That’s right: graduation, the jail, family, my boring but good-paying office job, looking for a teaching job, and our formerly-neat-and-tidy-now-bulldozed- looking-wrecked-ass apartment tried to kill me with their demands on my time–but I prevailed and I came out of last week with an MFA in poetry. Dean Guma told me I was entitled to “all the rights and privileges” that such a degree entails, which is pretty much to say that I am entitled to an attractive (small) piece of paper and a lot of debt to complement my arcane knowledge of rhyme and meter and Anne Carson. Speaking of Anne Carson, there’s a post on her coming sometime soon. I’ve had a draft of a post on Anne Carson and TV Men for over two weeks just sitting around unpublished. But, as I said, I’ve been a little busy.
Just to tide you over, I present a letter from the bottom of my Harper’s Weekly Review. I don’t know how many of you subscribe to this email, but it is awesome. And if Jeff and I listen to Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me later in the week than usual, in podcast form, and I’ve already read the Weekly Review, I know way more of the answers to both the trivial and the important questions they ask. Anyway, sometimes the Weekly Review publishes letters–once the editor published one of mine and it was embarassingly exciting–today they published this one:
TO: Harper’s Weekly
FROM: Mark Marspetulant-ass dweeber huh eL lay dirtbag debutante gEORGE
W. dOUCHEWIPE fack - W/ YER SNAB FKN TOOD YOU PART OF THE
SHOW YET Ya SMEGMATIC, DILLETTANTI nOTiNmYbACKyARD FKN
DILDO W/ YER MAGIC CARPETBAGGIN FKN PRIVATE SECTOR
ENTREPRENEURIALITIED EmPtYvYIN’ lAND oF oPPORTUNISM FKN
tROOP-sUPPORTIN’ tANGERINE dREAMER FKN sHARPER iMAGE
lAFFER cURVIN’ rEAGANOMICKED-ASS shithole GOD THE FUCK
DAMN YOU YOU FKN WARFARE-QUENNIN’ HO-HO??[Resume attached]
I think that’s awesome. Quite. Both–and I’m translating a little here– “not in my backyard fuckin’ dildo” and “magic carpetbaggin’ fuckin’ private sector . . . ” really get my motor racing. I think it’s the messed up typography (hello, Frank Bidart) that makes me imagine this letter as a poem . . . or maybe it’s my muscle-relaxant-induced delirium.
2 Comments
24 May 2007 at 7:44 am
congratulations and congratulations and congratulations!
11 August 2007 at 7:54 am
[...] the following week, they got severely bitched out for it. In the typical fashion of crazy Harper’s readers, many MANY people wrote in to shame them for publishing a spoiler–me included. Here, then, is [...]
Leave a Reply