Thursday, November 1, 2007

purple expectations

I'm writing an essay about literary fraud. Apparently, there have been a few poets who thought modernist poetry was completely ridiculous (which it is... no offense), so they fabricated fake poets and wrote random, silly poems and sent them in to magazines and book publishers. They got published, were acclaimed, grew to fame, until it came out as a hoax. Apparently the poets who invented Ern Malley (a fictitious modernist poet who fictitiously died of Grave's disease and relied on his fictitious sister to send his poems in to be published) just opened books and chose words and phrases at random to create their poems.

I started my essay with a ridiculous poem I wrote, and signed it with the name of a poet that I made up:

The water is large and fluffy
With all your purple expectations.
So fly away, great pelican,
To skies of herring and possibility.
-- Dark Salmon, by Regina Underover

I could be modernist! It seems so easy!

Or, I could sit at this desk and toil away on essay after essay after essay. Yes. Option number two, please.

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