Her First Column for Caesura, after Her Infamous Run on Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (2017-2020)

Dear Emily Post-Avant,

As editors of the reincarnation of Caesura, we would like to invite you to contribute a semi-regular column to our magazine, whose first official issue will be appearing next week. We have been fans of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and of your quite unpredictable and controversial advice column to poets, there.

Would you be open to contributing to Caesura on a quasi-regular basis, regularity to be determined? We’d love to be your new abode, as it were (reserving the right to cancel at any time, of course).

Please write us back. We’d be happy, should you wish, to discuss details around this idea.

Sincerely,

The Editors of Caesura (Who May Not Know What They Are Getting Themselves into)

Dear Editors of Caesura (Who May Not Know What They Are Getting Themselves into),

I will say Thank You, first of all, not so much in courtesy as in wonderment. I am in debt to yoru daring and yoru tolerance. In a time of such circumspection, you have extended yoru humanity to me, for no reason I can yet fathom. Here is my branching hand, reaching outward, to you.

Secondly, I will say that No, my dears, you probably do not know what you are getting into.

Then again, neither do I, nor have I ever! This makes phenomena all the more tremendous.

Let us go, then, into the dark, to be blown backwards, with our little hummingbird wings spread out, mouths open in Doppler squeal. Assuming you could hear the little sprite, inside a naïve, outmoded painting (ho-hum) by Paul Klee. (Klee could only dream of being half the artist a Yoko Ono or Jeff Koons is, eh? “Painting,” what a joke! Ha ha.)

I love your new mag in buckets. Though that piece on Henry Miller and Norman Mailer was pretty outré and out there (yikes). I’m a bit surprised you’re still there, un-cancelled and un-hacked, in wake of it. Stay safe. Stay masked. Keep your powder dry.

Lots of other bracing stuff: The series on the history of the avant-garde; the essays on Adorno and Greenberg; the sequence on Translation, starring Baudelaire, Poe, and Benjamin; the priceless Bad COVID Art entries; the review of el gran maestro Machado de Assis; the piece on that spooky Balkan artist, can’t recall her name, maybe I’m too scared to remember it; the Octave comic/cosmic epic in process, and more… (Though perhaps cut down on the Kent Johnson by & about stuff? I could tell you stories. Including how he and his pal Mike Boughn, from Dispatches, still owe me payment for, say, 85% of the columns I wrote for them, and it’s now clear they don’t intend to compensate me, ever, even as they know I’m currently without home, dragging a wheeled suitcase across the Washington Palouse and Idaho Panhandle.)

I know it is disconnected to what I am talking about, whatever it is I’m talking about, sorry, but Where are the Situationists when you need them, you know? Just wanted to toss that question out there. Because when I look in the mirror, I can see it backwards, red lipsticked on my forehead, in ancient Gaelic: Càite a bheil na bàird nuair a dh ’fheumas tu iad?

I would like to suggest a modest $300 per column, to you, a bargain, for sure, though we can of course negotiate. That would at least keep me alive for the time being on Top Ramen. This first piece is free. Please write me back and we can come to some agreement, tovarishchi, like on American Pickers, my favorite TV show, along with Storage Wars, before I got evicted.

Hopefully this first entry (again, it is complimentary) will entice some people to write me, at emilypostavant@gmail.com, even though most of my past poet-nerd fans haven’t caught on to your magazine yet. Could you please encourage your readers to contribute with a $10 donation to my email at PayPal? Thank you. Things are pretty harsh right now and winter is a-coming.

Anyway, I hope some people from the Art world do write me letters about art. I minored in Art History as an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee back in the day of the Grenada invasion, when I was still a boy, getting straight A’s, when you had to memorize slides in a “viewing annex.” That’s where I met my first wife (I recall, with saudade, the buzzing, amber glow of that room), who later moved to Pakistan and eventually blew herself up in a car, in Kandahar. I hope that’s not too much information. I was going to go into Art History for grad school (I was sleeping with one of the profs in the art program there, before my transformation, and even though my major was Political Science, I was a shoo-in for UW/Madison).

But then the Socialist Workers Party sent me to do propaganda work on the railroad--the Milwaukee Road, in its last years, before bankruptcy--where I was almost crushed by a freight car (sorry it missed me, Poetry Foundation). After the Party turned into a sectarian cult when the Cold War ended, I ended up, in despair and self-loathing, in a fourth-tier Creative Writing Program, near Reno. The first time I read in workshop, I fainted and broke my nose when I fell. Thus, my botched and star-crossed career has borne me hither.

I am going on for too long. Also, I’m so sick of poet-types, so send me some letters, Art-types!

Spokane, Washington is smothered today by some haboob of violet smoke. God help us all.

—Emily Post-Avant

Emily Post-Avant’s one-hundred-plus letters for Dispatches from the Poetry Wars are here.