I'm glad you're choosing to front channel, Ken. Back channel messages that
lead to such important things as a listmember resigning are best deleted
immediately or returned to sender with the clear statement that you insist
upon the message being sent front channel.
Administration of a list or any other organisation needs to engage all of
its members, as is evident in your described experience and what it has led
to.
Obviously, we POETRYETC listmembers and our administration would not condone
members' backchannel messages that drive individuals off the list.
Sharon and Stephen are our co-managers now, are they not?
If so, I hereby call upon Sharon and Stephen to address the serious
situation you've described that has led you to leave the list. Obviously,
their aim would not include revealing personal information, preferences,
prejudices, or names---but rather to make clear that negative backchannel
messaging damages us and our list immeasurably.
We have weathered major storms that would've flamed-out other lists.
POETRYETC is an unusually fine group of individuals gathered for creative,
helpful, powerful good. Let us not see it destroyed by one or a very few
members who feel unable to handle anger except through backchannel snipes
and attacks.
I'm profoundly sorry----and am certain many others will be, as well----that
you have left the list. This may be the best time for you to stay. I hope
you will reconsider.
Judy
2009/1/14 Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
> On two or three past occasions I have dropped off this list, usually in a
> huff, only to return shortly thereafter. This time, taking the same leave,
> I am entirely deliberate. I cannot stay here. I don't know what the World
> Elsewhere looks like, but it doesn't look like this.
>
> Earlier today I entered into a brief but hostile correspondence with
> someone on the list who, when confronted, told me she withheld an invitation
> from me to contribute to the winter anthology because she considered me
> duplicitous and a false friend. Why? Because I did not take her side in a
> controversy regarding the now-famous online anthology. When I asked for
> further details she said did not want to argue anymore. Yes, she named
> names. I will not repeat them.
>
> In fact I had taken no side. I wanted no part of the hyperventilating and
> name-calling. But imagining I did appeared to gratify this person's need
> for neatly defined angels and demons, as though this were some damned Dan
> Brown or Tim LaHaye novel where you're with the powers of Darkness or of
> Light.
>
> Yes, from my hurt and to my discredit I then took chunks of the received
> emails and sent them to people on and off the list. It was surely an ugly
> gesture in recompense for one that was uglier still. I have sometimes
> probed my personal limits of forgiveness, and today I found one of them. I
> have no charity for the uncharitable. And I learned that here.
>
> For the last year this has become an increasingly painful place. I do not
> like censoring myself. True, doing so was my choice, going effectively
> silent was my choice: but I felt as though my choices of subject matter were
> subject to the prevailing attitudes here. I was too cowed by the prospect
> of disapproval to go counter to an environment that would have sunk far
> better writers that I can hope to be. Where poetryetc in 2003 and 2004 was
> feeding my writing and expanding me, beginning in 2005 it's undermined my
> ability to create much of anything.
>
> There seem to be two modes on this list: ignore and attack. I'm sure
> that's not news. I just happen to detest it. I would rather be attacked
> than ignored, and I've been ignored for longer than I care to remember.
>
> A great and good friend of over 12 years' standing who is not on the list
> but is in fact in the winter poems anthology told me today that she has
> begun backing away from the politics that are pervasive in any group of
> poets. I don't know if she can do it. Naively, I didn't know there *were*
> any. I never thought about factionalism while I was here, just the vapidity
> and arrogance of specific individuals. The more fool I. In this particular
> inbred society I feel like an intruder about to be sucked up by white
> corpuscles.
>
> I shall simply have to find a new place in which to be a misfit. And no,
> BritPo is not an option for reasons you can easily discern.
>
> Best wishes to you all. Some of you I would delight in hearing from again.
> Others have names I hope to forget.
>
> Ken
>
> --
> Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/
> http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
> ---------------------------------
> "All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available
> prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray
>
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