I just ordered this book and I am so excited. The Ern Malley hoax is one of my favorite stories. I always remember the way my professor described it to me, saying "It set back modernism in Australian literature 30 years." Making fun of the schlock that gets published on Poetry, etc. has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years so I can't wait to see what you've done. This book was made for me.
oddly enough, i learned about the hoax a few weeks after i'd started mine. but as soon as i read up on it, i knew it was a legendary feat. mags like "poetry" and such have been getting away with some pretty lazy editorial practices for quite a while, so someone had to stick it to them. hope i've made mcauley and stewart proud. let me know what you think of the book when you've read it!
"Poetry" didn't, no, but I expressly avoided the top mags like that and "Paris Review" because some of those magazines commission their poems (especially ones like "Paris Review," where it's my understanding that agents vie for the prime spots for their clients, and then they fill the rest of the mag with general submissions. But even if some of the top mags didn't have that procedure in place, the main reason for avoiding them still would have been assessment time. Many of these top mags take upwards of nine months to provide an answer. Case in point: I sent my "Tragicomedy" pieces to "The Antigonish," which is considered one of Canada's better literary journals, and it took them over a year to accept them. By that point, I had already given them to "Plenitude," a decent mag, to speed things up. If I'd reserved some of these pieces for consideration from top mags alone, this experiment might've taken five years instead of two. I had so many pieces to send out that it just made sense to go for mags that were generally speedier with their responses. That said, I might, for fun, try to get a couple junk ones published in the big mags now that there aren't time constraints.
But where is the proof that these bad poems were published exclusively because you were pretending to be marginalized? Shit-ass poetry gets published from straight white guys all the time. Some of your posts on your substack are about making fun of poetry from guys like that.
I was ready to set aside ideological barriers to see if you had a point but is just nothing.
The way this ideology has managed to hijack the art world and turn so much of it into an outright fraud is really staggering. For more on how things have been going in the institutional independent film environment, feel free to take a look here:
The same thing's been happening in theater of course. Just yesterday I was treated to a facebook post by a playwright who capitalizes on the fact that she's the daughter of Lao refugees talking about buying her seventh Chanel handbag. She's certainly cracked a million in grant funding over the past decade, maybe two. Her comedy troupe (which of course isn't funny at all) received something like $350k in grant money just last year.
In any event, spending the equivalent of a down payment on a house on empty status signaling, all in the name of social justice, is apparently where all of this leads.
Which journals are the “respected, long-standing fixtures of the poetry landscape”? From this and the article that River Page just published, I’m only seeing journals I and many writer friends have never heard of (Tofu Ink??)
Ones like "Plenitude" and "The Antigonish" (they sent a publication offer, but I had to refuse because I'd already had those pieces published) come to mind. Though, truthfully, I didn't spend as much time trying to infiltrate the mid-/upper-level mags because their response times are dreadful ("The Antigonish" took a full year to respond), and I didn't wanna dedicate five or six years to this instead of two or three. I am considering trying to get into "Poetry" and a few others on that tier, though. Mostly for my own amusement now.
But let's not also forget Alan Sokal's brilliant parody of postmodernism, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, " a classic of the genre.
I just ordered this book and I am so excited. The Ern Malley hoax is one of my favorite stories. I always remember the way my professor described it to me, saying "It set back modernism in Australian literature 30 years." Making fun of the schlock that gets published on Poetry, etc. has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years so I can't wait to see what you've done. This book was made for me.
oddly enough, i learned about the hoax a few weeks after i'd started mine. but as soon as i read up on it, i knew it was a legendary feat. mags like "poetry" and such have been getting away with some pretty lazy editorial practices for quite a while, so someone had to stick it to them. hope i've made mcauley and stewart proud. let me know what you think of the book when you've read it!
Did Poetry mag actually publish your fauxslop anti art, or are you using these smaller cut-rate rags as a metonym for "the industry"?
"Poetry" didn't, no, but I expressly avoided the top mags like that and "Paris Review" because some of those magazines commission their poems (especially ones like "Paris Review," where it's my understanding that agents vie for the prime spots for their clients, and then they fill the rest of the mag with general submissions. But even if some of the top mags didn't have that procedure in place, the main reason for avoiding them still would have been assessment time. Many of these top mags take upwards of nine months to provide an answer. Case in point: I sent my "Tragicomedy" pieces to "The Antigonish," which is considered one of Canada's better literary journals, and it took them over a year to accept them. By that point, I had already given them to "Plenitude," a decent mag, to speed things up. If I'd reserved some of these pieces for consideration from top mags alone, this experiment might've taken five years instead of two. I had so many pieces to send out that it just made sense to go for mags that were generally speedier with their responses. That said, I might, for fun, try to get a couple junk ones published in the big mags now that there aren't time constraints.
Will be following this journey. Well done, sir/ma'am.
Really fantastic. Naked, beshingled and casting love bites along the beach. Who could ask for more from poetry.
Excellent podcast episode!
glad you liked it. really appreciate the support.
"voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip" = lollll
But where is the proof that these bad poems were published exclusively because you were pretending to be marginalized? Shit-ass poetry gets published from straight white guys all the time. Some of your posts on your substack are about making fun of poetry from guys like that.
I was ready to set aside ideological barriers to see if you had a point but is just nothing.
The way this ideology has managed to hijack the art world and turn so much of it into an outright fraud is really staggering. For more on how things have been going in the institutional independent film environment, feel free to take a look here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cinematimshel/p/ideologically-out-of-line-and-insufficiently?r=16t7t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The same thing's been happening in theater of course. Just yesterday I was treated to a facebook post by a playwright who capitalizes on the fact that she's the daughter of Lao refugees talking about buying her seventh Chanel handbag. She's certainly cracked a million in grant funding over the past decade, maybe two. Her comedy troupe (which of course isn't funny at all) received something like $350k in grant money just last year.
In any event, spending the equivalent of a down payment on a house on empty status signaling, all in the name of social justice, is apparently where all of this leads.
Which journals are the “respected, long-standing fixtures of the poetry landscape”? From this and the article that River Page just published, I’m only seeing journals I and many writer friends have never heard of (Tofu Ink??)
Ones like "Plenitude" and "The Antigonish" (they sent a publication offer, but I had to refuse because I'd already had those pieces published) come to mind. Though, truthfully, I didn't spend as much time trying to infiltrate the mid-/upper-level mags because their response times are dreadful ("The Antigonish" took a full year to respond), and I didn't wanna dedicate five or six years to this instead of two or three. I am considering trying to get into "Poetry" and a few others on that tier, though. Mostly for my own amusement now.
Hilarious and jolly good show.
But let's not also forget Alan Sokal's brilliant parody of postmodernism, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, " a classic of the genre.
I actually referenced that in the "Afterword" portion of the "Echo" manuscript. Couldn't forget about the Sokal Affair!
Mos def!
Why is the post in all-bold?
i was just fiddling with the interface. was new to the platform at the time. lol.
interesting.
How so?