Bullshit

Why are some poets such fucking prima donnas? I was working on a collaborative book for a couple of hippies and they are just fucking insane. I started designing and formatting this book in June or July. By August I had a draft completed. Then these two started revising their poems. Usually, one does this before one sends a book off to be considered for potential publication, and this step has often long been taken by the time the book has been accepted and the press is designing it. That was even a minor problem. Now--as of the end of March--there have been two print proofs, and one of the authors wants to change the margins, which would essentially mean reformatting the entire book. And I'm not going to do it. There have been numerous problems while working on this book, a book that has lines in it like "Poetry and smoke . . . —both are so intoxicating and so ephemeral" and "Learning to open our heart to the moon was a vast candle" and "to insure my vitriolic equilibrium" and "We had once been mahatmas too". In other words, it's not a very good book. This book has a section in it called "Star Pie". What the fuck? Fucking new age bullshit. I don't make the decisions on acceptances and rejections, by the way. I just have to make the goddamn thing. It's not even new age. It's like reading a version of the asshole white guy with the shaved head who stops you on a street corner, or--more likely--on your college campus and tries to talk you into buying some twenty dollar book entitled something like "Sri Swami Sivananda and His Mission." Some bullshit like that. These people--the ones for whom I was designing a book--think their book is good and that people are going to buy it. I don't even fucking care about what I'm saying here. Some poets are among the world's most deluded people. They will be the cause of future world wars.