Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Yeah, love how this Kitty Karry-all set of not-quite random ILX0rs who posted early on in this current brouhaha became some kind of instant Most Wanted List.

xyzz, if there is something i can’t comprehend, it is the fact that people can read that sanctimonious open letter and feel anything besides annoyance or anger.

Wait, were we supposed to read the letter in addition to the tweet?

honest question, treesh -- does the strength of your feelings in this instance connect back to something that happened to someone you know? because your reactions seem disproportionate to merely siding with a perfect stranger over her losing a non-paid position due to a tweet you only became aware of via this thread.

I have had friends get tagged as “problematic” and have their words be misrepresented, yes.

Which you then did to...a bunch of us, myself included.

Well, i am sorry about that I was just quoting the post. I do feel that the post identified a real phenomenon—an impulse to assume the worst of someone who is the subject of a pile on.

xp - that happens all the time on ilx with few or no repercussions to the poster who has been tagged, so I suspect there's more to that story. which you need not share. thanks for the answer.

I do not feel that any of the people named in that post are bad or malicious in any way.

how exactly were the early posts misrepresented or read incomprehensibly?

I guess these fellows believe flopson and i were implying they celebrated her firing

is it good or bad that nobody reads poetry

They didn’t quite say that

self xp

to me it was just jaded social media management stuff and then table came to say he hated her writing (as he does with every author ever mentioned)

Most poetry is crap

Sounds like you're applying as editor at Barren Magazine.

xp - because it's very hard to do well

Seems to me some guy had a rule about that, Waldo Something or Other.

I always forget the correct percentage.

Read for yourself: https://daniellerosepoet.wixsite.com/home

Much of it is in prose blocks, and reads like stuff that was coming out of MFA programs in the late 90s and early 2000s. It's not very exciting, though I rescind my earlier adjective.

#PsychoPoetry #TripPoetry

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

Inzane!!

Though sincerely, I kinda feel like the academic poetry community could really benefit from having a viral memelord associated with it

otm

I feel like good memes are inherently poetic (as opposed to prosaic)

here's a few:

https://www.instagram.com/newsforpoets/
https://www.instagram.com/poets_union/
https://www.instagram.com/kenyjpgarcia/

and some others i am probably forgetting

poets_union looks the best of the three

meme consumption is so automated it leads to insatiable demands upon producers, causing overproduction and intractable quality issues. imo poets shouldn't touch that shit.

your o is wrong

^ ^ ^ this is why I never started my poetry meme page. i'd rather be reading or writing poetry and having no one care about :-D

your anti-o is just another o, dear

news for poets is really good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ewBCtBG6BI

different strophes for different folks

Folkies obv. Where's your sense of internal rhyme??

Will also accept folkses or folksies

sometimes a rhyme is a bridge too far

I have had friends get tagged as “problematic” and have their words be misrepresented, yes.

― treeship., Tuesday, 7 September 2021 17:47 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh no, no thank you, dont fuckin drag me into this

I'd like to thank Aimless for bringing us together to reflect on how much of a dick move it is to 'dear' one of the few female posters left on ILX.

o dear!

the much-ballyhooed notion that women have been disproportionately driven from ilx by persistent chauvinism feels like a particularly pernicious canard imo. gabbneb doesn't even post nowadays!

The couple of poetry slams I've been to have had readings by minorities and women and people who are not employed in the literary culture sector. They were enthusiastically attended and the crowd in both performing and in attendance were younger than the audience attending more literary poetry in bookshops I have also attended.

Why are you typing this ignorant dismissal of it?

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, September 7, 2021 4:46 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don’t think the presence of women and minorities not employed by the literary cultural sector at slam poetry nights refutes the statement “the general population has no interest in what [poets] do.” if they were performing at slam poetry they are themselves poets and the statement applies to them. the general population has no interest in what poets or slam poets do. it’s funny to me that poetry ppl freak out at that obviously true statement

Her mistake is thinking of it in terms of a general population and raw numbers, and then how this transitions to a conversation with each other. It needn't be that but it's the kind of thinking expressed in her tweet that turns that world into a private conversation.

I don’t think she was just talking about numbers – she was also talking about a closed audience.

I sort of compare it to comic books – another once-mighty artform that does piddling numbers to ageing audiences. Equally in comics there are creators who want to broaden the form and the audience, toxic fans who get defensive and nihilistic about the idea of diminishing returns, and fans who just appreciate the work while acknowledging its lesser impact.

Poetry is just not comparable to me. It's much older and mass literacy is fairly recent but yeah it can intersect to create this sorta micro-culture in a way that's similar to other stuff in the way you describe.

throwing this one out there: i can think of one form of poetry that is arguably the prevailing mode of cultural expression atm, at least in america

I sort of compare it to comic books – another once-mighty artform that does piddling numbers to ageing audiences.

comic books sold $274,308,460 retail in bookshops last year, up from $225mil in 2019, $165mil in 2018 and $96mil in 2013. Forty-six of the top 50 were for kids or YA, and eighty-seven of the top 100.

yeah i might humbly submit that manga is taking over the world tbrr

Was being a chauvinist thinking superhero comics - I wonder how much it is without manga, BD etc.

so.. without the most popular examples of the artform.. probably not great!

Americans Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey are 13 of the top twenty (these figures are for North American publishers btw); one manga volume comes in at #18 (My Hero Academia book 1). Pilkey's ten Dog-Man books are 13% of all comics sold through bookstore channels, and the only non-Pilkey, non-Raina book in the top 10 is the 2020 Newbery Award winner.

(NB that both those authors probably sell a greater proportion of their work to libraries and through Scholastic directly than Bezos and bookstores.)

Manga sales are up over 50%, moving $77 million total. Seven MHA, two Demon Slayers, and Uzumaki were the top ten sellers.