Letter to a young poet.

April 3, 2009 at 6:59 pm | Posted in australian poetry, memoirs, sheer selfindulgence | 12 Comments
Tags: australian poetry, Derek Motion, flarf, magazine, memoirs, poetry, ron silliman

With all due respect and so as to bury the point deeper under unnecessary verbiage.

How to make a magazine.
Pick a name, Jacket or foam:e or Cordite. Maybe not them, I think they are owned already, then select a template, find a techie who loves to fiddle with computers if necessary or just start with a free wordpress blog but spend twenty bucks on getting the dot wordpress removed. Ask your friends who presumably can write for submissions and throw links. Ask them to write cool stuff about how hip your magazine is and how cool it is to be in it. Silliman is only famous because he and his mates namipulated the grooogel algyrhythm. It works by weighting links, not the traffic that goes through them. A good internet writer can write good links. And what a cool job, man. Wherever you are bash out a bit of citizen journalism or poetry or plain old fashioned bullshit, like Silliman whilst sitting on a beach drinking beer anywhere in the world. You are all too prissy and poetical.

Haha, Friday night. Anyway staplers and photocopiers are dangerous and when a kid wants to know something about poetry he googles it. Create your own careers you lazy cynical bastards. What do they teach at universities these days. Did you see Tao Lin, selling shares in his publishing future? Haha. It’s not hard but you gotta be smart, smarter than me cos I am too honest. Have fun. It’s the only thing that works, my friend, if that is  not a premature assumption. Oh, and write everyday if you can and put it in public, it is good for your writing.

How much did Goethe write, by candlelight,
(A response to this brilliant piece of writing by Derek, Mr Motion.)

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