Where's Ginsberg?

Q: What's worse? A big corporate publisher demanding outrageous licensing fees to publish a poem it controls or going ahead and publishing an anthology that purports to be of 20th century American poetry but doesn't include work by Allen Ginsberg (or Sylvia Plath, or Lorine Niedecker, and so forth) anyway?

A: Going ahead and publishing an anthology that purports to be of 20th century American poetry but doesn't include work by Allen Ginsberg (or Sylvia Plath, or Lorine Niedecker, and so forth) anyway.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation In Hell

My zine pal from Canada, Justin Chatwin, occasionally takes time out from running for parliament to run a cool blog called Message All. Recently, he asked me if I had any writing to share, and I dug around in the archives and found an unpublished short story. I had originally written it in 2001, but then September 11th happened and the world changed . . . er . . . maybe not. Actually I'm not sure how the little story ended up an orphan or why it wasn't published before. There's a good chance someone asked me for a story for their zine or something and then as often happens the zine never got published and by that point I had forgotten about the story. I stumbled across it a couple of years ago and liked it. Readers of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus will recognize the plot of the story since it covers events also referenced in the novel. That's likely why the story never appeared before. It was written prior to the novel, but since the story covered similar events and the novel was published in 2002 in zine form, I shelved the story. It stands on its own though, which is why I offered it to Justin. I'm happy to see it finally be published. It's been waiting, enduring a decade of hibernation in my computer. When the story was initially posted on MessageAll, there were a couple of typos (the title was missing "Vacation" and the last line "hell"), but I expect Justin will take care of them. If you've noticed the weather getting nippy, then warm up with "What I Did On My Summer Vacation In Hell"!