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REPORTS FROM A SMALL PRESS BURNOUT: THE MOLTERS
Sherrie has a poetry blog. She calls it Molten Language. It’s her blog, but there’s a community, too. It’s a cozy community. 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 mafia of MFAs, PHDs and Volvo drivers. They refer to themselves as “Molters”. Molters are wise, charitable, physically fit, educated, uber-human in their creativity, 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 the simple fact of your existence you are fouling up their earth.
I typed a comment on the Molten Language blog about one of the Molter’s poems. That’s what the comments section is for, right? In a downpour of applause I whispered that the poem was full of clichés . 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 published draught by Sherrie, queen of the Molters:
