“When is the right time in a relationship to present someone with a poem? “

From How To Write A Love Poem

by Jim Behrle September 27, 2011: 

“When is the right time in a relationship to present someone with a poem? A good question. The line between creepy and romantic is ever shifting. Some people might like a poem written about them at first, and then later come to find it creepy and taser you. Others might, upon first reading, feel creeped out and then later come to love the poem you wrote. You never know.”

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Feeling sorry for Michael Derrick Hudson for not being able to publish poetry under his own name? Stop. He’s been published in places many other poets would die to get into.

I’ve been checking various news sources to see if I can find any other good articles and opinion editorials on the latest Best American Poetry scandal that I blogged about yesterday, but most of what I’ve found have been articles telling the general story.  I did find the fake twitter account of Michael Derrick Hudson, though, which contains fake tweets such as:

 “what? people are angry about my poem? I’m gonna get to the bottom of this or my name isn’t Yi-Fen Chou”

My other favorite quips so far were made by my college/Facebook friend Justin, who wrote the following last night (Note: I’m including hyperlinks to the stuff I had to look up, as I’m not as knowledgeable of the gamer, science fiction, and computer worlds as Justin is. The connections he makes are worth noting.)

“This is going to turn into ‘GamerGate‘ or the ‘Sad Puppie'” in the poetry world, isn’t it?…They should just issue authors GUIDs and make them publish under that ‘identifier’. I really love the sonnets of 8e69f359-dec2-44b2-a090-bcd0f83d24a7!”

Heh. Also, for the heck of it, here’s the Michael Derrick Hudson meme that’s making the rounds:

I mentioned the meme here yesterday but held off from posting it because I was trying to figure out whether it was mean or not, as it uses the word “mediocre…” and I don’t like to be mean and I was kind of feeling sorry for the guy for how much vitriol is being thrown his way…but then I realized that this guy hasn’t actually been having problems publishing his poetry in general under his own name. This is despite what Alexie wrote about Hudson being “an unknown guy who has published maybe a dozen poems in his life.”

Here are two that Hudson had published in the esteemed and well-established Poetry Magazine:

*End of Days Advice From an Ex-Zombie

*Russians

*Here’s Walking with Brenda Twenty Years Ago through Chicago’s Graceland Cemetary at Painted Bride Quarterly

*and here’s “Baby Zach and the Winter Squash” and “Dreams of the Kid from High School with the Weird-Shaped Head“ at Superstition [Review]

These, especially the first, are all well-established, excellent markets for poetry.

Upshot: if you’re feeling sorry for this guy because he’s been having trouble getting published because he’s a white male poet: stop.  He’s not.

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Note: the temporary header-image for these last two posts is from Jim Behrle’s website, the Best American Poetry Tumblr.  Every year he goes through just about every page of the current Best American Poetry and makes fun of it.