6/29/07
We're moving backward. We've been sensing this for a few weeks. Cars are getting boxy again. As a participant in consumer culture, I would grab an iPhone if it were offered, but what is this $600 cell with internet that plays music? I thought they already had that. There's the iPhone, then, and now that Brown v. Board of Education has been reversed, the misery of recidivism, economic, stylistic, and of course political, disaffects our days.
6/28/07
6/27/07
One of the darn things about the current admin and its shrinking ranks of defenders is that they destroy the news. Any phenomenon outside the circle can be dismissed as immaterial. Anti-torture bill? There's sure to be a special signing along with renditions, whatever. And at base political levels, opponents are tortured and torn apart like emoticon play things. When a loyalist like Richard Lugar speaks out against Plan A, the official 'soft' word is that the admin has known about Lugar's views for some time. In other words, whatever. Katrina was whatever and, by the way, the clean-up, much less the repair, of Louisiana still is. Unsoft Cheney, fuck-you czarist prince of whatever, left foot exec, right foot independent torturer, will not be subject to executive constraints: Comment from White House: Absolutely nothing substantive. No embarrassment, either. Come September, assessment of the surge in Iraq will now be a snapshot. Soft and fuzzy. Whatever. Justice Department further implodes. The president has confidence (always will) in his former counsel. The news, the raving madness of our political condition, gets tamped down to story/joke outlines of the running hysteria variety. In fact hysteria is better than news. In which vacuum Ann Coulter distinguishes herself testing limits that have been heretofore taboo among the no-better-no-worse gaggle of other 'partisan' jokers. Coulter stepped over the line Monday, wishing gay John Edwards death by terrorists. Next day Edwards's wife Elizabeth called into Chris Matthews to ask Coulter to stop the ad hominems. Note Coulter's twisting the request into an infringement of free speech and Coulter's steely brush-off, the whatever.
EE: I'm calling you … in the south when we -- when someone does something that displeases us, we wanna ask them politely to stop doing it. Uh - I'd like to ask Ann Coulter -- if she wants to debate on issues, on positions -- we certainly disagree with nearly everything she said on your show today -- um but uh it's quite another matter for these personal attacks that the things she has said over the years not just about John but about other candidates -- it lowers our political dialogue precisely at the time that we need to raise it. So I want to use the opportunity … to ask her politely stop the personal attacks.
Ann Coulter: OK, so I made a joke -- let's see six months ago -- and as you point out they've been raising money off of it for six months since then.
CM: This is yesterday morning, what you said about him.
AC: I didn't say anything about him actually either time.
EE: Ann, you know that's not true. And once more its been going on for sometime.
AC: I don't mind you trying to raise money. I mean it's better this than giving $50,000 speeches to the poor.
EE: I'm asking you
AC: Just to use my name on the Web pages…
EE: I'm asking you politely…
AC: … but as for a debate with me, um yeah, sure. Yeah, we'll have a debate
EE: I'm asking you politely to stop personal attacks.
AC: How bout you stop raising money on the Web page then?
EE: It didn't start it did not
AC: No you don't have cause I don't mind
EE: It did not start with that you had a column a number of years ago
AC: OK, great the wife of a presidential candidate is calling in asking me to stop speaking
CM: Let her finish the point...
AC: You're asking me to stop speaking stop writing your columns, stop writing your books.
CM: OK, Ann. Please.
AC: OK
EE: You wrote a column a couple years ago which made fun of the moment of Charlie Dean's death, and suggested that my husband had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said ask me about my dead son. This is not legitimate political dialogue.
AC: That's now three years ago
EE: It debases political dialogue. It drives people away from the process. We can't have a debate about issues if you're using this kind of language.
AC: Yeah why isn't John Edwards making this call?
CM: Well do you want to respond and we'll end this conversation?
EE: I haven't talked to John about his call.
AC: This is just another attempt for –
EE: I'm making this call as a mother. I'm the mother of that boy who died. My children participate -- these young people behind you are the age of my children. You're asking them to participate in a dialogue that's based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues and I don't think that's serving them or this country very well.
APPLAUSE
CM: Thank you very much Elizabeth Edwards. Do you want to -- you have all the time in the world to respond.
AC: I think we heard all we need to hear. The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking. No.
EE: I'm calling you … in the south when we -- when someone does something that displeases us, we wanna ask them politely to stop doing it. Uh - I'd like to ask Ann Coulter -- if she wants to debate on issues, on positions -- we certainly disagree with nearly everything she said on your show today -- um but uh it's quite another matter for these personal attacks that the things she has said over the years not just about John but about other candidates -- it lowers our political dialogue precisely at the time that we need to raise it. So I want to use the opportunity … to ask her politely stop the personal attacks.
Ann Coulter: OK, so I made a joke -- let's see six months ago -- and as you point out they've been raising money off of it for six months since then.
CM: This is yesterday morning, what you said about him.
AC: I didn't say anything about him actually either time.
EE: Ann, you know that's not true. And once more its been going on for sometime.
AC: I don't mind you trying to raise money. I mean it's better this than giving $50,000 speeches to the poor.
EE: I'm asking you
AC: Just to use my name on the Web pages…
EE: I'm asking you politely…
AC: … but as for a debate with me, um yeah, sure. Yeah, we'll have a debate
EE: I'm asking you politely to stop personal attacks.
AC: How bout you stop raising money on the Web page then?
EE: It didn't start it did not
AC: No you don't have cause I don't mind
EE: It did not start with that you had a column a number of years ago
AC: OK, great the wife of a presidential candidate is calling in asking me to stop speaking
CM: Let her finish the point...
AC: You're asking me to stop speaking stop writing your columns, stop writing your books.
CM: OK, Ann. Please.
AC: OK
EE: You wrote a column a couple years ago which made fun of the moment of Charlie Dean's death, and suggested that my husband had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said ask me about my dead son. This is not legitimate political dialogue.
AC: That's now three years ago
EE: It debases political dialogue. It drives people away from the process. We can't have a debate about issues if you're using this kind of language.
AC: Yeah why isn't John Edwards making this call?
CM: Well do you want to respond and we'll end this conversation?
EE: I haven't talked to John about his call.
AC: This is just another attempt for –
EE: I'm making this call as a mother. I'm the mother of that boy who died. My children participate -- these young people behind you are the age of my children. You're asking them to participate in a dialogue that's based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues and I don't think that's serving them or this country very well.
APPLAUSE
CM: Thank you very much Elizabeth Edwards. Do you want to -- you have all the time in the world to respond.
AC: I think we heard all we need to hear. The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking. No.
6/26/07
If you scroll down to the bottom of Bill Knott's oddly organized blog you'll find three of his color drawings (or they could be gouaches but they reproduce as washed charcoals). They were posted June 20, and they give a glimpse of the brooder perpetrating the gallows humor in his poems. They radiate a vintage, mid-century Matta-ish apocalyptic bent. The 'figures' are boxed into Stuart Davis-like confines, sealing their fate as 'after' pieces, that is, design after another's thought. See what you think.
6/24/07
6/22/07
We're stock and barrel for artifice, stock in trade. When Jimmy Schulyer remembers Joe Brainard and Frank O'Hara, and when Ron Padgett calls up all three of them, what's biographically accurate beyond ghostly artifice is the entirety of kinship, four-way as it happens, tubby, transfixing emotional sustenance that comes with affection among friends. Tony Towle dreaming of O'Hara seems credible as both artifice and traceable proposition on similar if more 'platonic' grounds. Lewis Warsh has long been licensed, so to speak, to feel and sing to the feathery shadows of poets as lovers present but out of practice. Robert Creeley dexterously wrote about John Wieners alive and, to more tragic effect, vice versa. Friendship, ebullience, shared wit, ardor are components to watch for in the vetting process the onlooker or reader follows to decide whether a poet or playwright, beyond artifice, walks with or overruns the spirits of Wieners or young O'Hara.
6/21/07
Poetry in a world of video wallpaper and audio curators had better get sweet and savagely to the point. Click any of the four above and you're going to see the barebones of seduction, eye news. Three of the four bring on music and extra graphics. There's nothing in e-poetry like them. Maybe nothing in poetry, period. (Although I would like to think otherwise.) Flipside: these four samples lack the gooey touch of a poet. Let's get some verse, music, and sexed-out beasts up on the web, already.
6/19/07
The narrative arc remakes itself into a poll-driven din.
(As.) The bacterial growth was enlarging.
Diagnosis is a mystery. To save the baby -- poetry travels. There's blood everywhere.
The Pierre, leechlike. The Punta Cana or Waldorf, an embarrassed dither. The Half Moon, proud to be garish. The Every Turn and Twist. Mixed venues for composing on drugs are more a slice of Harlem or Noe Valley, but where can we sleep for strapping performance, comely debutante?
Dopamine, quips, or organic hashish works if attendees come to listen. Or there could be something else, that lean, ten-piece orchestra in your head flown apart while we consumed -- song's origin shipping off to a chill enclave, not connecting to fans so much as nipping clientele who have their own youth culture down pat.
A tornado of fire keeps you asleep.
From there, I think it's time to focus on more challenging work.
Gaming demands a few portable desks with secret drawers packed with crystal goblets and tools for investment, friendship to burn directly from the can, and falconry, as well as pharmaceuticals. Take the little pink rounds, get it on, pull drawers, stare down my bitewing x-ray, glaze over star positions and how stars form, particles released by decayed stellar phenomena or other.
Right now I'm using both the patsy and you to send spam and pay my bills. I should search for shuteye signs along with rationalized angles to function urbanely, I know, for this thrill is a steppingstone to higher and more improper deviation and global narrative. What I am getting to, date, is, forms of prosody are multiplying, solving equations for more advanced synthesis and future master classes, and they are doing rhythmic mayhem, bobolink sky cycling, dockside to collide, with ease.
Now approaching, the four horsemen.
You overnighted ethanol and vodka, but the bionic glove is a godsend. When I light the sterno and carefully place it under a 'piston,' the subtracted janitors return with blues renditions of real counterculture. We need thus to care to see all photos before they were retouched out, and the long-running trio of content: authentic disaster, worship of deep discounts, Chopin. Lenny Chopin. (Poems have sex in uncomfortable places.) So stay perversive and I'll hit turf hard enough to be injured. I'll get good and round-shouldered and flash the smile of a craven brilliantine.
From mercury to riches, there are decent folk still trying to sleep. Meanwhile some are coming nearer for poetry on optic nerves. Pinpoint the moves and know we all love their shadows from a pocket of the quarter of guests ensnared and shades between registered in a tank of landmarks with one ledger. Evening. Lingo.
(As.) The bacterial growth was enlarging.
Diagnosis is a mystery. To save the baby -- poetry travels. There's blood everywhere.
The Pierre, leechlike. The Punta Cana or Waldorf, an embarrassed dither. The Half Moon, proud to be garish. The Every Turn and Twist. Mixed venues for composing on drugs are more a slice of Harlem or Noe Valley, but where can we sleep for strapping performance, comely debutante?
Dopamine, quips, or organic hashish works if attendees come to listen. Or there could be something else, that lean, ten-piece orchestra in your head flown apart while we consumed -- song's origin shipping off to a chill enclave, not connecting to fans so much as nipping clientele who have their own youth culture down pat.
A tornado of fire keeps you asleep.
From there, I think it's time to focus on more challenging work.
Gaming demands a few portable desks with secret drawers packed with crystal goblets and tools for investment, friendship to burn directly from the can, and falconry, as well as pharmaceuticals. Take the little pink rounds, get it on, pull drawers, stare down my bitewing x-ray, glaze over star positions and how stars form, particles released by decayed stellar phenomena or other.
Right now I'm using both the patsy and you to send spam and pay my bills. I should search for shuteye signs along with rationalized angles to function urbanely, I know, for this thrill is a steppingstone to higher and more improper deviation and global narrative. What I am getting to, date, is, forms of prosody are multiplying, solving equations for more advanced synthesis and future master classes, and they are doing rhythmic mayhem, bobolink sky cycling, dockside to collide, with ease.
Now approaching, the four horsemen.
You overnighted ethanol and vodka, but the bionic glove is a godsend. When I light the sterno and carefully place it under a 'piston,' the subtracted janitors return with blues renditions of real counterculture. We need thus to care to see all photos before they were retouched out, and the long-running trio of content: authentic disaster, worship of deep discounts, Chopin. Lenny Chopin. (Poems have sex in uncomfortable places.) So stay perversive and I'll hit turf hard enough to be injured. I'll get good and round-shouldered and flash the smile of a craven brilliantine.
From mercury to riches, there are decent folk still trying to sleep. Meanwhile some are coming nearer for poetry on optic nerves. Pinpoint the moves and know we all love their shadows from a pocket of the quarter of guests ensnared and shades between registered in a tank of landmarks with one ledger. Evening. Lingo.
6/18/07
A stretch. (Also a plea.)
Ok. Seventh inning. A parachutist glided into the triple-A ballpark, centerfield, score PawSox 1, Richmond zip. Pulling his cord, the cadet stepped out of his flight suit and ran bare-ass to the microphone on the pitcher's mound. Why, it's a poet! Right off the guy broke into an inappropriate sonnet and sestina. The crowd that half-filled the stadium booed, boozy, lunging boys and squirts, some blowing kisses in the poet's direction.
Better luck next time, Mr. Percy Outrage.
Lord's Prayer in boardrooms, champagne at Nascar, revved Metallica competing for soap brands. Why can't poetry break through?
It's just the time. Time, now, brought by the verb atomize and its affiliates, present and past participles and the gerund: atomizing of the exposition into multiple centers, tennis courts, lap pools, suites with video inside videos that link to shopping carts. The soundtrack off the beachfront is a new jungle dance that's actually ring tones from the hipster opera restaged as an audio pop-up template for the anti-rape recruitment kiosk near customs. (Customs has been buffed up.) Even the news dailies are atomizing like Mingus bands of demographic 'sections' bringing on drug-induced niche narcolepsy. Hence, op-ed Plavix. (What, this old rag?) Hence, as well, an 'arts' page that touches on 'style,' 'eating out,' 'day travel,' and 'business,' and vice versa. Like in college, the news seems all the same, off-somewhere, atomized.
When it comes to narcotics, the internet will never replace college. If you actually want to graduate, there must be balance in your life. You will need to include adequate amounts of drugs and work. As long as you and the administration are satisfied with your efforts, the fun aspect is likely to enhance your experience. Besides, there might be something in the water that you'll need to neutralize, and if you tell kids 'Don't do this' it just makes them more apt to do it, especially college types. I believe that everyone has drug savviness that can add to your well-being. If you can take a little piece of each person and add it to yourself, it can make you a better atomizing person.
So the challenge is out there. Please, poets, it's a question of more strategic mixed venues. Baseball and other slow moving spectator sports. No, they won't work for us. Vegas nights and poems. Hardly. Babysitting and poems. Don't think so. Spicy food and poems. Perhaps. Drinking and poems, much better. Mind exploding, sexually oceanic drugs. The best.
Ok. Seventh inning. A parachutist glided into the triple-A ballpark, centerfield, score PawSox 1, Richmond zip. Pulling his cord, the cadet stepped out of his flight suit and ran bare-ass to the microphone on the pitcher's mound. Why, it's a poet! Right off the guy broke into an inappropriate sonnet and sestina. The crowd that half-filled the stadium booed, boozy, lunging boys and squirts, some blowing kisses in the poet's direction.
Better luck next time, Mr. Percy Outrage.
Lord's Prayer in boardrooms, champagne at Nascar, revved Metallica competing for soap brands. Why can't poetry break through?
It's just the time. Time, now, brought by the verb atomize and its affiliates, present and past participles and the gerund: atomizing of the exposition into multiple centers, tennis courts, lap pools, suites with video inside videos that link to shopping carts. The soundtrack off the beachfront is a new jungle dance that's actually ring tones from the hipster opera restaged as an audio pop-up template for the anti-rape recruitment kiosk near customs. (Customs has been buffed up.) Even the news dailies are atomizing like Mingus bands of demographic 'sections' bringing on drug-induced niche narcolepsy. Hence, op-ed Plavix. (What, this old rag?) Hence, as well, an 'arts' page that touches on 'style,' 'eating out,' 'day travel,' and 'business,' and vice versa. Like in college, the news seems all the same, off-somewhere, atomized.
When it comes to narcotics, the internet will never replace college. If you actually want to graduate, there must be balance in your life. You will need to include adequate amounts of drugs and work. As long as you and the administration are satisfied with your efforts, the fun aspect is likely to enhance your experience. Besides, there might be something in the water that you'll need to neutralize, and if you tell kids 'Don't do this' it just makes them more apt to do it, especially college types. I believe that everyone has drug savviness that can add to your well-being. If you can take a little piece of each person and add it to yourself, it can make you a better atomizing person.
So the challenge is out there. Please, poets, it's a question of more strategic mixed venues. Baseball and other slow moving spectator sports. No, they won't work for us. Vegas nights and poems. Hardly. Babysitting and poems. Don't think so. Spicy food and poems. Perhaps. Drinking and poems, much better. Mind exploding, sexually oceanic drugs. The best.
6/14/07
Sorry, Tree
Eileen Myles
Wave 2007
Vomit. It has a ring to it. A ring-dighted vessel of a word. Eileen Myles found that out after eating Swedish meatballs in junior high:
We got back to class and the nun asked us what we had had for lunch and I said vomit quickly, feeling smart at once. A new Swedish word. I remember out in the hall that afternoon, being punished for the word, remembering the raucous sound of classroom laughter. Even I joined in, feeling entirely out of control, humiliated, but the enormous release the one word had triggered still made me snort and gag with pleasure. Alone. It wasn't so bad to be totally wrong if you just didn't know and it was so much fun.And there you have it. The young poet links to essentials, the word, no constraints, humiliation, release, gigantic joy. In just 81 pages Eileen circulates wildly among essentials and innumerable incidents, freeing up happenstance, a dog "bipping" outside, nails on his paws "clicking...float across our sea / like degrees / along a thermometer / laying flat numbers / everything into a room / I can see / do you hate me now / Darling I want nothing but this / endless flow / of getting loose..." Eileen's subjects are at once beloved, present, past, and merely observed, "the boy's / just sitting / there being / young." In "Culture" she speaks as native lover, as alien to her language -- "I'm barely / Thinking in English" -- and as unempowered accessory -- "Okay I'm talking about an invisible / Culture. I wish I could help. / Service seems / Central, participation. / All this rushing to wind up / Walking down the street..." This anime captured as well in "That Country" where we talk in American "which means / to speak / where you land...a spin without / a home. / An edgy / feeling. A coin..." But the larger subject is her method for composing freedom. "I want to live here feeling celebrated for breathing open," while Eileen the pedagogue and anarchist emerges, as artists "like error," she says, and "Living makes me hot," finding ways to scribble her way out of "silent connection" grabbing "the white / handle of / my speech / like it's an / umbrella / and I shake / it free / of words," ringing vessels for "letting the / day be massive / Unlicensed."
6/13/07
6/12/07
It's a long way from Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold, the enraged ex-agent on "Entourage," to Tammy Foye, and even further, perhaps, to Prada Bernhardt, the former media poet and tea person for Media Listserv. Or is it?
Something strange happened in court during the Bernhardt “poetry fiend” trial. That was the moment when Fannie Wildman's name came up as someone Bernhardt had fantasized about killing. It began to dawn on everyone, from spectators and reporters to, perhaps, the prosecution, that they were about to witness the first use in a high-profile criminal case of the “Devil Applies for Arts Grants” defense.
Plot twists lurking below the surface in the Bernhardt story suddenly emerged full blown, propelled by the fevered writings in Bernhardt's diary and manifesto. In a written evaluation, the defense psychologist, Eva Darwin, stated that for Bernhardt, the sexually charged, celebrity-driven pressure cooker of the poetry world was toxic, “the proverbial recipe for disaster.”
Was it true? Is poetry so catty, judgmental, obsessed with appearance and attitude that it can drive someone insane? Is it so poisonous that it can lead a person to commit several felonies? While the “poetry made her do it” defense ultimately failed -- the jury resoundingly convicted Bernhardt of plagiarism and sex abuse, and she faces 25 years to life in Bayonne or, worst case, the Bronx -- some elements of her lawyers’ claims do resonate.
There is no doubt, several poetry insiders and former insiders say, that working in the industry can be brutal. “Poetry is what poetry is,” said Headon Camlon, a former publicist for Art Pain, who now runs Flower Bed, a small press for sub-Saharan poetry in SoHo. “If you’re not grounded and don’t have a strong sense of yourself, sure, that could affect you. Possibly. I think.”
Still, he added, survival is part of the poetry game and depends, to some degree, on the passion someone has for the racket. “I think that people who stay in poetry and love poetry, believe in poetry on a certain level,” Camlon said. “There is a certain element about poetry that does require endurance, the component of it that changes all the time. And I think that those that can tolerate it will have a sort of constitution to survive and, you know, fuck it up so it's interesting.”
Bernhart, now 43 or 44, was fired from Media Listserv by her then-condomate Corel Unbred in 2002 for, essentially, being obnoxious to the wrong person. Before then, she had been a lowly freelancer and graduate student in pop culture; working in the constraints department of the Granny Tearoom and Lit Agency, the oracle of the poetry industry and subsidiary of Media Listserve, was her dream job. She had access to celebrities, she could tie up magazine editors, make them quiver.
But she was also a seemingly willful misfit, according to former colleagues, someone with bad grammar, unmanageable hair and tone-deaf social etiquette, on the order of Heathcliff, Ugly Betty and, yes, improbable Tammy Foye, Wildman’s once-clueless assistant in grant applications, in a world that prized all the opposite qualities. It was not so different, maybe, just maybe, from high school, and in the end, after her dismissal, she became a monster, Stephen King’s Carrie, humiliated at the prom.
“There was no place in the world for her,” Raquel Miracle, the author of “The Mad, the Bad, and Poetry's Tiresome Innocent: The Criminal Mind in Prosody,” told the jury. “Everybody was a hypocrite.” After Bernhardt was fired, the psychologist said, her latent paranoid schizophrenia emerged, and she plunged off the deep end. On Halloween 2005, she impersonated a gay firefighter and tricked her way into the Chelsea apartment of Parker Frown, a former co-worker she barely knew, where she sexually molested and terrorized him for 13 hours.
Bernhardt put Manolo Blahnik sandals on her victim, which some commentators have described as fetish-like behavior. It was not a fetish, her lawyers say -- the shoes became “props” in her crusade to destroy poetry icons.
Camlon wondered why Bernhardt would have been attracted to an industry that was so toxic for her, an industry dominated by strong effeminate men, which was certainly no place for a mishugunah female. Still, he said: “I could get rock hard if convinced that it was the industry that drove her to do what she did. You are or you aren’t that person. I believe some far more deeply rooted psychological trauma would make her do something like that. At least that's what my roots are telling me.”
The poetry version of “The Vowels of Awesome Nature, Even the Seven Northeastern State Capitols,” based on the best-selling video infomercial by Tammy Foye, former assistant to Ms. Wildman, came out in 2006, while Bernhardt was awaiting trial. “When I read the poem, with all its raw naturalism and all, I said that’s the Bernhardt story, plain and klutzy,” Rubric Gotti, Bernhardt's defense lawyer, recalled the day after the guilty verdict. “You have a chip on your shoulder, you think people are inferior to you, and then you go into poetry, where you could be inferior,” Gotti said. “They are flying high. You feel like a schlump. It’s not the best environment to handle your psychosis.”
In her diary, Bernhardt obsessively vented her rage at, among other targets, Kerry O'Michaly, then the detector of beauty at Demand Press. “I can’t help remembering the week I lost my job at Media Listserve, and I called Kerry -- who sang my praises up till then, so I thought she’d see a friend in need,” Bernhardt wrote, while running from police. “She called me back and berated me for leaving too long a message on her cellphone. ‘That costs extra points, you know?’ ”
Bernhardt went on: “If there was ever a contingent of hubris-drenched compensated sociopaths crying out for retribution, it’s this crowd. And every time I think about their callous indifference along every step of my downturn, it just strengthens my resolve to see this through until I’m a bleeding corpse splayed out on the sidewalk filled with police-issue lead.”
On Dec. 7, still on the run and surviving by visiting churches and soup kitchens, she wrote that she had become part of a netherworld of tracers and copyists whose members “lack the essential props that would fool others into thinking they’re still a part of the society: a cellphone and a Starbucks cup with that paper/Styrofoam band around it to ‘protect’ the cup-holders. (God Help Us!)” But she saved her fiercest wrath for Wildman, the fabulously successful arts adminstrator. Why Wildman? Because, Bernhardt claims, she did not return her phone calls when she was a tea server and columnist for Media Listserve. With the benefit of hindsight, you can sort of understand why.
“When I was a poet working the lines at the tearoom, there were many high-profile editors, and God knows they had big egos, but you could still get them on the phone -- the Crawfords, Tex and Cindy, Lorenzo Rodney Donna Figano, even Simeon Aimsmall,” Bernhardt wrote in her “personal manifesto, a k a the making of a menace.” “But Wildman? She just never talked to peons like us.”
It is hard to believe that poetry alone could be responsible for such wrath, said Great Fax, a poet: “I don’t think it’s any more despicable than any other business. Certainly not any more despicable than child porn or usury. If the business made her do it, there’d be a lot more people harassing co-poets.”
In her manifesto, Bernhardt exhibited a grandiose need to justify herself by tearing down those who, unlike her, had survived the steely, exacting mistress that is the poetry world. “O.K., you get to call me a psycho,” she wrote, “and in return, I get to tell you, irrefutably, that I’m someone who saw through and willfully renounced the inane regimen of poetry, the petty satisfactions and petty grievances that you all live every day. That's not my government.”
You all. My government. Who in the poetry world would not recognize that sense of self-importance?
Something strange happened in court during the Bernhardt “poetry fiend” trial. That was the moment when Fannie Wildman's name came up as someone Bernhardt had fantasized about killing. It began to dawn on everyone, from spectators and reporters to, perhaps, the prosecution, that they were about to witness the first use in a high-profile criminal case of the “Devil Applies for Arts Grants” defense.
Plot twists lurking below the surface in the Bernhardt story suddenly emerged full blown, propelled by the fevered writings in Bernhardt's diary and manifesto. In a written evaluation, the defense psychologist, Eva Darwin, stated that for Bernhardt, the sexually charged, celebrity-driven pressure cooker of the poetry world was toxic, “the proverbial recipe for disaster.”
Was it true? Is poetry so catty, judgmental, obsessed with appearance and attitude that it can drive someone insane? Is it so poisonous that it can lead a person to commit several felonies? While the “poetry made her do it” defense ultimately failed -- the jury resoundingly convicted Bernhardt of plagiarism and sex abuse, and she faces 25 years to life in Bayonne or, worst case, the Bronx -- some elements of her lawyers’ claims do resonate.
There is no doubt, several poetry insiders and former insiders say, that working in the industry can be brutal. “Poetry is what poetry is,” said Headon Camlon, a former publicist for Art Pain, who now runs Flower Bed, a small press for sub-Saharan poetry in SoHo. “If you’re not grounded and don’t have a strong sense of yourself, sure, that could affect you. Possibly. I think.”
Still, he added, survival is part of the poetry game and depends, to some degree, on the passion someone has for the racket. “I think that people who stay in poetry and love poetry, believe in poetry on a certain level,” Camlon said. “There is a certain element about poetry that does require endurance, the component of it that changes all the time. And I think that those that can tolerate it will have a sort of constitution to survive and, you know, fuck it up so it's interesting.”
Bernhart, now 43 or 44, was fired from Media Listserv by her then-condomate Corel Unbred in 2002 for, essentially, being obnoxious to the wrong person. Before then, she had been a lowly freelancer and graduate student in pop culture; working in the constraints department of the Granny Tearoom and Lit Agency, the oracle of the poetry industry and subsidiary of Media Listserve, was her dream job. She had access to celebrities, she could tie up magazine editors, make them quiver.
But she was also a seemingly willful misfit, according to former colleagues, someone with bad grammar, unmanageable hair and tone-deaf social etiquette, on the order of Heathcliff, Ugly Betty and, yes, improbable Tammy Foye, Wildman’s once-clueless assistant in grant applications, in a world that prized all the opposite qualities. It was not so different, maybe, just maybe, from high school, and in the end, after her dismissal, she became a monster, Stephen King’s Carrie, humiliated at the prom.
“There was no place in the world for her,” Raquel Miracle, the author of “The Mad, the Bad, and Poetry's Tiresome Innocent: The Criminal Mind in Prosody,” told the jury. “Everybody was a hypocrite.” After Bernhardt was fired, the psychologist said, her latent paranoid schizophrenia emerged, and she plunged off the deep end. On Halloween 2005, she impersonated a gay firefighter and tricked her way into the Chelsea apartment of Parker Frown, a former co-worker she barely knew, where she sexually molested and terrorized him for 13 hours.
Bernhardt put Manolo Blahnik sandals on her victim, which some commentators have described as fetish-like behavior. It was not a fetish, her lawyers say -- the shoes became “props” in her crusade to destroy poetry icons.
Camlon wondered why Bernhardt would have been attracted to an industry that was so toxic for her, an industry dominated by strong effeminate men, which was certainly no place for a mishugunah female. Still, he said: “I could get rock hard if convinced that it was the industry that drove her to do what she did. You are or you aren’t that person. I believe some far more deeply rooted psychological trauma would make her do something like that. At least that's what my roots are telling me.”
The poetry version of “The Vowels of Awesome Nature, Even the Seven Northeastern State Capitols,” based on the best-selling video infomercial by Tammy Foye, former assistant to Ms. Wildman, came out in 2006, while Bernhardt was awaiting trial. “When I read the poem, with all its raw naturalism and all, I said that’s the Bernhardt story, plain and klutzy,” Rubric Gotti, Bernhardt's defense lawyer, recalled the day after the guilty verdict. “You have a chip on your shoulder, you think people are inferior to you, and then you go into poetry, where you could be inferior,” Gotti said. “They are flying high. You feel like a schlump. It’s not the best environment to handle your psychosis.”
In her diary, Bernhardt obsessively vented her rage at, among other targets, Kerry O'Michaly, then the detector of beauty at Demand Press. “I can’t help remembering the week I lost my job at Media Listserve, and I called Kerry -- who sang my praises up till then, so I thought she’d see a friend in need,” Bernhardt wrote, while running from police. “She called me back and berated me for leaving too long a message on her cellphone. ‘That costs extra points, you know?’ ”
Bernhardt went on: “If there was ever a contingent of hubris-drenched compensated sociopaths crying out for retribution, it’s this crowd. And every time I think about their callous indifference along every step of my downturn, it just strengthens my resolve to see this through until I’m a bleeding corpse splayed out on the sidewalk filled with police-issue lead.”
On Dec. 7, still on the run and surviving by visiting churches and soup kitchens, she wrote that she had become part of a netherworld of tracers and copyists whose members “lack the essential props that would fool others into thinking they’re still a part of the society: a cellphone and a Starbucks cup with that paper/Styrofoam band around it to ‘protect’ the cup-holders. (God Help Us!)” But she saved her fiercest wrath for Wildman, the fabulously successful arts adminstrator. Why Wildman? Because, Bernhardt claims, she did not return her phone calls when she was a tea server and columnist for Media Listserve. With the benefit of hindsight, you can sort of understand why.
“When I was a poet working the lines at the tearoom, there were many high-profile editors, and God knows they had big egos, but you could still get them on the phone -- the Crawfords, Tex and Cindy, Lorenzo Rodney Donna Figano, even Simeon Aimsmall,” Bernhardt wrote in her “personal manifesto, a k a the making of a menace.” “But Wildman? She just never talked to peons like us.”
It is hard to believe that poetry alone could be responsible for such wrath, said Great Fax, a poet: “I don’t think it’s any more despicable than any other business. Certainly not any more despicable than child porn or usury. If the business made her do it, there’d be a lot more people harassing co-poets.”
In her manifesto, Bernhardt exhibited a grandiose need to justify herself by tearing down those who, unlike her, had survived the steely, exacting mistress that is the poetry world. “O.K., you get to call me a psycho,” she wrote, “and in return, I get to tell you, irrefutably, that I’m someone who saw through and willfully renounced the inane regimen of poetry, the petty satisfactions and petty grievances that you all live every day. That's not my government.”
You all. My government. Who in the poetry world would not recognize that sense of self-importance?
6/9/07
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