"I'd never be a member of any club that would have me as a member." It's an old adage attributed to Marxists and famously borrowed by Woody Allen. And while I've never been much into "clubbing" at all of any kind, I'm especially antipathetic to the loose gaggle of poets who decry one another's work on blogs and reviews, or publicly stroke one another's egos, boast about being published, and form insular networks to advance their own works. At the same time, I find myself fascinated by the "poetry community" - like a passerby looking through the glowing window of a wealthy home, the glory and dysfunction of its priveleged, self-satisfied, perpetually unfulfilled occupants equally inaccessible.
It's all so offputting, isn't it? Perhaps I should form a paparazzi of sorts, by turns smearing and glorifying poets without having to allow it in return. Then again, I'm not so excited about taking the GRE so that I can eat raman and grub about with snooty English graduate students and professors at the U.
Smug, Anonymous, and Membership Free... that's how I'll have to be.
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