A Literary Journal of Critical Thinking
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex

_{Stephen Fonzo (Warrenton, VA)} 

I am a poet, musician, essayist, archaeologist, scholar, and wanderer. I prefer hiking, beating on drums, reading, and watching documentaries to going to a job, making money, gaining prestige, or being polite. Therefore my only full-time career is pursuing honesty and beauty. One can be a gentleman without being well-mannered... and one can be a hard worker without working for someone else's goals. Find your own.

Poe's "System of Puffery" Grows Ever More Bloated
The Plight of American Poets and Writers

Though long free from intellectual dependence on England, the canon of American literature remains needlessly tied to the umbilical cords of American academe and its insistence upon defining and embracing trends. Arguably the first American author to note this weakness in the minds of literate Americans was Edgar Allan Poe, who was relegated to marginality during his own lifetime due to his forthright criticisms of American and English icons and due also to the tabloid-press coverage of his eccentric lifestyle, both of which led to widespread character assassination and refusals of publishing and employment. Poe continues to be consigned to novelty as a writer of horror (to be read only at Halloween) or to a static place in the Romantic/Gothic movements of the Western literary canon. He is cited as a tragic example of artistic self-destruction, thus glorified and dismissed simultaneously.
        As a consequence, Poe's contribution most commonly ignored by English professors and schoolteachers is his vehement stance against the canonization of literature, that is to say, the selection of so-called "important" works and their arbitrary placement in an intellectual "lineage" or genealogy of taste. If not in his poetic works and short stories, then certainly in his critical essays and non-fiction did he identify what he termed "the system of puffery in literature," whereby authors in the mid-nineteenth century were published and praised by virtue of who wrote their letters of recommendation, their membership in aristocratic literary salons, or from what part of the country they came. At this point, American literature had still not yet defined itself as separate from English literature, thus making Poe's prognosis that much more threatening and prescient. For speaking this rude truth in The Poets and Poetry of America and his many editorials, and for criticizing institutional science in Eureka, where he anticipated the discovery of Big Bang Theory, Poe alienated himself from friends and employers and was blacklisted from the finest literary magazines, especially those in New England. Much, if not most of his opus vitae does indeed address dreamlike themes of Beauty and Death, associated with Romantic literature, and therefore Poe is mistakenly read as inherently apolitical or as concerned with form over message.
        We, writers and readers of the early twenty-first century, who wish to tear down the facade of pretense and the fissures of groupthink that still characterize our own corrupted literary milieu, MUST recognize the similar failures of our academics and canon-builders to heed truth in criticism, especially in criticism that is directed towards them. We do not have to ignore past authors in order to ignore the canons into which they are placed by scholars. I invoke the example of Poe precisely to demonstrate the origins of a process of literary dismissal that has continued unabated in America, often towards the most direct and intelligent, and therefore most dangerous and threatening critics of culture and art. May we all find such examples of our own, to help us combat the ignorance and loftiness that is levied towards us by the privileged, comfortable, incestuous, and empty writers of academe and prestigious literary-press journals.  May we, in our own persons, furnish such examples for future generations of thinkers and authors. 

Upon Reading the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

"Finally," in the great literary tradition of the anthology,
There is a volume devoted to the glory of outcast poets,

A thoughtful and no doubt comprehensive collation of writing that is not in the mainstream...

But soon will be...because it's now on the shelves and in the classrooms.
Wait—what do outlaws have to do with tradition,

And why are they seeking, or claiming, their own validation?

And who exactly qualifies as an outlaw poet?

One who writes about drugs and malaise?

One who writes about semen or cunts?

Or one who knew or wishes they had known Ginsberg, Kerouac... or better yet, Burroughs or

Bukowski?

Does it take such verbal tokens and social connections to be an outlaw,

And if so, then how does any of that constitute bravery, rebellion, or ostracism?

Beatniks, hippies, chauvinists, feminists, anarchists, communists, capitalists, classists, classicists,

aren't those all just walls of seclusion for weak and dizzy minds that cannot comprehend

solitude, the thought of being alone, or even just a thought alone?

I suppose the category would include the postmodernists, too,

And everyone else who has made the mistake of the religious and the artistic by assuming that
the job of human thinking is finished, and so now is merely the time for analysis, celebration, or

appreciation.

Well, some of our minds are still active!

And if you're tired, then why don't you just retire,

Or can you only rest once you too have been canonized?

The sanctity of it all!

Go in peace, writers of yore, the outlaw anthology has been published,

You can quit now for there is nothing more to write as long as you still wish to "lower" yourself

to classic forms, romantic themes, or modernist ideas!

Drop that shit and get with it—join the mainstream, in other words, the outlaws!

The rebels have an edited compilation, and they called it a Biblel

So, are the writers who didn't get in  the first edition somehow to a lesser degree outside? More

"inside" the establishment by being outside of the anti-establishment? Your whole logic is inside
out... not even transparent!

Okay. You wish to defend your exclusive club for the non-exclusive. That is permissible. But I ask you, do you know who first

called humanity a herd animal?
I implore you to reflect upon it.