Faits divers de la poesie

Absent the art work, the following is excerpted from the blog "Faits divers de la poesie"(http://faitsdiversdelapoesie.blogspot.com). It's the effort of a collective of six poets, some of them disguised. See for yourself who they are. I'm including the section that mentions Maxine Chernoff and me. We can be grateful that we don't lose a limb, hold our severed heads by the hair, display more concern for our careers than for the Iraq War, disappear upon stepping into a crop circle, are blown to pieces, or get snatched away by giant prehistoric birds. The first entry in the blog aims bullets at Brian Turner, award-winning soldier-poet and author of Here, Bullet. The following is located near the end:

"M. Bradley and M. Kalamaras were strolling in Montfavet when a car blew up. Apprehended by the police, who have no clue they are the two greatest surrealist poets of America… The U.S. Embassy, suspicious and clueless too, refuses assistance.

Another blow to Imperial Culture: Three miles upstream from Nice, the river Paillon has overflowed its banks, taking with it the French branch of the U.S. Poetry Project, under construction.

This week, in Kandahar Province, a wedding party of thirty-some has been incinerated, by a drone-fired missile. Concurrently, in New York City, The Nation magazine has received three hundred-some mainstream and experimental submissions.

The thief Godin snuck in. Seeing M. Hoover and Mme Chernoff weeping in embrace, the former babbling that the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry betrayed everything he’d stood for, O God, O God, what have I done, etc., the intruder turned away. Softly behind him, he closed the door.

From a butterfly’s wings in the slums of Lagos, an F-4 in Austine: Seven MFA students with $20,000 stipends have been deposited (traumatized but fine) in Iowa City. Itself recently hit by divine wrath…

M. Collins has read at Fort Collins. Mlle Boulanger, the troubled graduate student who expertly drew in the restroom the honored reader committing fellatio upon M. Longfellow, has been expelled.

MFA poets Mlle Fournier, M. Vouin, M. Septeuil, of Providence, Buffalo, Irvine, hanged themselves: rejections, bad review, no review.

Yet again?! The poet Mme Graham was sitting in a beauty parlor, with a large metalloid cone upon her head. When she reached inside to scratch her scalp, one of her numerous rings caught a faulty wire, blacking out the whole arrondissement. This according to the Coroner.

Was it envy or shock? Or perhaps a conflation of both? This, the brilliant young critic M. Blanc (far off in the future) asked his readers, in an essay pondering the curious fact that not a single Flarf blog did offer a comment or link to the Faits Divers de la Poesie…

Was it envy, shock, or the lingerie? Or perhaps a conflation of all three? This, the post-avant world did ask, in muffled tones, about M. Silliman’s blatant refusal to offer even a link to the Faits Divers de la Poesie…

Foul-mouthed, brilliant, ruggedly handsome, fed-up with the exploitation of part-time faculty, the poet and critic M. Amato, of Normal, slugged his Department Chair in the nose, breaking it. Where are the Marxist poets who will follow the Comrade’s example?

On 3 December, the critic and unclassifiable poet M. Weinberger left for Iceland, to address the Parliament. Two days later he flew to Mexico, to receive the National Order of the Aztec Eagle. In their English offices, old-guard Language poets gnash their teeth."