Like I Have Time For This?

So, like I’ve mentioned before, I write poetry. I’ve published a poem and everything. If I could find a spare hour or two that didn’t involve me locking myself into the bathroom and sticking my fingers in my ear and singing LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! when the kids start going crazy, I’d probably have a lot more published poetry. I’ve got lots of poems that are ready for publication, but not a lot of time to sit down and do the clerical work involved with sending them out to journals.

 But..anyway.

So, I’m a poet, and when I lived in Colorado I hung around with a lot of other poets. We were all part of this little rinky-dink organization called Poetry West, and we’d have workshops, and readings, and we’d get better known poets that were coming into the area for lectures to stop by and give us readings and signed copies of their books, and we’d take them to dinner and listen to them talk, and once a year we’d go up into the mountains for five days to a quiet place where we would write poetry.

And it was just really GREAT.

Right before I moved away, the presidency changed from a good friend of mine to this really strange man who’d been with us for years, and always wanted the slot, but no one really trusted him with it because he’s a fucking fruitcake little bit crazy, and we weren’t sure he’d make a good leader. But the current president had served for 5 years and really needed a break from it, and she couldn’t find anyone else to take over for her except for this one man, so we were stuck with him.

And he’s run this organization into the ground, basically. He’s gotten all excited about bringing the organization into the public eye, and he’s applied for some state funding so he can hook up to some other unknown poetry organization, and I guess they’ll all be unknown together. And he’s been so rude and horrible to people, making them serve on committees, and making them draft up mission statements for these committees (these are POETS, for God’s sake…ask a bunch of poets to write a mission statement and you’ll make their heads explode, is all I’m sayin’), and then after making them suffer through the agony of writing said mission statements, he reviewed the statements, then REJECTED them and made everyone start over. Not a whole lot of new poetry is getting written in Colorado Springs this year, apparently.

Then, because he was applying for state funding, he forced this little rinky-dink organization into an AUDIT. For the love of God, Poetry West is gonna be audited. So, he demanded all the checkbooks and account numbers and post office mailbox keys, and when people were like, “Gee, I’ll give you copies, but I’m not just handing all this over to you,” he disbanded the annual publication, drove to people’s houses and forced them to hand in keys, and then proceeded to harrass the treasurer via emails to the point where she’s about to have a nervous breakdown. He then contracted a probono lawyer to start sending legal notices to the treasurer to HAND OVER THE DOCUMENTS.

 And apparently, after months and months of this, some of the original founding members got together and said, “Gee, maybe it’s time we ask him to step down.” So they asked him, and he FREAKED out, and started screaming about how they couldn’t get rid of him until the elections were held in the spring. (Elections? What elections? We’ve never had elections….We always have trouble getting anybody to do ANYTHING. If someone agrees to volunteer to do something we’ve always said OH MAN! THANKS! instead of making them actually run for the office.)

So, then, the founding members and some other long term trusted (eg: not insane) members (the majority of whom are just a bunch of sweet little old ladies) got together and did a little bit of talking and decided it was time to call a special meeting for the purpose of electing a new board of directors whose first job would be to IMMEDIATELY fire the current President, and Vice President (and the other cronies that are in on this ridiculous situation) and try to get this organization back on its normal path which has always been: bringing the best poets into town to speak, read, and teach us about poetry, and generally supporting the local community of writers in developing their poetic skills.

So, at this point, one of them emails me, and that’s how I found out that all this shit had gone down in the year since I moved away. And me, just a bit wistfully, but not at all seriously, I say: Gee, I wish I was still a member so I could support you in this. I don’t know, send you a proxy vote or something. If there is such a thing. And 24 hours later, I get this email from the founding members saying my membership has been reinstated, and I can go ahead and send my proxy along. So I do, because I love these people and it breaks my heart that It’s Come To This. That this could be the end of Poetry West.

And what happens? I end up on the email list again. And for the past 10 days or so, my inbox has been INNUNDATED with nasty email arguments between the fucking fruitcake current president and the treasurer and everyone in between. The current president is now campaigning for his re-election as if he were Hillary himself. He even emailed me and asked for my vote. Not that he’ll get it.

It’s a train wreck to top all train wrecks, my friends. They’re all slinging names at each other now, and typing in all-caps, and making fun of people’s misunderstanding of the Blind Carbon Copy feature of email programs. And we’ve even got one member (we’ll call her the Rodney King Contingent) who keeps writing poems about the DEATH OF POETRY WEST and emailing it out to the entire membership, and apparently her line lengths are supposed to paint a picture in one of them, but it’s hard to tell exactly what it’s supposed to be because she didn’t realize that when she emailed it, the fonts would change all over the place, so it just looks like one big blob. And it’s not even a good poem, either. But she keeps sending out her little poetic blips of “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

It’s pretty bad. So bad that I’m sort of thinking about starting a new blog where I can post all these emails, so you can see what it looks like when poets go bad. Something like: passiveaggressivepoets.wordpress.com, or how about: they-made-us-write-a-mission-statement.net.

The special meeting is this Thursday evening. If they even hold it, at this point. Today’s big fight was whether or not members are even allowed to vote, and if they’re not, that means the president has all the power, and if that’s the case, why have a meeting at all?

And I’m thinking well, because that way you could all bring your week-old tomatoes to sling at each other.