"Poetry Foundation Clamps Down on Prankster Poets"
 

Discuss (if you feel like it):

An article from The Reader.

"That was followed by an uncomfortable moment of silence, he recalls, and then Dunn—whose performance practice includes belly dances with a live python—began "doing her own person-to-person disruption," shedding clothing and demonstrating a sudden passion for him. Over the protests of Poetry Foundation staff, he reciprocated. "We began making out in an exaggerated, comical manner," Johnson says. When a security guard warned emphatically that "PDAs are not allowed in the Poetry Foundation" and said that the police would be called, they stepped it up, testing the foundation's "stodgy rules of decorum" and the $300,000 floor by "rolling around" on it, "laughing and groping" in a show of "sexual slapstick" that included a plastic pig nose Dunn stuffed into Johnson's mouth."

Belly dances! Live pythons! A plastic pig nose as public sex toy!

C'est sans commentaire! ;)

Thanks,

Bill

This young lady is an exhibitionist. She's making sure that her reading attracts those who'll enjoy blowing off steam, heckling and taking their clothes off.
(Heck - none of that happens at my readings! :rolleyes:)

Will anyone even be listening to her poetry, I wonder, with all that nudity going on? And is it any good, anyway?

Another thought: Duncan's thread has this quote: The singer, under all circumstances, must be more interesting than the song he sings.

Do you think that "The poet, under all circumstances, must be more interesting than the poem she reads"?
Hmmm... Dunn seems to think so!

PS. If anyone goes to her event, please report back to us! :)

. . . and I thought the thread title meant Poetry was actually going to clamp down on pseudo-poets :p . Anyway, I think the prank was delicious.

Wow, looking at the YouTube clips, the staff of Poetry Foundation seems a shower of officious b*****ds.

Buzzards? Barmaids?

Officious barmaids.
Like it. Heehee.

(Quincy, how do you find those YouTube links, please?)

bollards? bandaids?

Jayne--

The link was embedded in the article, but this should get you started:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssotf..._order&list=UL

The other noteworthy thing is the way that the Poetry Foundation's h.q. looks like the unnatural offspring of a three-way between a university library, a corporate headquarters, and your local Barnes & Noble.

Thanks, Quincy.

I watched it but it's all rather civilised, isn't it? If that had been here there would have been a punch-up!

I had to smile at the bit where the girl says, "It's OK, let's just go and have some wine." Yeah, that's probably what I'd have said.

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

Yes! Occupy Poetry! Take over the press and put out Formalist broadsides and scatter them from the windows. Poetry to the People!

I didn't live through the 1960s for nothing.

This hilarious!!! And awful. I'm with you, Gail! Where's George Carlin when you need him? Well, here he is--a link on my Facebook, courtesy of Quincy. I hope it's OK to put this here. It has bad language in it....


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6m...ature=youtu.be

Charlotte

Why am I so unsurprised, Quincy? But at least we're wiser nowadays. Keats took it all so personally.

Duncan