I guess I'm more disappointed with myself than I am with them. When I'm their age, imagine the crazy pyrotechnics I'll be up to to try to seem *at all* relevant. I've shrugged off their petty snipes at me: the backchannels, the flarflist domination of messages like "the community must crush Jim! He's eating OUR honey!" I guess I should just stand aside when poets act like they're better than poetry, or that any path poets take to separate themselves from the crowd is A-OK. It's just poetry, right? Careerist bullshit is the oar that pushes the canoe. Well, I got into poetry to die penniless in a gutter a complete unknown. Why shouldn't everyone else have to die alongside me?

But I'm a social critic. The sheer lunacy of any poet acting like they invented pooping is great fodder for my work. When they ramble into comment fields to shout down bloggers, we should all just glow with fondness and eager light. Please. Maybe they ought to just write better poems. Hold elections, kick out the Republican leadership and start fresh with their American reading public. A New Deal for a New Kind of Poem. In 50 years all subway ads will contain flarf and there will be a statue of Gary Sullivan in front of every Starbucks, genius of the revolution. Until then, maybe they ought to lighten up.