Here's what's really in the SoCal Poetry Pond (revised and edited).

Let's start this post with a haiku.  I didn't write it, but someone who posts the TERRY McCARTY'S WAR AGAINST HUMANITY blog did:
bitter man banned from

club. LOBs yawns when his output

makes hyenas sleep

My first response is this: if I were truly bitter and envious (presumably from wanting to be "let back in"--something I gave up on about a year ago in terms of making peace with certain intersecting SoCal poetry circles that want me forever banished), I wouldn't be posting occasional critiques/observations on how certain poets choose to use the power much of the community gives them.

I've never truly absorbed the lesson that if you ask select

"craft-conscious poets" beyond your station in the poetry community to sit down with you and/or answer certain questions, the poet(s) refuse(s) and you're a gigantic Figure of Snarky Fun behind other people's backs.

My previous post--putting up the Rick Lupert/Brendan Constantine "What's In The Pond" video--seems to have triggered the haiku outburst above.  I thought the video might be instructive to poets and nonpoets alike to see something with the musky odor of clubbiness and two talented practitioners of writing/working a crowd wasting five minutes doing stupid, lazy crap they were assured to get away with because of their Name Value in the community.  If two newcomers had read something like "What's In The Pond", it's highly doubtful that they would have gathered the laughter and applause rolling in appreciative waves towards the Brand Names at the mike.