I don't know...perhaps you all do. I wonder...was that huge building, the heavy-handedness in responding to upstart poets, what Lily had in mind when she endowed it?

Did Ruth intend for a concrete monument to be built for established poets only..or to foster new poets, give grants, help poets old and young. Or all of the above? I ask because I don't know what her intentions were. Whatever, it was better than most big drug money is spent these days, I guess.

I've now sent at least five submissions to Poetry and had not a whiff, so they're obviously a fat shower of bollards or barmaids or bumplugs or buzzards or whatever it is Quincy was getting at. What's rude about a bastard? I'm a bastard. Blame the parents. The alternative term, whoreson, seems less fortunate to me. I'm chairing a reading next week, and if Ian Parks and/or Alan Jenkins get naked and roll around on the floor I'll not be 'appy.

Oh, the bastardism that struck me, was, well, that a certain degree of epater le bourgeois kind of goes with the territory, and I don't mean Chucky Bernstein stomping around with a hammer making a complete tool of himself in some museum in Upper Manhattan under Poetry Foundation auspices. I mean the real thing.

In any event, the start of this seems to have been a general "keep off the grass" bit of @$$holishness on the part of the staff, which provoked a bit of scandal. I mean, I'd be pissed off if someone did that to a CSM reading, but the Bowery Poetry Club staff aren't pricks, and CSM doesn't really have a budget per se, so I don't lose sleep over the possibility.

I've seen those guys in the dark suits before--they were in The Godfather, right? The dudes they were "escorting" woke up the next day, not with a bloody horsehead, but with a copy of Poetry at the foot of their beds. Next thing you know, they're on Lily's payroll.

Thomas Graves' comment.

Duncan

re: under read poets:

I did not mean that the poets don't read, rather that the poets aren't read...

. . . :D . . . :(

[quote=Rory Waterman;221132]I've now sent at least five submissions to Poetry and had not a whiff/QUOTE]

Just five? Amateur! I've tried annually for 30 years...

Perhaps It’s time to Occupy Poetry.

Bumplugs I like.

An apposite blog post by Colin Ward.

Duncan