Now that everybody knows who is running Foetry, Alan Cordle's spin is that he decided to come back and reveal himself and proudly run the site in the face of all the criticism? Huh?
I remember how he loved the press when they wrote tastey morsels praising Foetry's anonymous & crass criticism of the poet elite; now that they uncover the dirt on him and those closest to him, he has a problem with the press. What a child.
Cordle will set things right again. Far right.
What I like about the new Foetry page is that Cordle's "blog roll" contains the handful of idiots who support his cause. So, now that he has been outed, he is outing all his anonymous supporters. Alan Cordle is the Tom Hanks of Foetry. This helps us--all of us foets. (Oh, and Cordle tells himself on his own website that he missed himself: "Foetry! We missed you." Who missed you?)
I say we find anti-foets and exterminate each of them in a mass satyrical festival.
We could make this fun: for them and for us.
Something like the wonderfully sublime scene in Soylent Green in which E G Robinson is euthanized to his suiting. (Sol, overwhelmed with what humanity had become at the hands of the anti-foets had the courage to let life go. I mean, when you learn that Soylent Green is people, and that anti-foets are cannibals, it's a lot to take. You all sympathize, right?) Hopefully, we will end the scene without Charlton Heston coming in to ham it up.
No Heston.
Well, We could put him out of his misery, too, come to think of it. So, invite Heston. He can bring his gun and shakey old-man hands, and I am positive the anti-foets are all Heston fans anyway. What with all their gusto for the good life, the fair life, the American way.
For the mass-kill...er...I mean culture of life...uh...misery-ending...their just isn't a nice word for it. For the execution: for the anti-foets: we will offer them a long walk into a formal room, a promenade, a march, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, we'll have them in robes, we'll present them with $500,000 Grants, National Book Awards, Janet Holmes begging for forgiveness, Jorie Graham burnt at the stake, they'll see chapbooks with new flashy graphic designs, all true-bound and expensive paper, each with their names on them, not limited editions either, and The New York Times will get their story straight,
and slowly we will chemically squeeze the life out of each of their petty, pitiful, raisined hearts with invisible gamma-foet-rays.
I volunteer to light the fire to burn their bodies
and we will flush their ashes down public toilets
in anonymous prairie-town Greyhound Stations.
We will count out meter--a new prosody--in
multiple flushes, map new stresses,
.
Somebody, maybe Michael Peirson, will write a poem about
Brendan Fraser
Alan Cordle
A Gloryhole
A slow whine
And a wrinkled expired one-way ticket to NYC.
---------------------------
Welcome back Cordle; you are officially off the artist's roll call for life.
Friday, April 22, 2005
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1 comment:
I vented, Dan, because I needed to. But I do believe that poets are useful.
To paraphrase Holderlin: What use do poet's serve in a bereft time?
To cite Waldman, for one point of view: to go against the grain for the benefit of others.
Poems may inevitably be objects, and objects in our culture may inevitably become commodities--valued only in exchange.
But something we do as poets resists for and with one another the transformation from use to exchange, as far as value is concerned in the poetic object. More significantly, when we proclaim ourselves poets, writers for that matter, we are doing something together for a reason.
It isn't a self-fulfilling, but socially purposeless act.
Concerning Cordle: I am dismayed that so many folks are willing to allow him a response-less venue. He has every right, privilege actually, to speak his mind. He has no right, no privilege, to be offered respect.
He has not earned it.
We take care of each other. I have a call out right now for my first chapbook anthology for my new press. Send me your work and I'll consider it for publication.
We do this for each other--in exchange for future consideration and for the pure joy of it. BOTH.
Contests are no different.
Concerning care: I care not for Cordle or his wife; I care for the process. He is fucking up the discourse to meet his own needs. It would be one thing to act irresponsibly with good intentions. His actions would simply lack virtue.
But he is out to ruin reputation.
He is the kind of white guy who resorts to the tricks of the trade in the white power structure grab bag when he isn't offered predetermined reciprocity for his labor. That short-changing isn't supposed to happen to him--only to others.
But, Dan, I am venting on my blog. It's my space to write and share with my friends, colleagues, and readers what I am feeling at the moment of my post. It's not too formal. And I did mention that it was satire.
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