I’ve turned off the feature that allows for anonymous comments. Three abusive comments about the sexual habits of female poets from an anonymous poster in two days is three too many.

 

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Plus, this friendly Christmas message from Franz Wright:

You're so full of shit, Ron.  Are you kidding, or do you really not hear the pathetic absurdity of terms like "Gang of Eight"?  It's embarrassing, & you're misleading young American idiots with no knowledge of history.  There's no conspiracy--your work is just tremendously, cruelly tedious, and nobody but a linguistic technician could read it for more than five minutes without dying of boredom.  You're the other pole of the formalists, an anachronism. And since you can't become Minister of Culture for Stalin or Mao, I suppose it's a good thing capitalism distributed a computer to you:  it's important for eccentric losers like you to have something to do, otherwise they might actually find a way to put their "ideas" into practice, and start putting the real artists in concentration camps. If you don't have the balls to put this in your blog (what a perfectly descriptive terms that is, don't you think?), that's ok.  I am bidding eternal farewell to blogdom as of this moment, I assure you.  And while you are busy writing your popular movie reviews, I'll be working on something about you for one of the publications real people actually read - it will take some work, since so few of them have even heard of you, but I'll do my best.

Like hell.

FW