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Sherrie Kolb-Cassel has a poetry blog. She calls it Molten Language. You must be a certified member to roast your chestnuts there, and she doesn't admit just any Sam-Bob. Initially, Molten Language was open to the public, but I ruined that.
Bad apple.
The current members of Molten Language are a sandalwood mafioso of MFAs, PHDs and Volvo drivers. They openly refer to themselves as “Molters.” Molters are a race of near-clones who are wise, charitable, physically fit, educated, creatively uber-human, well-to-do, and morally exigent. It is hard not to feel like you don't have the right to drink their water or breathe their air, or that by simply existing you are fouling up their earth.
I typed a comment at Molten Language blog about a member's poems. That's what the comments section is for, right?
In a downpour of applause, I whispered the poem was cliché. My comment never appeared because Sherrie moderated it into oblivion. In response she posted: MATHER SCHNEIDER OF THE ABYSMAL IGNORANCE GO AWAY.
Was that really called for? Anyway, I'm not going away. Where am I gonna go, France?
Molters refer to drafts of poems as “draughts.” Here is a snippet of a published draught by Sherrie Kolb-Cassel:
THE INERRANCY OF MY WORD
The wisp of well being wafts
on a well-anchored cloud
[...]
effortlessly,
navigating the air
like language in the hands of
the Master.
I made another comment on the blog. I expressed my feelings that this poem needed a few more draughts. Maybe even a whole keg.
After erasing that comment too, Sherrie posted: TWEEZER DICK SEND A POEM AND WE WILL CRITIQUE IT. PUT YOUR CAB TIPS WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS.
So, I sent this:
MY FATHER IS AN ALIEN
who blends into the crowd
as he waits at the airport.
I'm thirty eight
and he asks me if I've grown.
The gray in my hair
is like his last
I saw him. At least time
has kept its word.
We hug, like squeezing by someone
in an airplane aisle,
arms like turnstiles,
bodies hard as suitcases,
before working our way
to the big round lip
of the baggage carousel.
I still have his elbows,
hands, and shoulders.
In five minutes we are silent.
My eyes probe for the familiar
among the bags that descend,
no two exactly alike, all falling
into the same slow orbit.
Some of the Molters questioned whether I had written it. Maybe I was a dirty thief? Many of them wouldn't condescend to touch it, but the bolder ones were eager to show off their 90,000 dollar learnedness. The critiques consisted of 3 pages of academic mumbo butt-meal which boiled down to this: I should change the word “last” in line 6 to “the last” because “last” was “archaic language.” Freshness of language is one of the keys to a well-wrought draught.
Afterwards Sherrie emailed me and told me I had made a “good start”. I had forged an inroad to the literary community and was one step closer to the great awakening. She complimented her Molters for being fair and insightful. No thanks were necessary. No charge. I would pay in karma. She said I should go to college because it was clear my lack of education was a sore spot for me. She advised me to get rid of my hate, a most unhealthy and unattractive emotion, and said that maybe, if I was lucky, one day I would understand.
Then she erased all evidence of me, my poem and our exchange, and barricaded her blog against trespassers.
Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2010, 128pp/$15).
