also this guy amuses me...

hardcore snark fortunately aimed at "Real Poetry," not us insignificant small pressers. I enjoy watching him work. he's found something he's good at (because the poems I've read of his don't do a damn thing for me): making fun of the same assholes and idiots in MFA/big money grant/workshop-land that I too find equally worthless*. the fraud and bullshit associated with rigged and expensive contests (and the suckers who enter most of them), the factory-like production of MFA's smearing their useless avant-garde turds all over the place and calling it poetry, the incestuous nature of Univ. mags, etc, is a perfect example of the banality of evil. deliberately obscure abstraction is to poetry as A. Gonzales is to reliable testimony (and the idea that poetry needs folks who don't "get it" in order to stand out as poetry is absurd; poetry's function ultimately is always to reveal a deeper truth about ourselves, to enable an understanding of that which we cannot readily grasp, and bullshit word games do not a good poem make. us chumps without the proper book learnin' just don't have the tools to appreciate Real Poetry, I suppose). and while ostensibly expanding the presence of Poetry in our society, writers like those being snarked above are simultaneously killing a poem's relevance to any readers other than poetic technicians. it's way fucking worse than the "tough guy" silliness that prevails among small press writers, with their chopped flat prose and drinking/woman/child/job/etc. problems. at least small press poems hurt in a good way. poems should speak in vibrating, electric language that actually has something to say, poems should be more than a display of learned technique, poems should be the distillation of our human essences.

anyway, the stuff on BAP is priceless indeed, as that book consistently makes me sad. and gassy.

*not all MFAs. just those who suck.