My first Mean Week post is totally cheating because I’m not going to be mean and, instead, shall direct you to my favorite Mean Poet: Joseph Massey. Joe lives in the woods in Northern California where he is like a gentle Swiss bear. He drinks taco beer and sculpts word machines of fern-smelling delicacy. But on the internet! O Lord. On his LiveJournal blog, Mr. Massey is a cranky son-of-a-bitch and not afraid to take it to your ass with a whip made of questionable meat products. Witness this gristle he dropped recently into a favorable review of Peter O’Leary’s memoir:
It’s an antidote to so much of the bullshit that counts as what it seemingly must mean to be a poet these days, thanks in huge part to the MFA android machine. It’s a palate cleanser after spending too many hours — shame on us! — reading blogs where you come away disgusted, as if you had just eaten a pillowcase full of cotton-candy washed down with generic cola, as if poetry can be reduced to the ego-bloated emptiness of notices of acceptance and rejection by journals and magazines that are mostly amorphous blobs of visionless shit, mirroring the very system that supports them, and the endless crowing over the scramble to get books published that no one will read because their only audience is a CV.
Joe’s even got a poem coming out in The Nation, so you know his agenda is like political and shit. That’s right, Blake, political.
look around you. is there a cat? are you experiencing existential problems? are you currently refreshing your network browser to see if that other disembodied internet person has furthered the argument about what surrealism is? do you read the believer? did you just laugh at a story on mc sweeneys about what it would be like if franz kafka had a little league team? do your poems suck really hard? and are you a pretentious asswipe? well then my friend, you are an internet writer. wait now, hold on, put those really skinny arms down, i’m not looking to fight it out with someone who experiences depression on so grand a scale as yourself. no doubt you’ve had it bad. but seriously, fuck you. you are passive, halfway philosophical, you write the same fucking autobiographical stories using the same contrived depression and angst and i could beat your fucking ass in a heartbeat. that’s right, i’m not even going to continue intellectually. i could kick all of your asses. so close your macbook pro (and stop ripping on whoever, most likely dave eggers or john updike because i am sure they are weeping onto their keyboards and listening to bright eyes, cursing that “writerdude78” just called them a “sellout”) and email me your address so i can come to your house and beat your skull in with my hand. i know this will alienate me further since like, or something, like physical violence is existentially fucked and like, you just want to write poems about being a pussy, and you can’t get hard anymore and you’re too busy defending someone else on their blog from a random commenter, like it even matters, but seriously, there is not one writer on the internet, with the exception of barry graham, who looks like he might be able to kick my ass, who i can’t fuck up. i hate everyone. the very idea of mean week is because you’re all pussies. fuck you. suck my cock. stop being a neurotic pussy and write something that makes you want to throw up when you read it.
It seems a lot harder for an online literary journal to be smarmy in the way of Zoetrope: All Story: since it’s the web, usually there’s a bit more wide of a perspective, and you tend to get a better grab bag of unusual work.
I like new journals. I like journals with their own aesthetic and who invent themselves primarily because they want to put words in the world: words that likely would not have found a way to get read if that journal hadn’t existed. There can never be too many high quality journals. A node is a node.
It’s that time again, kids. New literary magazine reviews are filleting eyelids at NewPages. You’ll find reviews of many fine lit mags. I am glad to see that the online venues are reviewed with the print mags, instead of at the bottom of the page. Also, leading off this batch is a review of Abyss & Apex, an online quarterly focusing on speculative fiction and poetry. (Is there such a thing as speculative non-fiction? Would that be science? Philosophy? I’d like to see some slipstream personal essays and such.) Anyway, these magazines are reviewed: