David Ulin, Suzanne Lummis, WIDE AWAKE and me.

Reposting this from Facebook, where, but for a handful of exceptions, it was not commented on:

Read David Ulin's remarks about WIDE AWAKE in his 10-Best [books] article in LA TIMES. Became enormously depressed, but nothing I can do about Ulin reducing the collective value of a large (and quite diverse at times) group of poets to one person's choices. And this isn't intended as a slight towards Suzanne and the work she did compiling it (I [bought] a copy)--just Ulin's insistence that the only poets worth remembering in perpetuity are the ones intersecting with [Suzanne] to varying degrees.

Here comes The Rooster From Wooster!

Before I say goodbye to the first decade of the 21st century, I want to take one more chance to recognize the fatuousness of a ex-California-now-New-England literary poet/journalist who I've had issues with in the past. In this post, I'll omit his name, but refer to him instead as The Rooster From Wooster.

Here are a couple of pearls of intended self-reflection from The Rooster's blog:

Sometimes, it's hard not to think that the urge for fame or success, for validation, makes tame monsters of us.

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Thursdays are for pimping
I feel like I'm busy all the time, but it doesn't always feel like I've accomplished anything. Still, I turn around and there's something or other I wrote, or was interviewed in, or edited, or whatever. It's as though the process has become so commonplace that I fail to register it. This is not a good thing. Becoming jaded is dangerous, at least for me: it robs the writing process of its magic, makes me stop caring. None of this is good, and it's an impulse I need to watch out for.

Hope you were as impressed with The Rooster's crowing as I was.

When you feel like someone has stepped on your face as that someone climbs the literary ladder.

Recently, a local litizine which operates online released its latest e-issue.

I submitted poems to it. My work wasn't chosen.

Normally, I don't waste space on this blog complaining about rejection re submitting poetry to publications/other poets (with the recent exception of revisiting my years-ago treatment by Name Omitted). Rejection is a fact of the writing life.

But I'll run through another red light and make an exception here.

Years back, when the editor was building her litizine, I was able to submit work and be accepted. And I was able to offer a chapbook of mine for review--and the review appeared.

On top of the above, the editor once asked me to guest-edit one of the issues. I took the assignment quite seriously, read the poems and selected my choices. And I did get a nice thank-you letter.

Now, I'm finding that the litizine won't accept my poetry or make room for reviewing a recent chapbook I offered to submit

Maybe there's too many submissions now (not exactly the case during the litizine's early phase). Maybe the poems I submitted were judged as lacking in quality and standards.

And, maybe, just maybe, I'm not Prestigious enough and the editor (plus her assistant) want to chase Literary Prestige like greyhounds after a mechanical rabbit at the dog track. The chasing of Literary Prestige happens a lot in Los Angeles and, as I've noticed in the past, can lead to poets contorting themselves into pretzels or reinventing themselves to create distance from too-populist coffeehouse pasts.

Click this link and judge for yourself as to the quality of the litizine's standards: http://www.poeticdiversity.org/