A favorite passage from NEWS CLIPS AND EGO TRIPS

"...I'm sometimes amazed by my stick to-it-ness because the years have seen a lot of treatment of poets by other poets (who were also editors and entrepreneurs) that have caused me and others much pain. I'm not talking about mere rejection of poetry here. I'm talking about the self-importance with which poets inflate their egos, trying to compensate for the way the mainstream culture ignores them. We're all pretty weirded out and we all have to find our way to deal with it. But seriously, I've seen this personal ego-need manifest itself in poets who hog reading time, poets who schedule themselves and their friends over and over again in reading series, editors who do not merely reject poets' work but tell them sarcastically that they are not and never will be, ahem, "ready" to be published. We've all met up with the inevitable cliques, and the people who make their personal taste in poetry the "law," not to mention the irresponsible types who don't return manuscripts even when there's an SASE attached."--from Lynne Bronstein's article "Why Can't We Be Friends?" which originally appeared in the March 1995 issue of NEXT...magazine.