  

Can professors really be so fragile at Wellesley College?  And if so, what does that teach their students?  Well, it teaches them that feelings trump freedom of speech and vigorous debate, cornerstones of democracy!  Moreover, Prof. Chiasson requested I cease contacting him and anyone else connected to the college.  So, here I disobey that request by contacting you.  Please do not send your Campus Police down to Cape Cod to put me in handcuffs for my various speech crimes!  

For the email (and cartoons) I sent to Prof. Chiasson, as well as his rather troubling email response, please do examine http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/04/dan-chiasson.html.  Also, below you can read the essay I sent to the English professors, as well as my correspondence.  Do you think the items might warrant imprisonment?  It is true that my "tone" might not be in-line with expected academic "tone," but from my perspective the tone is the message is the tone.  Besides, I never make threats and have no criminal record of violence whatsoever.  Hopefully, you will not agree with Prof. Chiasson, regarding the Campus Police…

[No response was ever received.] 

Dan Chiasson

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For the Record--Wellesley College

Interestingly, the following intellectual scuffle began when I read a Boston Globe hagiography on the new Pulitzer Prize winner, Professor Frank Bidart of Wellesley College. I'd sketched a cartoon on Bidart several years ago, so checked to see if I'd posted it online.  I had... and discovered Bidart had actually left a comment on it in 2013.  Thus, I wrote a criticism of him, including my comment on his comment, and sent it to the student newspaper, The Wellesley News.  No response.  Well, it didn't respond to the Hillary cartoon I'd sent about three years ago.  I also sent it to all of Bidart's English professor colleagues, which is how I "bumped into" Dan Chiasson.  

Poet/Critic/Professor Dan Chiasson is employed by the New Yorker and Wellesley College.  He alleges that my criticism constitutes a "BORDERLINE HARASSING NOTE" and the three cartoons (each pertaining to the New Yorker) I sent with it to be "RACIST."  The "note" appears immediately below.  Chiasson's rather mind-numbing comment follows, including his threat to inform Campus Police (oh, my!), and request that I cease trying to engage in vigorous debate, cornerstone of a thriving democracy.   My comment regarding his comment then appears.  (When someone asks me to SHUT UP, I generally ignore them!)  And finally the three cartoons appear.  

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Not one of Chiasson's English professor colleagues deigned to respond.  Vigorous debate is certainly not a cornerstone of the English Department!  

Finally, bellowing RACISM is an infantile tactic used to terminate debate.  Might it be surprising that a Harvard PhD like Chiasson employs that tactic?  Not really...

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From: George Slone
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2018 9:12 AM
To: dchiasso@wellesley.edu
Subject: Three criticisms of the New Yorker...

To Dan Chiasson, Poetry Professor, Wellesley College, Poet & Critic for the New Yorker:

Well, I sort of laughed when I saw “Poet and critic” highlighted on your Wellesley College Professor of English biography page.  After all, isn’t that an oxymoron of sorts, considering that in today’s academic/literary milieu, critic has come to mean anything but “rude truth”?   It’s the sales, stupid!  The sales of poetry books!  

Anyhow, perhaps I’ve jolted you a tad this morning in your world of backslapping and self-congratulating.  Ainsi soit-il.  In an effort to instigate a wee bit of vigorous debate, I attach three cartoon sketches I did regarding the New Yorker.  The first one was used for the front cover of one of my books.  Of course, those contacted at the New Yorker remained silent.  Silence, of course, tends to be the modus operandi of those working within the establishment when criticized from outside the establishment, although on rare occasions ad hominem might result.  

Finally, if you’d like to invite me to one of your classes to speak about The American Dissident and my experiences in the censoring, ostracizing, and banning world of poetry, I’d be most happy to jump into my car.  Just let me know.  Thank you for your attention.  

Sincerely,

G. Tod Slone, PhD (Université de Nantes, FR), aka P. Maudit

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From: Dan Chiasson

Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2018 8:03 AM

To: George Slone

Cc: thewellesleynews@gmail.com; fbidart@wellesley.edu; kbrogan@wellesley.edu; wcain@wellesley.edu; mcezaire@wellesley.edu; pfisher@wellesley.edu; ogonzalez@wellesley.edu; ahickey@wellesley.edu; ylee@wellesley.edu; klynch@wellesley.edu; smeyer@wellesley.edu; jnoggle@wellesley.edu; tpeltaso@wellesley.edu; lrodensk@wellesley.edu; lrosenwald@wellesley.edu; msabin@wellesley.edu; vshetley@wellesley.edu; yko@wellesley.edu; msides@wellesley.edu

Subject: Re: Open Letter to Frank Bidart

Dear George Slone, In the interest of transparency I will also now forward to The Wellesley News, and to The College Police, the borderline harassing note you sent to me yesterday, and copies of the racist cartoons you attached. Please cease and desist contact with me and everyone associated with the College. 

Dan Chiasson

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From: George Slone

Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2018 6:35 PM

To: Dan Chiasson

Cc: thewellesleynews@gmail.com; fbidart@wellesley.edu; kbrogan@wellesley.edu; wcain@wellesley.edu; mcezaire@wellesley.edu; pfisher@wellesley.edu; ogonzalez@wellesley.edu; ahickey@wellesley.edu; ylee@wellesley.edu; klynch@wellesley.edu; smeyer@wellesley.edu; jnoggle@wellesley.edu; tpeltaso@wellesley.edu; lrodensk@wellesley.edu; lrosenwald@wellesley.edu; msabin@wellesley.edu; vshetley@wellesley.edu; yko@wellesley.edu; msides@wellesley.edu

Subject: Re: Open Letter to Frank Bidart

Dan Chiasson,

Thanks for your amazing response.  Now, you have me shaking in my boots regarding the College Police!  Will they drive down to the Cape, knock on my door, and put handcuffs on my wrists?  Well, nothing really surprises me these days, especially on the part of poets and professors.   Your email in itself is “harassing” in its evident effort to push in-lockstep fascist pc-groupthink and stifle my First Amendment rights to speak my mind, not your mind.  But, unlike you, I possess a solid backbone, so will not wear a muzzle, despite your request.  I would rather be banished to a left-wing Stalinist gulag, than be stifled by your ilk.  

BTW, “borderline harassing” is not illegal.  Do you even know what the legal definition of harassment is?  Allow me to help you (and your colleagues) with that.  For a person to be punished by law for harassment—he or she, black or white—, the harassment must be continual (not one time) to the point where one can prove one can no longer do one's job.  That is the legal definition, not the pc-definition.  AND normally, the harassment must be effected by a co-worker or boss, certainly not by someone from outside your ivory tower, who did not make threats of violence and cannot really effect the job performance of a “normal” or “average” professor at your institution.  

Racist cartoons?  Are you nuts?  Well, if you’re pc-indoctrinated, as I suspect you are, then yes, you must be.  Two of the three cartoons I sent to you depict your New Yorker colleagues.  In one of them, the colleagues in question are all white.  How was that possibly racist?   In the other one, they are black and slightly black.  In both, my criticism is equally harsh.  That in itself proves the absence of racism.  Think!  Think, if that is at all possible for you at this point in your game.  

Could you really see no reason at all in those cartoons?  Is it possible for someone with a PhD from Harvard not to see reason when it appears in CAPITAL LETTERS?  Well, you prove that it is.  With characters like you at the helm, it is no wonder the poetry establishment embraces censorship, ostracizing, and banning of rare poet apostates like me.  In-lockstep is your desire for the poetry community.  Methinks, no thanks!

Finally, what a great lesson this controversy would be for adult Wellesley College students to engage in.  Too bad, you and the others contacted will likely keep it from them.  Why?  Because it makes you and the others contacted look far less than the Dr. deities you like to parade around as.   Can you not even comprehend that your "cease and desist contact" request is simply a statement of rejection of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy?  It is likely that your attitude mirrors that amongst the professorate of Wellesley College.  And that is truly sad for democracy... 

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Suzanne Nossel and Frank Bidart

Issue #28  Fall/Winter 2014-15

EDITORIAL 

Entartete Kunst et al

This issue’s front cover features a handful of established-order cogs and is the fifth in a series, Entartete Kunst.  From the established-order point of view, clearly the cover would be dismissed as “depraved art.”  Would PEN America:  Journal for Writers & Readers, Agni, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, Poets & Writers, Rattle, American Poet Magazine, etc. have published the cover somewhere in their pages?  Of course not!  Why not?  Fear of inconvenient truths!  Criticism against The American Dissident is published in each issue.  What’s the big deal?  In fact, I encourage it!  But not the editors of those magazines!       

     

Featured are Academy of American Poets former chancellor Frank Bidart (center) receiving PEN’s literary award for established-order poetry, Chair of PEN’s Literary Awards (Poetry Society of America’s queen bee) Alice Quinn (left), PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel, Poesy Judge Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poesy Judge Peg Boyers, Poesy Judge Toi Derrricotte, and Poesy Idolater Hollywood starlet James Franco.  I’d written a long email to Nossel, who remained silent.  Then I wrote another long email to her.  She responded though rather vacuously and very briefly.  Then I wrote several more emails to her, posing questions.  She did not respond to them.  Why is PEN so un-responsive and so apathetic to the concerns of an unconnected citizen?  For the correspondence, see below.  For my two-part essay critical of PEN, see http://www.globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone?start=18 and http://www.globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3825-pen-an-ethical-consideration-part-ii.

  

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From: todslone@hotmail.com


To: snossel@pen.org
CC: journal@pen.org; dmoran@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; deji@pen.org; kglennbass@pen.org; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com; sturgislibrary@comcast.net


Subject: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party


Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 10:20:07 -0400

To Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director, PEN America:  Please allow me to pose a few questions pertinent to free expression in America: 
1. Is there a reason why PEN America is indifferent to the fact that I, a poet, was permanently banned from commenting on the Academy of American Poets website in 2007?  Is it not somewhat hypocritical to state on your website, “PEN America/ Free Expression, Literature,” while simultaneously awarding a poet, Frank Bidart, who proved entirely indifferent to my complaint of the censorship (removal!) of my free expression by the Academy of American Poets when he was one of its active chancellors?  For the transcript of my censored comments, see http://theamericandissident.org/orgs/academy_american_poets_
transcript.html. 
2. Is there a reason why PEN America is indifferent to the fact that I, a poet, was permanently banned without warning or possibility of due process from my very neighborhood library, Sturgis Library, one of the very oldest in the country?  My speech crime was one of simple written criticism regarding the library’s own written policy that “libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view”.  The permanent banning of my point of view and that of those published in The American Dissident prove that hypocrisy.  In fact, is there a reason why PEN New England will not even respond to my correspondence with that regard?  Does it consider me, like Sturgis Library and the Academy,  a persona non grata in America because I dare express my points of view, as opposed to some party-line, pre-approved points of view?  Could the answer to these questions simply be that some “free expression,” although protected by the First Amendment, is simply not condoned or defended by PEN America?  That of course is something for you to contemplate.  It is evident that the academic/literary established order does not approve of “free expression” that criticizes it, its icons (Bidart et al), and its firm control over literature in America.  It is also oddly evident that PEN America seems to favor awarding prizes to those attached to that anti-free-expression established-order.  Again, this is something for you to contemplate.  
Finally, why is criticism like that included in this very letter, for example, kept out, amongst others, of PEN America Journal, Poetry Magazine, and the American Library Association’s American Libraries Magazine?  [No response]

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From: todslone@hotmail.com


To: snossel@pen.org
CC: journal@pen.org; dmoran@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; deji@pen.org; kglennbass@pen.org; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com; sturgislibrary@comcast.net


Subject: RE: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party


Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2014 11:33:28 -0400

To Suzanne Nossel:  Well, I doubt you’ll respond.  After all, what could you possibly write in your defense… of apathy and bourgeois elitism?  Hopefully, you’ve not become so high and mighty that you won’t even be able to focus on anything this lowly plebe has to write here… hopefully.  Thus, I simply continue this dialogue de sourds.  Currently, I’m sketching the next front cover of The American Dissident, #28, which will feature Frank Bidart, you, and other literary elitists (Quinn et al) involved in your Literary Awards (the images of you on Google portray a NY West Side Vanity Fair cocktail-party socialite… how odd for the head of PEN America!)  Regarding the awards, you state:   “The PEN Literary Awards bring together writers, editors, and members of the literary community to celebrate the ultimate fruit of free expression: great literature.”  But what about those writers and editors NOT of the “literary community,” as you term the closed community of mostly established-order academics and their poet/writer acolytes.  How to become a member of that community?  Well, the response is obvious:  play the game of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil PC-expression-only. The “ultimate fruit of free expression,” as you term it, is certainly not academically-approved, promoted, and designated “great literature.”  The “ultimate fruit” is rather literature scorned by the elites because it dares criticize the elites.   Far more often than not, “great literature” as you term it, is a subjective—not an objective—term.  Far more often than not, that so-called “great literature” is innocuous, hardly at all threatening to the power structure, which designates it “great.”  You seem quite confused pairing “free expression” with so-called “great literature.”  Have you read The Oak and the Calf?  If you haven’t, do so!  But one would certainly expect that you have read it, considering your position.  In any case, if you recall, Solzhenitsyn’s book depicts the literary scene under the Stalinist dictatorship.  Sadly, that scene is a mirror of today’s literary scene in America.  Of course, Americans are rarely arrested for writing (three cops showed up to escort me out of the library one week after my published writing, but I was not arrested).  Instead, they are ostracized into oblivion, that is, if the established order feels offended by the writing.  Why does PEN America not focus on that?  Why does it not support the few American writers who dare criticize the academics and writers who control the literary scene in America, including the pompous chancellors of the Academy of American Poets (Bidart et al) and the one-percenters of the Poetry Foundation?  The answer of course is that PEN has become an integral part of that scene.  In essence, the scorners of free expression (academics and literati) have infiltrated and taken control of PEN America… unless, of course, it was always thus.  In essence, if that were not true, why would your publication, PEN America Journal, not even respond to, let alone publish, the highly caustic article I wrote on PEN and submitted to it (See http://www.globalfreepress.org/sections/free-speech/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration). The following is a pertinent quote from The Oak and the Calf to back the above contention:  
The shrill, vainglorious literature of the establishment—with its dozen fat magazines, its two literary newspapers, its innumerable anthologies, its novels between hard covers, its collected works, its annual prizes, its adaptations for radio of impossibly tedious originals—I had once and for all recognized as unreal, and I did not waste my time or exasperate myself by trying to keep up with it.  I knew without looking that there could be nothing of merit in all this.  Not because no talent could emerge there—no doubt it sometimes did, but there it perished too.  For it was a barren field, that which they sowed.  I knew that in such a field nothing could grow to maturity.  When they first came to literature they had, all of them—the social novelists, the bombastic playwrights, the civic poets, and needless to say the journalists and critics—joined in an undertaking never, whatever the subject, whatever the issue, to mention the essential truth, the truth that leaps to the eye within no help from literature.  This solemn pledge to abstain from truth was called socialist realism.  Even writers of love poems, even those lyric poets who had sought sanctuary in nature or in elegant romanticism, were all fatally flawed because they dared not touch the important truths. 
Finally, unlike your journal, The American Dissident will publish the harshest criticism received because it really does believe in free expression… and vigorous debate, democracy‘s cornerstones.  
......................................................

From: snossel@PEN.org


To: todslone@hotmail.com
CC: Journal@Pen.org; dmoran@PEN.org; Arielle@PEN.org; Deji@PEN.org; kglennbass@PEN.org; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com; sturgislibrary@comcast.net


Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2014 17:19:16 -0400


Subject: Re: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party

George—I am on vacation right now. We are happy to read and absorb your comments, no matter how critical. I am sorry to hear you have found your voice stifled in certain settings and glad to know you've created your own outlet. Best wishes, Suzanne  
...............................

From: todslone@hotmail.com

To: snossel@pen.org

Subject: RE: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party

Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2014 19:10:43 -0400


Hi Suzanne,

Well, your response is really a non-response.  After all, you did not respond to one point made in those two emails I sent.  What might "read and absorb" really mean?  Perhaps when you return from your vacation (how not to think of Obama), you'll respond to the various points and questions I made in those two emails.  BUT I certainly will not be holding my breath.  I've been "dealing" with PEN's deaf ears for well over a decade now, which is why it will be highlighted in the next front cover of The American Dissident.  It is likely PEN personnel are simply far too busy with their cocktail parties with rich and famous writers to be bothered contemplating any criticism regarding PEN.  Bonnes vacances a toue (accent aigu)!

Sincerely,

G. Tod

From: todslone@hotmail.com


To: snossel@pen.org
CC: fbidart@wellesley.edu; pboyers@skidmore.edu; writecen@pitt.edu; rowan.phillips@stonybrook.edu; journal@pen.org; dmoran@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; deji@pen.org; kglennbass@pen.org; pen-newengland@mit.edu; kwulf@mit.edu


Subject: Suzanne Nossel et al satirized by P. Maudit


Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 16:32:21 -0400

  
To Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN:  
Well, I expect you’re back from vacation now.  In any case, you, Frank Bidart, Peg Boyers, Toi Derricotte, Alice Quinn, James Franco, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips in the context of the PEN Literary Awards have been satirized as elitist literati on the front cover of issue #28 of The American Dissident, A Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence, which was just published and distributed.  You can examine the cover on the AD blog site here:  wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com.  

The journal is a 501 c3 nonprofit and is unable to obtain any public funding whatsoever from the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, etc., etc.  The journal incarnates an enemy of the people… in the Soviet sense.  The front-cover aquarelle is #6 in my Entartete Kunst series.  As you hopefully know, “entartete kunst” was art deemed depraved by the Nazis and thus removed from the public eye and/or destroyed.  For PC-America today, entartete kunst include any art critical of the academic/literary established order (PEN et al) and its diverse cogs, apparatchiks, and icons.  Get my drift?  

Question:  Why won’t PEN America Journal publish any criticism of PEN?  Is that not oddly perverted?  After all, isn’t PEN supposed to be devoted to FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION?  
Answer:  

Question:  Why won’t PEN New England respond to my efforts to re-obtain my civil rights and Freedom of Expression with impunity in New England?  What is wrong with Karen Wulf?   Usually, cronyism and inability to brook criticism explain such silence.  
Answer:  


Thank you for your attention and hopeful input and feedback.

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From: todslone@hotmail.com

To: snossel@pen.org

CC: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com; kwulf@mit.edu; fmarchant@suffolk.edu; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com

Subject: PEN... not at all like Charlie Hebdo

Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 20:10:47 -0400

To Susan Nossel, Exec. Dir., PEN America:  
Unlike Deborah Eisenberg and other PEN dignitaries, who seem appallingly blind to the Islamic threat to freedom of speech and democracy in general, I applaud your decision to award Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage award.  Perhaps as someone who promotes that award, however, you should have put down your cocktail for a moment and manifested the courage to respond to the aquarelle satire (see attached) I created on PEN and sent to you.  In fact, you should have distributed it to other PEN elites.  As you know, it became the front cover of issue #28 of The American Dissident.  Was that depiction over the PEN red line of acceptable satire?  Perhaps you ought to have also asked PEN New England’s Karen Wulf why she refuses to this day to respond to my requests for help to regain my civil rights here in Barnstable County on Cape Cod.  Am I simply insufficiently PC for Wulf?  "Defending freedom of expression" is supposed to be her and your mantra!  You should have also distributed to PEN elites, rather than completely ignore, my caustic essay, “PEN:  An Ethical Consideration” (see http://www.globalfreepress.org/sections/free-speech/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration.  And how to explain Professor Emeritus Fred Marchant on PEN New England's board of directors, who essentially banned The American Dissident from his Suffolk University Poetry Center?  Is he afraid his students might notice my satirical work on him and PEN?  What has professor emeritus come to mean today in America, if not professor conventionality and conformity, hardly at all professor temerity and individuality?  Finally, is PEN really so high and mighty as to be above criticism?  Well, uh, you actually did respond to all of my concerns back in August:  

George - I am on vacation right now. We are happy to read and absorb your comments, no matter how critical. I am sorry to hear you have found your voice stifled in certain settings and glad to know you've created your own outlet. Best wishes, Suzanne  


Yes, so sorry...

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

From: George Slone

Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2016 11:58 AM

To: snossel@pen.org

Cc: antonio@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; shreya@pen.org; kdkarlekar@pen.org; mmark@pen.org; laura@pen.org

Subject: PEN HYPOCRISY

 

To Susan Nossel, Exec. Dir., PEN:  

You never did get back to me after that vacation of yours almost two years ago!  Again, my question is quite simple:  how do you manage to thrive in hypocrisy?  How do organizations like PEN simultaneously boast to be free-speech advocates, while viscerally rejecting free-speech criticism with their regard?  Why will you NOT post negative criticism of PEN on PEN’s website like this email and that of the front cover of The American Dissident featuring you, PEN, and that hypocrisy?  Did you even bother to look at the cover I sent?

PEN of course is not at all alone.  NCAC, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, ACLUM, and American Library Association, for example, share in that egregious hypocrisy.  How do the first two justify ignoring the Garland, TX near-massacre of free speech?  Well, they do not even attempt to do so!  After all, silence is the most effective weapon of hypocrites!  How does the NCAC manage to include Islamophobia hysteria, but not Islam in its “15 Threats to Free Speech 2015”?  See the essay I published with that regard here http://www.globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3936-15-threats-to-free-speech-2015-an-egregious-and-purposeful-omission .  Go on, check it out, or do you only do that when it’s a question of rich and famous establishment writers like Rushdie or writers in foreign jails or writer murderers and rapists in American jails?  

How do you manage to ignore HR 569, a bill that seeks to be the first anti-blasphemy law regarding Islam in America?  Over 82 Democrat congressmen are co-sponsors of it.  The front cover of the current issue of The American Dissident features the main sponsor next to three members of CAIR.  Would PEN America Journal like to publish a picture of that front cover?  Of course not!  How does PEN manage to ignore Loretta Lynch’s anti-free-speech declaration that she’d look into the possibility of prosecuting blasphemers against Islam?  Yes, that was her mind-boggling reaction to the San Bernardino Islamic massacre, as you might recall.  

Is part of PEN Free Expression Coordinator Shreya Balhara’s job to free-expression coordinate all criticism of PEN into the garbage bucket, unless of course lodged by approved PEN members?  Is part of Editor M Mark’s job to assure the absence of hardcore criticism vis-a-vis PEN in each issue of 

PEN America Journal?  Why the fear of such criticism?  In every issue of The American Dissident, the harshest criticism lodged against me and the journal is not only published, but encouraged.  What’s the big deal?  I just cannot fathom your perspective.  

Finally, I note that out of the 24 staff members listed on your site (http://www.pen.org/pen-staff-directory), only four are men.  One or two are black.  Is that called PEN diversity and inclusion or rather PEN sexism?  [No response]

Alice Quinn

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The above aquarelle features Alice Quinn, PEN America's Chair of Literary Awards and Executive Director of Poetry Society of America, which is a members-only club, where only members select new members.  Nothing like democracy, eh?!  It's who you know, not what you know... per usual.  Quinn, former Poetry Editor for the New Yorker, is depicted as an established-order puta. The depiction was of course influenced by a photograph taken by Walker Evans of Mexican prostitutes. 

David Orr

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.”