STOP PUBLISHING JOURNALS

It's good to see that Tarpaulin Sky continues to work toward the noble goal of turning as many off to poetry as possible. With their new issue 13, they give people all sorts of new reasons to dismiss poetry as inaccessible and boring.

Yawn.

Will anyone buy their print issue? Probably. People enjoy reading people they know and shaking their heads thinking, "wow! This is hella boring, dude!"

So dujour. So precious. So boring. :( $12.00. 162 pages. 160 pages of rubbish.

It is similar to TYPO lately. If you don't have anything good to publish, don't publish.

Try finishing this without yawning. I don't want to pick on whoever it is who wrote that tripe, and I don't care that she wrote tripe. Why is it getting published? Why is Noah Eli Gordon published again and again? I have never met a person who likes his work. NEVER! Sometimes there is a difference in taste, but who keeps publishing Lily Brown? Why do these names keep popping into my life when everyone wants them out?

They are ruining poetry. People think that all of poetry is boring because of them.

Editors, if you can't find good poetry, publish shorter journals. If you can't fill fewer pages, stop publishing journals. The journals are all bad right now. The one good thing about them is that when they actually publish something worth reading, it's such a big deal that everyone talks about it.

$12.00 for the names on the Tarpaulin Sky's new journals is a very funny joke.

Almost as funny as "The men are enjambed."

clowns like david larsen and david larsen likes clowns

I laugh. Poetry is funny. It is fucked up being back in California.

David Larsen, who is very funny, is a very funny poet. At Pegasus, he performed with Alli Warren and Dana Ward. Alli Warren, soooo experimentalllll, duuude. Alli Warren makes people laugh. Alli Warren was in Abraham Lincoln's first issue. Alli Warren makes me laugh.

"One was at the party... only no one was at the party." lol.

Dana Ward was also clowny. Clowns are funny. Dana Ward had them rotfl. Everyone thinks that Dana Ward is funny. I laugh at Dana Warren.

I laugh at David Larsen. David Larsen is funny. He likes to laugh and clown around. David Larsen is never serious. Every reading I go to having anything to do with David Larsen is big and jokey. Jokes make people laugh. I laugh because I am a person who can laugh at jokey things when they are jokey and the timing is right and other people are laughing telling me when to laugh.

I laugh at both jokes and clowns because they are funny.

I miss connecticut.

New Evidence

If you thought Jack Morgan couldn't get any more childish, look at his blog. Sending poems to PG and E people is stupid. The people who open those envelopes don't care about what is going on in your tiny child's mind about war or whatever that poem is supposed to be about.

If that isn't enough, he started a blog about his fucking retarded fish. His fish has been swimming upside down since I've known him. I told him he should put the fish out of his misery, but he has a weird thing with that fish. I don't know why. But why a blog about the fish? Are you serious?

He is what people hate about poetry.
His assumption that every person likes poetry deep down inside is ludicrous.
No one wants to read the stupid poems about about your fish, Jack. Don't embarrass yourself anymore.

I FUCKING HATE JACK MORGAN

Jack Morgan thinks it's funny that people hate him. He says he doesn't know why. But I think he does.
He told me once in an email, "You know why I won the Stronach Award and you won the Haas Scholars Award? Because I am a poet and you are a scholar. I can fake being a good scholar--anyone can, but everyone can smell a phony poet from a mile away."
A lot of people ask me why Jack and I aren't friends anymore. How could you be friends with a guy like that? He says that that email was a compliment.

And now this MURDERCYCLE shit. It's a poem about him driving around killing the people who hate him. He calls us all trash because he's talking about EVERYONE! On his blog. There's an entry on it where he calls us all cowards. I swear to God, this guy is going to get murdered one of these days.

That author photo? That's worse than Joshua Clover's. Those tattoos aren't even real. Who's phony, ass hole?

Now there is a group on facebook started by someone who hates him. HE JOINED THE GROUP. He was the first one to join! Then he invited me and all the other people he knows hate him probably.


Dear Jack Morgan,
It is you who are a coward, writing stupid little poems about your enemies. How childish! You are a child. The Trainwreck Union died because of you. You thought that you could do everything alone, so we changed the passwords. We wanted to do Switchyard. You might have started it, but now it's ours, so just shut the fuck up. You might have solicited all the poems, but now they're ours, so shut the fuck up. If I were you, I would stop writing poetry and drop out of college. You are neither scholar nor gentleman nor poet nor human for that matter. Maybe you should have delegated some of your responsibility. Maybe then we would not have buried our knives so deeply in your ribs. I thought you were a Shakespeare-freak, haven't you read Julius Caesar?

No one cares that you named the Switchyard or that the Trainwreck Union was your idea, so stop talking about it. Stop writing. Stop talking about us.

The only reason anyone goes to your readings, the only reason you get published, is because for some reason, Sara Mumolo is your friend. No one knows what she sees in you. Stop riding her coattails and see how quickly you fall into obscurity. You are a shitty poet.

Yours,
C.

Noah Eli Gordon

So I went to see Noah Eli Gordon and he read poems about televisions and microphones. He read very bad poems about televisions and microphones. If I ever write poems like that, I hope that someone will do something horrible to me so that I never do it again.

I didn't want to make fun of Noah Eli Gordon. It's really just too easy to make fun of artists who are normally the most abnormal of all of us, but I think he invites ridicule. He has sleeves of tattoos that look like they were bought as some kind of package deal with an identity. You know the kind of tattoos that put you in clique but mean absolutely nothing. Fashion tattoos.

His poetry is the kind of soulless poetry that makes me want to take a crap and leave poetry forever. It embarrasses me. His big long poem about microphones went something like this.

Crappy Crap Crapstar

This microphone looks like a big cock.
Crap crap crap
crap crap crap
crap crap crap

This microphone is made in China like everything else
crap crap crap
crap crap crap
crap crap

This microphone, if you haven't noticed, is black.
Crap crap
crappy crap
crapcrap

I am going to suck off this microphone while you all watch because that's what I do. I suck.
Crap.
I love you, microphone.
[wipes brow, spits]


Sorry for parody. I didn't want to do it, but I feel a lot better now. Thanks for reading.

William Alexander. The Emperor has no Clothes!

I used to like William Alexander. Now I hate him.
I hate him because of the play he wrote. But I hate him even more because of the way he milks his audience.

That play about the Catacombs was so bad that I had to get up and sit somewhere else until his shit was over and the cool stuff started. I was excited to see it, and his intro was great, and I thought, "this is going to rock." I was wrong. And if you clapped for that rubbish, how do you live with yourself? The girl in front of me was apologizing to her friends for making them come to a lame art thingie.

Shit like this ruins.
Just because people still clap for you, just because they buy bull shit, even seem to like it, does not mean you fork it into their open mouths for them.