On 5/21/10 2:49 AM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Yes, Anny. (I never banned Passananti: though Kinsella have have,
> after she sent him some dubious photos of herself and harassed him
> backchannel). Seiferle was a similarly vexed question, and my side of
> the story is fully documented, for anyone who cares to inquire. I
> still have all those bloody emails.
>
> I also remember your less than illustrious and very short term as list
> manager, when you banned me for publishing the Poetryetc anthology in
> Masthead.
>
> Let's not go there.
>
Nobody wants to "go there," but There is hanging over this list and has
been for years, so we might just as well take the trip. I've been here
since 2003, when I thought I'd arrived at some sort of Pantheon, only to
discover the trash cans were still uncovered and the smell could tear
out your sinuses. I'm not new but I don't Ms. Ballardini's longevity
here, either, in other words.
I recall the issue concerning Ballardini-Seiferle-Croggon a bit better
than I'd like because I was part of the collateral damage or "blowback."
Even a fading memory will recall things. Causes apart--either because I
don't know them and/or choose to be silent--there was a rupture here
among three strong people who happened to be women that should have been
repaired but instead became a cause for embarrassment. I got caught in
the backwash because two years ago I queried Anny privately in a moment
of egotism about why I was not even invited to submit work to one of her
online seasonal anthologies. I was informed that I was effectively dead.
Why? Because allegedly, via some Ballardini Bill of Attainder--in
practical terms an act not of statecraft but of extreme cowardice--I had
taken Alison's side against Rebecca. I was shocked. This was like living
in a Dylan song "On the Road again":
Well, there's fist fights in the kitchen
They're enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in
Even he's gotta take a side
Even the butler
He's got something to prove...
Since you're not replying to any further comments, may I suggest without
fear of retaliation, Ms. Ballardini, that you were lying? I took
*nobody*'s side. Everyone had something to prove, and when you waved it
in *my* face you could be sure there would be blowback even if it might
take three years for me to get to it. I'm a street kid, too, Anny, and
if you opt to *f* with me, be assured I will pick the moment for
payback. In normal life, I go out of my way *not* to choose up sides.
This is not a stickball game in the Our Lady of Pompeii schoolyard; and
while I understand by now that poetry is far more dangerous than
stickball, the underhanded and ugly behavior here is endless and always
subject to exhumation. I have never asked anything but the right to do
my work unmolested by unfounded and unpublished accusations which, by
the way, Ms Ballardini, and patently unprovable and entirely products of
your own warped conception of what "loyalty' is supposed to mean.
I am not a false friend but I am a hell of an enemy.
It is perhaps disingenuous of me to say so, but the contretemps between
Seiferle and Croggon, plainly put, is and never was any of my goddamn
business. The only person I'm here to defend is myself.
That concludes my little arioso
Ken
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