Rita Dove

In celebration of National Poetaster Month, below are three cartoons I sketched in 2004, 2006, and 2007.  Academic black-privileged Rita Dove of course did respond to any of the cartoons.  Also, below is an email I sent in 2007.  No response was ever received.  What I dislike about those like Dove, black or white, is how easily they fit into the establishment and how unlikely they'll ever bite the numerous hands feeding them.  For me, a poet should be a raw truth teller, not an academic careerist.  But then again, I guess I'm quite different.  BTW, I decided to post the three cartoons now after receiving an email from the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, which is highlighting Dove and one of her rather typically vacuous statements:  “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”  It aberrantly also highlights ex-president ("It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is.") Bill Clinton's vacuous statement:  "National Poetry Month offers us a welcome opportunity to celebrate not only the unsurpassed body of literature produced by our poets in the past, but also the vitality and diversity of voices reflected in the works of today's American poetry.”  When poetry is backed by hacks, you know damn well that poetry is fucked.  The Cultural Center, whose motto is "All the Arts for All of Us," will not unsurprisingly include my art.  Orwellian at its finest!  Long live the curating (censoring!) cultural apparatchiks!  

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Date:	Tue, 4 Dec 2007 17:41:44 -0800 (PST)
From:	"George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com>  Add to Address Book  Add Mobile Alert
Subject:	Academy censorship... is Rita Dove a knowing partisan?
To:	rr5m@virginia.edu, jobrien@virginia.edu, jep6p@virginia.edu, sdf8x@virginia.edu, jrf2j@virginia.edu, shb7f@virginia.edu, ggc8n@virginia.edu, derrico@virginia.edu

Since I cannot locate Prof. Rita Dove's email on your webpage, I am contacting you, her colleagues, in the hope that maybe one of you might actually be open to communication from an ardent poet critic of the academic/literary established order, of which you all belong.  Please either forward her email or forward this email to her.  Thank you for your attention.  BTW, you might like to subscribe to The American Dissident, a 501c3 nonprofit literary journal devoted to critical writing against the machine, as in "let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine" (Thoreau).  Your students would certainly (hopefully!) find it refreshing in its dissident perspective.  

G. Tod Slone, Ed.

The American Dissident

 

Dear Prof. Dove: 

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 on its online forums last July.  My assumption is that you 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 or 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.  

 

Sincerely,

G. Tod Slone, Ed.

The American Dissident

www.theamericandissident.org

1837 Main St.

Concord, Ma 01742

sam sax

Don Share

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Editorial - Issue #35

The Silence…

Of the Poets, Professors, and Free-Speech Advocates

 What you find is that there’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen.

—Warren Buffet

The SILENCE is deafening. The SILENCE is foretelling. The SILENCE is Orwellian. Poetry Foundation and its Poetry magazine are highlighted on this issue’s front cover.  Send a critique, as I’ve done, to its editor, Don Share… and SILENCE. Ask the Foundation, as I’ve done, why it refuses to list The American Dissident with the other poetry magazines listed… and SILENCE. The SILENCE is incarnate in “post-truth,” word of the year for Oxford Dictionary. Dolores Granger brought that to my attention, while a Wall Street Journal editorial had brought it to hers, noting the term indicates “a time in which truth becomes unimportant or irrelevant.” And that of course explains… the SILENCE.  Post-truthers hate truth.  Ideology hates truth. 

    Interesting things, perhaps even unimaginable ones, can occur when one openly criticizes the feeding apparatus of a post-truther and tests the waters of democracy. Imagine, for example, that Quillette, a conservative magazine, banned me from its “free-speech platform”! (See cartoon on page 5.) Perhaps it should be the poet’s prime job to speak the rude truth that will shake and break the fragile backbones and egos of editors, poets, professors, cultural-council apparatchiks, and journalists. If one pushes an ideology, which inevitably conflicts with truth, the best response to such truth is always… SILENCE.  

     Still it is perhaps surprising that so few intellectuals, even purported free-speech proponents, will respond to uncomfortable criticism.  National Coalition Against Censorship is a pitiful example, refusing to address criticism. Why?  Does its SILENCE indicate the criticism to be on target… or the critic to be a mere plebe and thus unworthy of response… or perhaps both? Recall the Charlie Hebdo massacre over three years ago.  Today, that liberal magazine is located in a secret “bunker.” One to two million dollars per year is spent on security, which the magazine, not the government, has to pay. Seven Hebdo journalists died, while others were wounded… by Muslim assassins. And what about the Pulse Nightclub massacre by a Muslim extremist in Florida and the Muslim would-be butchers at the Garland, TX Draw Muhammad contest? But for the ideologues at NCAC, Islam somehow is not a threat to free speech. One journalist, Fabrice Nicolino, wounded at the Hebdo massacre, recently said, “Chez moi, où je suis connu, des voisins d’extrême gauche ne veulent plus me dire bonjour, car ils ne sont surtout pas Charlie.” (Where I live, where I’m known, my extreme leftist neighbors will no longer say hello to me.)  Why not?  Well, because Hebdo criticized Muslims… just like it did everyone else.   

      Inside Higher Ed is yet another sad example (see last issue’s front cover). I’ve questioned its editors on a number of occasions. Their response? SILENCE! Poets & Writers magazine is equally pitiful. I dared criticize its front-page story, “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.” Was it a farce? Well, if you know poets, you know damn well it wasn’t. So, I wrote an essay (see p27) and sketched cartoons for six of those world-changing bards and sent them to the editors, the 10 poets, and even some of the latter’s academic colleagues.  SILENCE!  

    Most recently, I wrote a counter-essay regarding a piece published by a Bridgewater State University professor in Bridgewater Review and sent it to the editors, the author, and even the student journalists of the university newspaper, The Comment. SILENCE! Then I drew a cartoon on some of the characters, including the university president and shot it out to the targets.  SILENCE! The literary letters section at the end of this issue includes other instances of SILENCE, as modus operandi of those who hate free debate…   

n another note, George Carlin once said, “Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.” With that regard, poets, writers, editors and journalists, who quote someone who said SHIT-HOLE, should write SHIT-HOLE, not s-hole. The same goes for NIGGER and any of the other vocabulary on the forbidden list from BITCH to SPIC to CRACKER. And why isn’t NAZI on that list?  Isn’t it highly insulting to call any white person, who disagrees with PC-Antifa, a Nazi? Writing the n-word or b-word does not automatically give someone the moral high-ground. Instead, it gives a person the low-ground of a common self-censoring conformist. Saul Alinsky perhaps was on target: “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Do you want to be part of the masses or a staunch individual? Clearly, an army of Alinsky acolytes have been toiling away at controlling the language in the universities. When one writes s-hole or n-word, then clearly one is being controlled and needs to contemplate those who seek to control and pressure.  Faceless bureaucrats! Faceless academics! Faceless SJWs! Well, I for one will fight against control by them. And if that means they’ll call me a racist, islamophobe, homophobe, or sexist, so what!!! My ma taught me, sticks and stones…  What the hell are the mothers teaching their kids today?

Don Share

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EditThe Silence…

Of the Poets, Professors, and Free-Speech Advocates

 What you find is that there’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen.

—Warren Buffet

The SILENCE is deafening. The SILENCE is foretelling. The SILENCE is Orwellian. Poetry Foundation and its Poetry magazine are highlighted on this issue’s front cover.  Send a critique, as I’ve done, to its editor, Don Share… and SILENCE. Ask the Foundation, as I’ve done, why it refuses to list The American Dissident with the other poetry magazines listed… and SILENCE. The SILENCE is incarnate in “post-truth,” word of the year for Oxford Dictionary. Dolores Granger brought that to my attention, while a Wall Street Journal editorial had brought it to hers, noting the term indicates “a time in which truth becomes unimportant or irrelevant.” And that of course explains… the SILENCE.  Post-truthers hate truth.  Ideology hates truth. 

    Interesting things, perhaps even unimaginable ones, can occur when one openly criticizes the feeding apparatus of a post-truther and tests the waters of democracy. Imagine, for example, that Quillette, a conservative magazine, banned me from its “free-speech platform”! (See cartoon on page 5.) Perhaps it should be the poet’s prime job to speak the rude truth that will shake and break the fragile backbones and egos of editors, poets, professors, cultural-council apparatchiks, and journalists. If one pushes an ideology, which inevitably conflicts with truth, the best response to such truth is always… SILENCE.  

     Still it is perhaps surprising that so few intellectuals, even purported free-speech proponents, will respond to uncomfortable criticism.  National Coalition Against Censorship is a pitiful example, refusing to address criticism. Why?  Does its SILENCE indicate the criticism to be on target… or the critic to be a mere plebe and thus unworthy of response… or perhaps both? Recall the Charlie Hebdo massacre over three years ago.  Today, that liberal magazine is located in a secret “bunker.” One to two million dollars per year is spent on security, which the magazine, not the government, has to pay. Seven Hebdo journalists died, while others were wounded… by Muslim assassins. And what about the Pulse Nightclub massacre by a Muslim extremist in Florida and the Muslim would-be butchers at the Garland, TX Draw Muhammad contest? But for the ideologues at NCAC, Islam somehow is not a threat to free speech. One journalist, Fabrice Nicolino, wounded at the Hebdo massacre, recently said, “Chez moi, où je suis connu, des voisins d’extrême gauche ne veulent plus me dire bonjour, car ils ne sont surtout pas Charlie.” (Where I live, where I’m known, my extreme leftist neighbors will no longer say hello to me.)  Why not?  Well, because Hebdo criticized Muslims… just like it did everyone else.   

     Inside Higher Ed is yet another sad example (see last issue’s front cover). I’ve questioned its editors on a number of occasions. Their response? SILENCE! Poets & Writers magazine is equally pitiful. I dared criticize its front-page story, “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.” Was it a farce? Well, if you know poets, you know damn well it wasn’t. So, I wrote an essay (see p27) and sketched cartoons for six of those world-changing bards and sent them to the editors, the 10 poets, and even some of the latter’s academic colleagues.  SILENCE!  

    Most recently, I wrote a counter-essay regarding a piece published by a Bridgewater State University professor in Bridgewater Review and sent it to the editors, the author, and even the student journalists of the university newspaper, The Comment. SILENCE! Then I drew a cartoon on some of the characters, including the university president and shot it out to the targets.  SILENCE! The literary letters section at the end of this issue includes other instances of SILENCE, as modus operandi of those who hate free debate…   

      On another note, George Carlin once said, “Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.” With that regard, poets, writers, editors and journalists, who quote someone who said SHIT-HOLE, should write SHIT-HOLE, not s-hole. The same goes for NIGGER and any of the other vocabulary on the forbidden list from BITCH to SPIC to CRACKER. And why isn’t NAZI on that list?  Isn’t it highly insulting to call any white person, who disagrees with PC-Antifa, a Nazi? Writing the n-word or b-word does not automatically give someone the moral high-ground. Instead, it gives a person the low-ground of a common self-censoring conformist. Saul Alinsky perhaps was on target: “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Do you want to be part of the masses or a staunch individual? Clearly, an army of Alinsky acolytes have been toiling away at controlling the language in the universities. When one writes s-hole or n-word, then clearly one is being controlled and needs to contemplate those who seek to control and pressure.  Faceless bureaucrats! Faceless academics! Faceless SJWs! Well, I for one will fight against control by them. And if that means they’ll call me a racist, islamophobe, homophobe, or sexist, so what!!! My ma taught me, sticks and stones…  What the hell are the mothers teaching their kids today?

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The Following was sent to POETRY magazine et al.  

Response?  

ABSOLUT SILENCE!

From: George Slone

Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2018 9:37 AM

To: wbunn@coladv.com; scalderon@coladv.com; gcocking@coladv.com; cgillock@coladv.com; jguylay@coladv.com; info@poetryfoundation.org; natasha.trethewey@northwestern.edu; tapestryofvoices@yahoo.com; Doug holder; Rosalyn Becker; dsklar@endicott.edu; John Lauritsen; midcapecouncil2@gmail.com

Cc: chris.abani@northwestern.edu; amin.ahmad@northwestern.edu; e-biss@northwestern.edu; b-bouldrey@northwestern.edu; khbreen@northwestern.edu; j-bresland@northwestern.edu; meghan.costa@northwestern.edu; a-curdy@northwestern.edu; john-cutler@northwestern.edu; sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu; bedwards@northwestern.edu; rebecca-johnson-0@northwestern.edu; andrew.leong@northwestern.edu

Subject: Bunn, Bienen, Share, and Trethewey: THE SILENCE OF THE LITERATI

In Celebration of National Poetry Month:  A Criticism of National Poetry and the Silence of the Literati

To the Editor et al of Poetry Magazine and Managers et al of Poetry Foundation:
You have permission to publish the front cover of the current issue (#35) of The American Dissident in next issue of Poetry magazine.  It depicts the pitiful reality of the latter and poetry in general in today’s America via Share, Bunn III, Bienen, and Threthewey:  MONEY.  The front cover can be examined here:  

http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/04/don-share.html.  As you know or ought to know, Poetry Foundation refuses to list The American Dissident with other magazines listed.  

Might one of you prove sufficiently curious to actually spend 30 seconds to examine the cover or are you all so intellectually buffered and restricted?  And of course I expect no response from any of you at all.  After all, your m.o. vis-a-vis hardcore criticism tends to be absolute silence, as in THE SILENCE OF THE LITERATI.  And of course that m.o. is quite difficult for me to comprehend, for unlike the bulk of poet editors and publishers, I not only brook criticism with my regard, but encourage it and publish the harshest with my regard in each and every issue of The American Dissident.  That is a rare, cogent expression of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy.  Sadly, that is NOT Poetry magazine, nor is it poetry in general today, where poets are absurdly deified to the point of THOU SHALT NOT CRITICIZE POET ICONS.  The higher the high-and-mighty literati get, the more intellectually corrupt they become and thus the more buffered from outside criticism they demand and succeed to be.

BTW, I have cc’d this email to a handful of Poet Laureate Trethewey’s Northwestern University English Department colleagues and hope that handful will send it to the other colleagues, though doubt wholeheartedly that any of those contacted professors will possess the intellectual independence to respond and do so.  A cartoon I drew on Trethewey in 2012 can be examined here:  

http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/04/natasha-trethewey.html.

Go for it!  Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, academic entrenchment did that.  Finally, it is good when a poet laureate is a professor… for one reason:  his or her email is made publicly available by his or her university.   I could not locate Don Share’s email.  Will you please forward this letter to him.

Finally, intellectual corruption is rampant in the poetry milieu.  A poet plebe editor/publisher like me without connections cannot possibly obtain public money from the NEA or Mid-Cape Cultural Council, for example, nor will he ever be invited to speak at a poetry event like Harris Gardner’s Boston National Poetry Festival.  In fact, to speak “rude truth” a la Emerson today means risking permanent ostracizing by the poetry community.  My very neighborhood library, Sturgis Library, a proponent of National Poetry Month, for example, permanently banned me w/o warning or due process because I dared challenge the hypocrisy of Lucy Loomis, its director, in particular, with regards its collection development statement that “libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view.”  My point of view and the points of view published in The American Dissident have been permanently banned.  Do any of you care?  Of course not!  Why did I challenge Loomis?  Well, for one reason only:  Poetry magazine was the only poetry magazine on her shelves…  

Don Share

Don Share

Robert Polito

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From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: ackea040@newschool.edu
CC: nsfreepress@gmail.com; mail@poetryfoundation.org; editors@poetrymagazine.org; hmpi@poetryfoundation.org
Subject: New School prof/dirlo satirized
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 09:41:20 -0400

To Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Ackerman, the New School Free Press,

One of your professors or directors, Robert Polito, is satirized in a new P. Maudit cartoon as a gatekeeping censor of poetry.  I attach it here.  But you can also examine it on my blog site:  http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2014/03/robert-polito_19.html.  Please publish it in your newspaper.  Or is your newspaper, as I suspect, simply another ideologically-kept press parading around as “free”?  Please, at least, inform me of your decision.   Although, the cartoon is not “news from a student perspective,” it certainly ought to be an issue “important to young people and students everywhere.”  After all, censorship is becoming rampant in America.  If the issue is NOT important to students, then democracy in America is already lost. 

Sarah Browning

Eliza Griswold

Open Letter to Poetry editors Christian Wiman, Don Share, and Fred Sasaki, as well as Valerie Jean Johnson:

A satirical cartoon on Poetry magazine (Eliza Griswold) is currently posted on The American Dissident blogsite (seewwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com).  Will you actually be curious… or like most average-Joe poets incurious?   Of course, I’ll probably never know.  No matter. 

The fundamental flaw with Poetry magazine is that its editors refuse to publish harsh criticism with its regard, as well as with that of the established-order poetry milieu in general.  Byron and Pope hit the poet laureate of their time with sledgehammers, but Poetry mag would never publish poems like theirs today relative to one of our laureates. 

The PC-multiculti dogma reigns at Poetry, where ostracism and banning under the guise of moderation are currently effected.  Apathy to ostracism and banning has become a pitiful trait of today’s poets.  The Academy of American Poets not only censored my comments after having posted them, but also banned me, a poet, from participating in its poet forums.  Do you care?  It is highly unlikely that you do or, at best, would justify the censorship and banning.   Poetry Foundation has ostracized The American Dissident from its vast network in refusing to list the journal with other literary journals listed.  

In a nutshell, censorship, banning, and ostracism form your protective cocoon, making it happy-face bland and PC safe.  You represent that shameful aspect of far too many poets in America today. 

Minnie Bruce Pratt

N.B.:  Not one of the 20 or so professors I contacted, as predicted, responded.  However, the student newspaper editor was quite refreshingly responsive and published a slightly truncated version of the following open letter in The Daily Orange.  There is hope!  My thanks to Editor Meghin Delaney for her extraordinary openness and respect for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy. 

Hear No Evil

An Open Letter to the Professors of the Departments of Women's & Gender Studies and Writing and Rhetoric, Syracuse University:

The citizenry is drowning in hagiography, which is why I make it a point not to add to it. 

One of your colleagues, Minnie Bruce Pratt, attracted my attention this week via Poetry Magazine.  Statements she’s made incited me to sketch a cartoon with her regard.  It is posted with this letter on The American Dissident blogsite (wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com).  Hopefully, one or even several of you might actually be sufficiently curious to examine the uncomfortable truths depicted in it.  The crux of the criticism concerns Pratt’s assertion of wanting a socialist revolution.  But there she sits comfortably enjoying privilege under the current capitalist system, which also designates her as an “eminent poet.”  How strange, I’d thought:  a revolutionary with established-order chevrons and laurels. 

The problem with the so-called women’s liberation is that purported liberators like Pratt have mostly been coopted by the established order, especially in the realm of politics and academe.  Hillary stands as prime example of that sellout.  After all, what does it matter if a hack is female or male?  Ah, but the old Sixties feminists a la Pratt are quite contented with their positions in the established order.  Hypocritically, they remain shamefully PC-silent regarding, for example, Islam’s inherent misogyny.  How disgusted I was to see the photo of feminist Hillary wearing a hiyad head scarf in full solidarity with misogynist Islamists!  

            On another note, Syracuse University, which pays you quite nicely (to turn a not-so-nice blind eye) boasts of being a bastion of freedom of speech (“Syracuse University is committed to the principle that freedom of discussion is essential to the search for truth and, consequently, welcomes and encourages the expression of dissent.”), while simultaneously and hypocritically restricts that very freedom (see http://thefire.org/spotlight/schools/1143).   For this, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education designated the institution a red-light university.   “A red light university has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech,” notes the Foundation.  Therefore, I ask why you have done nothing at all (turned a blind eye) to question and challenge—for the sake of your students!—that shameful situation, or if you have done something—and I’d be quite surprised—please let me know what the results were and inform the Foundation of your efforts. 

Finally, my experience questioning and challenging academics over the past several decades underscores the likelihood that just one of you will actually deign to respond and engage in vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, is next to nil.  So, the true purpose of this letter is not to provoke a response from you—though hopefully it will educate you… a contrecoeur—, but rather to form part of the public record.  Thanks to the Internet, this criticism of you and your university will be posted. 

BTW, this letter has also been forwarded to the student editors of The Daily Orange, though again my experience underscores that even they will likely be nothing more than your ideological shadows and will also likely not respond—thus has become higher education in America today. 

PS:  Please do consider asking your library to subscribe to The American Dissident.  Your students might find the no-holds-barred, non-ideological criticism refreshing.  Perhaps, however, students are not your real top priority, despite the usual proclamations.  Institutional subscribers include Harvard University, Buffalo University, Brown University, John Hopkins University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Endicott College and, amongst others, New York Public Library.  

            Thank you for your attention. 

Christian Wiman

“Provocative” and “Upsetting”… Yet Somehow Safe 
For Bourgeois Consumption:  Poetry Magazine

As editor of a literary magazine, I receive periodic mail from Poetry, asking for money despite its $100 million drug-financed foundation.  Periodically, I stuff the envelope it sends not with money but with a broadside critical of poetry.  To date, I have received no response.  The poets involved with Poetry magazine, including its editor Christian Wiman, evidently live in safe-house cocoons.  They generally have money and security and are often careerist academics. 

In the most recent envelope sent by Poetry, an unbelievably nauseating hagiographic two-page essay by Adam Kirsch, “Poetry Magazine’s Rebirth,” was included. Kirsch notes regarding the magazine that “in its fabled early years helped to establish poetry as a serious American art.”  Allow me to replace “serious” with bourgeois.  Well, Kirsch does mention “stolidly institutional.”  Perhaps that phrase is even more revolting than the term bourgeois in its implication of being run by literary apparatchiks.  It certainly explains why the magazine’s editor and staff don’t seem to give a damn about issues of literary ostracizing and censorship, unless of course a famous poet is concerned.  They don’t give a damn that National Poetry Month (Boston) and Massachusetts Poetry Festival, for example, refuse to even respond to my requests that the magazine I edit be included on their lists of literary magazines.  They don’t give a damn that PEN New England refuses to respond to my freedom-of-expression grievances.  They don’t give a damn that the American Library Association’s “Library Bill of Rights”—specifically article II, “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.l”—is perhaps violated by public libraries across the country.  As an example, Sturgis Library, the oldest public library in the country, subscribes to Poetry, but refuses to even accept a free donation to the magazine I edit, which presents poetry as highly dissident and thus at antipodes to the highly bourgeois verse presented by the former.    

Kirsch goes on to note regarding Poetry that “its age and prestige mean America’s best poets have always been glad to publish there” without questioning in the least what “best” might reply imply (e.g., well-connected, unthreatening to the established order, and academic).  Sadly, the “literary fruits” stemming from the monetary load dropped upon Poetry by the famous drug company will simply serve to bolster and otherwise assure the iron-clad bourgeois grip on poetry.  As a dissident poet, openly and highly critical of that grip, I was invited only once to read poetry despite my persistent contacting of places that periodically invite poets (e.g., libraries, writing centers, and colleges).  That money will serve to make Poetry the prime literary gatekeeper in America.  And gatekeepers, as we all know, serve as censors, assuring bourgeois propriety and good taste—just what poetry needs, n’est-ce pas?  Yes, that money will indeed put Poetry at the center of American poetry. 

Kirsch notes regarding the magazine that “it has become one of the most interesting literary periodicals of any kind published today.”  But “interesting” is a highly subjective term, not objective.  Kirsch bases his evaluation on quantity:  from a circulation of 11,000 in 2003 to 27,000.  Popularity thus equals “interesting” in his mind.  And that’s fine, but should that factor be applied to poetry?  One could also wonder, though Kirsch doesn’t, how many of those copies are given away.  Money certainly enables Poetry to reign in regards to circulation.    

Kirsch goes on to praise editor Wiman, comparing him to Joshua, though Jesus would probably have been even better.   But, well, Wiman has 100 million dollars at his disposal.  So, Jesus was out of the question.  Thanks to Wiman, we’re informed, “Poetry has done what so few magazines of literary and political opinion ever dare: It has confronted its readers with new, potentially upsetting ideas.”  Oh, my!  Well, again, he doesn’t have to worry about losing subscribers.  But what might constitute “upsetting”?  Would this essay be upsetting… or rather too upsetting to publish?  

Kirsch tells us that the origins of the new version of the old magazine can be found in Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter.”  Gioia, however, was a poet bureaucrat in charge of the NEA, which is manned and womaned by cultural bureaucrats.  Kirsch mentions that the key solution in that essay was to decloister poetry from the confines of academe and to “address and care about the common reader.”  Now, that’s a good one.  In fact, I wrote a satirical dialogue several years ago on the “common reader.”  Somebody had criticized me for not writing for the “common reader.”  So I’d asked who the common reader was?  Would the common reader understand what I write here?  How might I better address the uncommon reader?  Should I use common vocabulary and common themes to attract the “common reader’?  If so, what were those themes?  The notion of a “common reader” is of course absurd.  In fact, the “common reader” likely never reads poetry at all and would hardly think of lifting Poetry off of a library shelf.  Perhaps he or she would pick up People magazine or the Boston Herald.  The “common reader” idea was nothing but a transparent ploy to propagate a veneer that poetry was somehow not in the hands of elite bourgeois poets. 

            Because of Poetry and other such well-distributed literary magazines like Agni, New Letters,  Ploughshares, and on and on, poetry would remain a filler item of the type published in The New Yorker, hardly, in Kirsch’s words, “the highest branch of literature.”  The contradictions in Kirsh’s essay are egregious.  For Poetry to suggest that the “entrenched institutions of the poetry world are stultifying” is in itself absurd, since Poetry represents one such entrenched institution.  Why does Wiman on the one hand decry the professionalizaion of poetry while publishing so many professional poets?  Where is the sense in that?  Kirsch notes that the poetry in each issue of the magazine is generally of a “high standard” without mentioning what that means or rather implies.  And again, one must emphasize safe for bourgeois consumption.  Finally, Kirsch notes that Poetry is “intelligently provocative.”  Hmm…

Lucy Loomis

Lucy Loomis stands as an example of an authoritarian gatekeeper. She banned an American Dissident broadside and even banned me from discussing the banning with library staff. For this, she is mocked on the front cover of the latest issue of The American Dissident. The banned broadside follows.

An American Dissident Free-Speech Broadside (distributed 02/14/2011)-
The American Dissident, a 501 (c)3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy & Dissidence, Offering a Forum for Vigorous Debate
G. Tod Slone, PhD, Editor (todslone@yahoo.com) (www.theamericandissident.org) 217 Commerce Rd., Barnstable, MA 02630
Open Letter to the Director of the Sturgis Library, Lucy Loomis
Libraries, far from being bastions of democracy, tend to be de facto opponents of free speech
Truth, it seems, is always bashful, easily reduced to silence by the too blatant encroachment of falsehood.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Gatekeepers are authority figures who seek to limit the choices of others. Gatekeepers are good at justifying their actions through circular reasoning.
—Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity

N
ot long ago, I was sitting in the Sturgis Library when I overheard a brief discussion: “They’re putting in good windows! They’re Andersen!” Then it arrived next to me: “Let me take a look at these nice windows!” I interjected, noting the library could afford expensive windows but not a $20 subscription to a nonprofit journal devoted to democracy. The people didn’t quite understand me.
A
s you know, your Board of Trustees and you decided to prohibit this free-speech broadside on your public premises, which is why it is being circulated elsewhere. As you also know, you refused to consider subscribing, even at a future date, to The American Dissident. By subscribing to Poetry magazine, which clearly presents an established-order viewpoint, and rejecting The American Dissident, which clearly presents the opposite viewpoint, you directly and knowingly violate your own Collection Development Policy, especially “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” Despite the dubious financial argument, your comments about “family friendly” and “too much negativity” indicate “doctrinal disapproval.” Your reluctance to discuss these issues with me underscores a certain rejection of democracy. Why not instead promote the latter and erect a FREE-SPEECH bulletin board? You could place on top of it: WARNING: CHILDREN TAKE NOTICE. POSTINGS ON THIS BOARD MIGHT BE OFFENSIVE TO YOUR ADULT PARENTS.
Y
our Collection Development Policy is an excellent one, by the way. Unfortunately, you do not abide by it and, worse yet, have probably convinced yourself that you somehow do. “Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy,” states the ALA’s “Freedom to Read” segment. “Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the less able to deal with controversy and difference.” How can you not perceive your banning of this broadside, as yet another instance of “silencing of a heresy”? How can you not understand that your insistence on positivity and “family friendly” not constitute yet another instance of “enforcement of an orthodoxy”? Has diminishing the toughness and resilience of our society become the true role of librarians today? Well, if you are representative, then I think so. And indeed, you are not unique. As confirmed by my decade’s long experience knocking on the doors of librarians and cultural-council apparatchiks, contrary to the lofty ALA statements, most doors remain firmly closed to the heretical viewpoints expressed in The American Dissident. Indeed, the journal has been an ardent critic of the close relationship often maintained between the art and literary milieu with the local chambers of commerce and the resultant censorship (call it what you like) of anything deemed too critical. Hypocrisy is rampant amongst far too many librarians! The ALA’s own Office for Intellectual Affairs refuses to even respond to my grievance.
Regarding the one flyer I left on a car windshield, an adult staff member, as you know, complained to you like a child. You called the instance “harassment”—a grotesque exaggeration! Please have that staff member, whoever she may be, examine the cartoon below. Why does she flaunt the bumper sticker—“Everything I Need to Know about Life, I Learned from Reading Banned Books”—when she is clearly a proponent of banning periodicals and broadsides? Why can’t she and you see the egregious hypocrisy? Your prohibition of my free-speech flyers on public-library grounds might be unconstitutional, as might also your prohibition of my discussing any of this with your adult staff. You behave not as a director, but as a high-school principal, and encourage your staff to act as if children. From the glorious Age of Reason, we’ve sadly retreated into the infantile Age of the Offended, thanks to those like you. “Do you do this everywhere you go?” you asked, deflecting focus from your anti-free speech policies. Well, I do question and challenge everywhere I go. Is that not my citizen’s duty? “If you don’t like it here, why do you come here?” you then asked sadly echoing the refrain: America, Love It or Leave It. But how dare you make such a statement when my tax dollars help pay your very salary? I like the library. You are not the library. You also lazily dismissed this broadside as a “diatribe,” instead of pointing out where you think truth to be lacking. You said I called you “marm.” Well, that term was only used in the cartoon below. But are you not a gate-keeping marm? As director, will you not keep me from obtaining funding from the Cape Cod Cultural Council because of my viewpoints? How far will you go to keep free speech out of your fiefdom: a no-trespass warrant?
Finally, the cartoon watercolor I sketched on you as gatekeeper is now the front cover of the current issue of The American Dissident (see above). A subscription was kindly donated. Will you reject the gift and censor my scheduled art exhibit in September? Will you continue to shame Barnstable’s own revolutionary patriot Mercy Otis Warren with your censorial decrees? This broadside was sent to a number of Cape Cod newspapers. Only the Barnstable Patriot responded with interest. As you know, I met with two of your trustees, both of whom refused to discuss the banning of this broadside and expressed no interest whatsoever in the principles at stake—the First Amendment et al. On another note, library director Anne Cifelli, summa cum lauda Wellesley College graduate, argued regarding her rejection of a free subscription offer: “It is outside the scope of this library's periodical collection.” “Why doesn’t that scope include democracy and free speech?” I asked. “The Yarmouth Port Library is a popular lending library,” she replied. She rejected a dictionary donation, but accepted a box of quilting books. Your library holds jewelry sales, wine auctions, and antiques shows, but will not erect a First Amendment bulletin board.
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N.B.: The purpose of The American Dissident is to question and challenge what normally is not questioned and challenged: the cultural-commercial established order, its gatekeepers, institutions, and icons, especially on the local level. As for poetry and art, they are left undefined and ought not to be limited to abstract landscapes, the female nude, and high-brow metaphorical feelings, but also include harsh criticism, the kind gatekeepers disdain. Let the poet and artist take risks, go against the grain, and stand apart to speak, as Emerson stated, the “rude truth in all ways.”

Big Money & Public Money Usually Support Obedience and Conformity

Normally, sites that censor do not interest me at all, and that includes Rattle and Poetry Foundation, which refuses to even list The American Dissident with other journals listed. With all its millions of dollars, one ought to wonder just how much Poetry Foundation serves as established-order censor. Evidently, The American Dissident must be INSUFFICIENTLY TASTEFUL for it (see below). In any case, two people suggested I check out Tim Green’s latest blog (see http://timothy-green.org/blog/2010/03/open-letter-to-the-poetry-foundation/comment-page-1/#comment-2863), a hagiographic piece on Poetry Magazine and its staff. My response to it was this essay, which was posted on Rattle, but censored by Green. A critical poem I wrote on Poetry Magazine, a while ago, appears after the essay.

If the citizenry ceases to question and challenge, ceases to think out of the conformist paradigm, preferring instead the comfy pathway of group positivism, the nation is lost. And I think it is lost today.

Green’s essay is indeed an example of base flattery, something that seems to have become very, very prevalent in our dying democracy. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything quite so transparent.

As for Ruth Lilly, who dumped $100,000,000 on Poetry Magazine, one can only assume that her education (and money) failed to shape her into a questioning and challenging citizen. Instead, she became yet another blind worshipper of established-order (bourgeois) poesy. Read about her money: “most unethical drug company on the planet” [see www.oralchelation.net/data/Lilly/data6.htm]).

“Beautiful in production,” notes Green regarding Poetry Magazine which is, however, very simple in design and format. “Beautiful” implies extraordinary.

“Poetry Magazine is tasteful,” notes Green. Now, what might that mean? Innocuous? Inoffensive? Bourgeois? PC? Evidently, it's come to mean BOURGEOIS. But should poetry be daintily “tasteful” or should it rather stand up on its hind legs and decry the bourgeois corruption ever trying to smother society in “tastefulness”?

“Tastes are subjective, but tastefulness isn’t, and you’re tasteful,” notes Green, again in praise of Poetry Magazine. But the statement is clearly a non sequitur and idiotic at best. How can one possibly go from the subjectivity of "taste" to the purported objectivity of "tastefulness"? Even if a particular "tastefulness" is shared by the whole of the bourgeoisie, that does not by any means render it an objective trait. It is truly amazing to think that colleges and universities, including the one that graduated Green, might actually be teaching students that "tastefulness" is somehow an objective quality.

“To top it off, you’ve made the outwardly generous, inwardly smart decision to give it all away online, for free,” notes Green, again in praise of Poetry Magazine. One must really wonder how Green's professors managed to fail him so royally. Evidently, his professors would have to ask how their professors failed them so royally. With 200 million dollars in the bank, how can putting up Poetry mag online even remotely be considered generous? An independent mind would rather ask why Poetry constantly beggars for subscriptions. With 200 million, it shouldn’t be charging anything at all for anything.

Quantity seems key to persons like Green, whose corrupted logic would conclude that 30,000 subscribers must equal greatness. What it really equals, however, is POPULARITY and INOFFENSIVENESS. It also implies that the so-called literate populace fears criticism and knows it ain’t gonna find it in Poetry Mag.

“And I’m good,” notes Green about himself. Yet reading his essay on Poetry Magazine, one would really have to conclude the opposite! Evidently, Green is the product of today's educationist emphasis on giving students positive feedback for just about anything they do... or don't do.

“Jealous criticisms,” notes Green regarding anything critical of Poetry Magazine. Yet how easy, lazy, and typically uncreative it is for him to dismiss criticism with an epithet. It reflects the multicultural, PC way of doing things today. Just call it a name... and thus ignore the criticism, even if valid. Only a lazy mind could dismiss all criticism of Poetry Mag as “jealous.”

In his essay, Green makes only one seemingly valid point: spreading the money, instead of dumping it on one organization. But would that have changed anything at all? No. Because the money still would have likely remained in the hands of established-order literature and literati. Thanks to Wiman and others of his ilk, students will continue yawning during their university poetry classes because 99% of their professors will never expose them to poetry as a sword, as opposed to poetry as bourgeois tea and crumpet wordsmithery. As for NPR, can it possibly get more bourgeois? NPC would be a better name for the organization, as in National Political Correctness. Who can bear even listening to those voices?

The real sadness with so much money concentrated in so few hands is that it will inevitably determine what poetry shall be read and what poetry shall be forever buried. Any poet daring to go against the money grain will be buried. Period. Poetry does not NEED to be supported, as Green stipulates. Supporting poetry kills poetry by helping to keep it bourgeois in taste and substance.

Now, do you think Wiman will respond?


From… Not One of Them
If you’re one of them, you’re either “great” and “brilliant”
or on the way to becoming “great” and “brilliant,”
for they man the helms of the grant-according machines
and occupy the literary posts of the nation’s universities
that accord such designation.
If you play their game and try your damndest to become
one of them, they might not make you wealthy, but they’ll
surely succeed in making you revered and well off—
not bad for a poet… or is it?

If you’ve been one of them, they’ll likely post-mortem you
on the front cover of one of their well-endowed magazines.1
If you’ve been one of them, and haven’t yet croaked,
but are on that verge as ambulating poet posterboy corpse,
they’ll devote a whole back cover to something you once wrote,
no matter how inane or trite, as in
“living is a meatloaf sandwich.”2
If you’ve been one of them, but are still midstream careerist,
they’ll eagerly publish one of your self-serving rants where
you mention the diverse nationalities of the bards
sitting upon your comfortable oak desktop, while declaring
“the truth is that the creation of art is laborious,” though you
create it with a $150,000 annual university salary, not to
mention the six or $700,000 in foundation grants.3

Now, as one of them and with a recognizable name,
they’ll even publish one of your divinity tirades
where you omnisciently declare that if one chooses not to
“call light and energy by the name of God,” one will sadly
“lose bearings,”4 which of course leaves me hopelessly lost.

Finally, if you’re not one of them at all and don’t even wish to be,
you’ll truly have to create laboriously, for without their money.
And they’ll likely either never have gotten to read, see, or hear of you,
though, if by odd chance they have, be assured they’ll hold
nothing but deprecating scorn for you.
……………………………………………………………………
1In this case, Poetry magazine (March 2009)
2The words are John Ashbery’s and featured on the back cover of Poetry, March 2009
3C.K. Williams
4Fanny Howe