September 15, 2025 • 48 mins
Two bored poets decide to prank their least favorite snobby magazine editor by submitting intentionally bad poetry to his literary journal and watching with mirth as he and his fellows delight in publishing it.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m3bytB5ULw
https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-poet-who-never-lived-ern-malley-at-80-234905
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4533011085
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-29/ern-malley-literary-hoax-angry-penguins-1944/100412208
https://www.ernmalley.net/
https://www.literaturelust.com/post/the-great-poet-ern-malley-who-never-existed
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/harris-maxwell-henley-max-29615
https://quirosonline.com/jindyworobaks-part-one/
https://time.com/archive/6821805/books-angry-penguins/
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/33/wertheim.php
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mcauley-james-phillip-10896
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stewart-harold-frederick-29423
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/fact2.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart Podcasts. Folks,
it's a hug sound No, I haven't seen when USA
look to see you there last. Welcome to Hoax, a
(00:22):
new podcast, or is it? It is? Every episode we
sort through the lies we wish we're true, and truths
that sound like lies. This is not just another scam
and scandal podcast. Oh no, these are stories of pranks
and griffs throughout history, so big and bold they make
us question why we believe. I'm the ghost of Danis
Schwartz and I'm the evil twin of Lizzie Logan. Welcome
(00:43):
to the show. Hello, Dana, Hey, I have what I
think is going to be a very fun hoax for
us today. Good. I could use a fun hoax, and
to the point that I kind of think it's like
some real Dana Lizzie shit. Oh and I would even
like to start off with two anecdot It's one from me,
one from you. Great, and I'll tell you what to anecdote.
(01:04):
I want you to tell car tell my anecdote. Perfect,
all right. I spent my first two years of undergrad
at Columbia University in the City of New York. Heard
of it. Yep. The thing that I was really into
while I was there was a program called Late Night
where we wrote short one act plays and cast each
other in them and performed them late at night. That
(01:24):
does sound fun, that's very college. It was very college.
It was really fun. And there was this one guy
sort of like in the community, in the program, in
the club who was actually a pretty talented playwright, but
was so annoying and had so many like ticks and
quirks and just like he was just this He just
(01:47):
kind of drove me crazy. And I will be the
first to admit that I was not in the best
headspace at Columbia, and I could have been a lot
more generous and a lot nicer with all of my
analyzes of people. But he drove me up the wall.
He drove a lot of people up the wall. I
think he sounds annoying. We can look at his social
media later. I can't say, but he had a very
distinctive way of writing that was like pretty pretentious. And
(02:10):
the way that you got your play into Late Night
was that you wrote it and you sent it into
like you know, whatever late night at Gmail or whatever,
and the board would then read them all and vote,
and there were a couple rounds of voting and you
could submit them anonymously. Okay, And so what I did
run semester was I wrote a one page play and
(02:32):
I submitted it under like a name that rhymed with
his name, Oh Lizzy, And it was just making fun
of all of his quirks and pretentiousness. And he was
on the board, so then he had to read it.
And apparently it got through the first round of voting,
and everyone was just signing on to me like very
(02:52):
lately bullying this guy, and apparently he was really mad,
and that was the end of it. You know, there
was no big dust up or anything. But keep that
in mind when we talk about our hooks. Fun gentle bullying,
real nerdy bullying. Yeah, I would say, like it wasn't awful.
(03:12):
I didn't call him like a terrible person. I was
making fun of his writing more than I was making
fun of him. No, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Also, I want to say, like, anyone listening to this
who knew me in college, really no you didn't.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah, I was. I was a mess in college. But
and this is a great segue, Dana fans out there,
if you don't know this crucial piece of Dana lore. Yeah,
you need to know it. Dana, Will you quickly tell
the listeners at home about at Guy in your MFA. Oh,
this is truly the start of my This is writing
(03:42):
Dana origins. This is Dana origin story. I was pre
med in college. I was just like, where'd you go
to college? I went to Brown? Heard her? We went
to Ivy League school. We did okay, so we're at Brown.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I was pre med thinking, well, yeah, I'm a writer,
but like, how does anyone become a writer?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Like make money?
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And I was very insecure about just the fact that
I'm like, well, I don't know how to do this
thing that I like to do. So I made a
parody Twitter account. And in my defense, it was twenty
fourteen or twenty thirteen, when these things were still like
relatively fresh and funny.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Oh yes, I remember. There was a parody account that
was just big Ben and every hour it would just
tweet out bong bong bong bomb and we loved it
and probably hundreds of thousands of followers.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, so this is the era we're writing in. And
I created this parody Twitter account called Guy in Your
MFA because Guy in your writing workshop was too long
for the Twitter name. It was just basically making fun
of like the pretentious lit bros in your undergraduate or
graduate in this case writing workshops who are like just
(04:46):
writing really boring stories about men on trains.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, just like water down David Foster Wallace.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
They think they're the next chiever. Yeah, and they're like, ah,
like modern masculinity.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
And I just like made this Twitter out and then
it got enough attention that I got a book agent,
and I was like, Oh, I can like make something
in the world that then will reach reach quote unquote
real people. And I made my friend Simon put on
like a beanie and stand in the library and I
took a picture of him, and that's this is some
Dana Lore.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
This is real Dana Lore. I remember this account. It
was very funny, and it really showed that people were
ready to make fun of this type of person and
also that Dana is a very funny writer. And it
also I think speaks to both of our anecdotes, speak
to like the power of anonymity. You can get a
little meaner, you.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Can get a little mean and also those people are
are It's.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
What I'm easy to make fun of easy to take
down a peg. I think you'll see immediately why these
things are relevant. I can't wait. What do you know
about the hoax of ern Malley? That name means absolutely
nothing to me. Fantastic. We are in Australia in nineteen forty.
I love it already. The war is on, the the
(06:00):
World War, the second one. In fact, nationalism is very high.
I'm sort of picturing it's almost like America post nine
to eleven, where everyone's like waving their flags, like very
like we are Australia, Like we have our values and
we're committed to that. Australia is backing Britain, but they
(06:21):
are no longer part of Britain and Australia is still
a fairly new country and they're sort of trying to
find their Australian cultural identity. Yeah, who are we? And
this is especially true within the poetry community. Why not?
Why not? There are some like poet and critic Ad
Hope who say Australians are essentially Europeans. We might not
(06:43):
be on the European continent, but we are a European
people and we should write sort of like formalist poetry.
The rhymes and is in niambic bin. I mean poetry people.
You know that I'm getting the terms wrong, but basically
like old fashioned poetry in the Western European tradition. Yes,
then there are the Jindy Warabacks cool who are writing
(07:06):
bush ballads about the outback and Aboriginal culture. None of
them are Aboriginal, but they're like, you know what Australia
has that no other country has is all of these
features of the terrain, So why don't we make that
the hallmark of our poetry? And ad Hope is like
that's some bullshit. Yeah. And then there's modernism. So modernism,
(07:32):
for those who don't know, is in the tradition of
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. And it's like, you know,
adding interesting line breaks and maybe it doesn't conform to
a particular format. We're gonna have an m dash in
there as many as you want. In fact, and this
is like weirdly political. People think modernist poetry is like communist,
(07:57):
and that gets like fascist.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Also, I remember it's like reading about the beef between
Carl Sandberg and Robert Frost about poems rhyming and Robert
Frost apparently like had beef with the poet Carl Sandberg,
and he said that writing free verse poetry was like
playing tennis without a net.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yes, so people are really against modernist poetry. They think
it is related to communism. There's related to communism. Yeah,
So there's this whole idea that like people who like
modernist poetry are just engaged in like a group delusion
or like groupthink where if you and this applies to
(08:40):
all modernist art. So Hope's sort of example that he
gives is he's like, these people are so delusional. They'll
look at a Picasso, which is obviously just a bout
of ugly shapes, and they'll call it beautiful because they've
been brainwashed, similar to how Hitler's minions have been brainwashed.
Like they're not quite drawing the line, but there's this
(09:00):
feeling in the air that it's like, no, like the
rise of fascism and putting aside your own critical thinking
is the same as putting aside this critical thinking that
obviously these poems are so bad.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
I mean, I will say sometimes I do read Instagram
poems and I'm like, wait, everyone else thinks these are good.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
That is so exactly where your head needs to be
right now.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yes, not all, not all poems on Instagram, but sometimes sometimes.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Exactly into this atmosphere comes Max Harris. Max is a
literary prodigy. He taught himself to read as a toddler.
He comes from very humble beginnings. But he goes to
Saint Peter's in Adelaide. That sounds fancy. He's a little
bit pretentious. He is sort of in the army the
(09:47):
way that like everyone is in the army, but he
doesn't have to go into combat. Really. He tells this
story about like he's assigned to like dig latrines and
he loves it because he just digs latrines and then
the rest of the day like reading proost.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I mean that kind of sounds okay. Sometimes I do
think that like if I had a job that was
just like physical labor, that was like not all day,
just like a short period of time, then you could
like be creative, Like that's not that's not bad.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
I do think you and Max would get along. He
he's an avowed anarchist, all right. Less he's also Jewish,
which nobody in the story is going to bring up.
But I think sort of colors the whole like you're
too far up your butt with your intellect. I think
the fact that he's Jewish is like kind of relevantly.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
There's not a ton of them in Australia.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Well, there's not a ton in Australia. And it's also
like we're not known for being the most practical people.
We're known for like a lot of my minded rhetoric. Yeah.
When he's eighteen, so he's like a freshman in college,
he starts a literary magazine called Angry Penguins, which is
so tumblr core it is. It's a line from one
of his poems. He named it after one of his
(10:56):
own poems. He named it after one of his own poems.
The first issue is fund by his mom. Oh yeah,
Angry Penguins is all about being avant garde and putting
Australia on the map of modernist poetry. Great, so's he's
not one of the where European let's do classical European poetry. No,
he's like, I worship Dylan Thomas and we need to
(11:18):
be hip and with the times. Sure nineteen forty one.
He's so annoying on campus and he's so loud and
proud about being an anarchist that all the other students
call a meeting and they're like, we need to teach
this guy a lesson. We don't like his you know,
(11:39):
communist magazine that he keeps passing out. They decide that
he and like three of his writer friends. They're like,
we're going to toss you in the river. And Max goes, Okay,
hold on, if you guys take up a donation for
the Red Cross, I'll just jump in the river. Okay,
that's actually that's that's cute. And they're like, no, they
(12:00):
need to humiliate you. We're going to toss you in
the river. So that's what we're working with, all right.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, so I'm gonna not take it as too much
of an insult that you said that we would get along,
but a little bit.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
I don't think you would be treated the same way.
I just I don't know we could cut that. Maybe
you wouldn't get along. No, it's funny. In nineteen forty two,
his co editor is killed in action. Oh no, so
he is. You know. The idea that he's just like
a sheltered college boy does become his reputation, but it's
not necessarily true. People who work in angry Penguins are
(12:34):
dying in the war, Angry Penguins picks up some steam.
They're bringing Dylan Thomas and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Australia,
not like bringing them physically, like printing their words. They
get some backers. There's this like lawyer in his wife
who sort of take a shine to Max and are like,
you can use our mansion to like have big vegetarian
dinners and play with our cats and sort of use
(12:55):
it as like a not a commune, but like a
little artist retreat. And they're living the very bohemian life.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I will say in college, I was a member of
a co ed literary fraternity, so I feel like I'm
very familiar with these people who cook communal vegetarian dinners,
and they get very annoying very quickly.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
So maybe you would have been annoyed with Max in
nineteen forty three, so he's still in college or sorry,
as they would say, university UNI. At UNI, he gets
a letter from a woman named Ethel Malley, and Ethel says,
my brother Erne just died at the age of twenty five,
which Ethel doesn't write this, but Max is probably would know.
(13:35):
That's the age that Keats was when he died. So
you know, I don't know if you know this about poets,
but they're a little bit enmamored of early death. So
she says, my brother Arn just died and I was
going through his stuff and I found these poems, and
I don't know anything about poetry, but I showed them
to my friends and they think that they're like pretty good.
So yeah, like, here's here's a couple of poems for you.
(13:58):
And Max is like, this is the best fucking poet
I've ever read.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Of course, ay a dead twenty five year old, He's like.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Send me all the poems. I love this, And Ethyl
writes back and gives him more details, like how she
and Arn were orphans and he never went to UNI.
He was a mechanic and he sold insurance. He had
Graves disease and refused treatment, and she includes more poems.
I think there are seventeen poems in total. But basically
(14:26):
Max now has all of the Ern Maley poems and
his introduction and his conclusion to his manuscript, and everything
Arn ever wrote is now in Max's possession. And Ethel
even says, like, you can have the rights to this wow,
And Max is like, obviously he's the voice of Australia modernism,
and conveniently he's dead. So as his editor, I get
all the glory. People immediately have suspicions. They're like, this
(14:51):
sounds a little bit convenient. And Max's response is like, well,
you know what, it's not really my job to decide
whether or not this woman is telling the truth about
her brother. Yeah, it's my job to decide if these
poems are any good. And I think they're really good,
and there's no such thing as fake and real poetry,
and you know, I take responsibility for this, like this
(15:11):
is on me. I vouch for these poems. Wow. All right,
So he's explicitly saying that yes. So he publishes all
of them, all of them in the autumn nineteen forty
four issue of Angry Penguins, about a year after he
got them. Now pause for a second to talk about
how I'm stupid, because I immediately was like, oh, the autumn
(15:34):
nineteen forty four issue, Like, you know how the September
issue Vogue comes out in August, So I was like, okay,
so like probably came out in September. But then a
bunch of stuff happens in June that references this, and
I was so confused until finally one of the sources
I was reading was like, it's Australia, so the seasons
are different. So autumn and Australia starts in March, it
(15:57):
starts in spring. Yeah, it's our spring. It's our spring.
But due to wartime delays, the autumn nineteen forty four
issue of Angry Penguins comes out in early June nineteen
forty four. Let's screw it up. It's really screwed up.
Get your Head on Straight Australia slash get yourn straight, Lizzie.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
No, it's their fault, all right.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
So this issue comes out. It's dedicated to Earn Malley.
It's all of his poems, it's Max's poems about his poems.
It's art like inspired by the poems, and Max writes,
I am firmly convinced that this unknown mechanic and insurance
Peddler is one of the most outstanding poets that we
have produced. Here. Immediately people who are like, no, there's
(16:45):
some speculation that maybe some other poets sort of in
his orbit kind of wrote them. But the main theory
is that these are Max's poems, So they do.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
People think the poems are good divided okay.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Also, jumping ahead of it, the poems do not last
as poems very long. Yeah. They almost immediately become part
of the story of these poems.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, so it's not like, oh, outside of this whole story, these.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Are amazing poems TVD, TVD all Right. Brian Elliott, who
is a lecturer at Adelaide University and Harris's teacher, thought
Max Harris was the author, and he wrote a parody
review like in the style of modernist poetry.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
That's so mean, and that your professor burns.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
And the like acrostic like the you know, first letter
of every line or whatever it spells. Max Harris hoax.
Oh that's funny. It is funny. It is funny. It's funny.
It's mean that your professor did that, but something punching down.
People get really into it. Reportedly, there's like students taking
(17:53):
bets on who the real author of these poems is.
And Harris is like, well, I know I didn't write them.
I kind of wonder who did. Yeah, so he hires
an investigator two and I can't believe he didn't do
this way earlier, but he hires an investigator to just
go to the address that Ethel had listed as her
address and see who lives there. Yeah, And the investigator
(18:15):
like checks all the records in the area and he's like,
there's no malle family here, but there's just some rando
who lives at that address and is Because this is
where the Australian accent really trips you up. They'd mixed
up fourteen and forty. Who's they? I don't remember if
which number is correct, but Max, in communicating with the investigator,
said like forty, and the investigator heard a different number. Sure,
(18:39):
And so they can't figure it out. And it takes
all of like a week or two for the true
story behind these poems to come out. Dana, Do you
want to guess how these poems came about? I'm going
to guess someone. Would it help you to read a poem? Yeah? Okay,
I would actually love to. Are they long? Should we
read them out loud? I I bookmarked like two of
(19:01):
the shorter ones. Okay, this is great? Shall I read
it out loud? Sure? Okay. This one's called Sweet.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
William, allegedly by Earn Mallei, credited to Earn Malle credited
to Earn MALLEI I have avoided your wide English eyes,
but now I am whirled in their vortex. All right,
I'm gonna pause and say already, if a poem has
the word vortex.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I'm kind of out.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
So I'm gonna say I don't think this is a
good poem. My blood becomes a damaged man most like
your albion, and I must go with stone feet down
the staircase of flesh.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Same thing with flesh.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's another word to me, that that's like a poem
red flag to where, in a shuddering embrace, my toppling
opposites commit the obscene, the unforgivable rape. One moment of daylight,
let me have like a white arm thrust out of
the dark and self denying wave. And in the one moment,
I shall you immediably attest, how though, with sobs and
(19:55):
torn cries bleeding, my white swan of quietness lies sanctified
on my black swan's breast. I don't know anything about poem,
but I'm going to.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Say I don't do not like that she doesn't know
anything about poem.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I don't know anything about poem, and I know that
this is obviously colored because I know that this is
a hoax, because this podcast is called hoax spoiler. And
maybe if you had come to me and been like,
this is the most amazing poem I've ever.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Write, I did say like I did think, like what
if I was like Dana I wrote that, I know
I would feel bad.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I don't like a poem with like there are certain
words to me that just feel like cliche poemy, and
it's like flesh and vortex and those those are the
red flag.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Words for me. We were just saying off mic that
I have written one good poem in my whole life.
I wrote it when I was four or five, and
I'll recite it to you now because it's very short,
good night, good night, good night, good night, A cat
on a windowsill good night. That that's a good poem,
Like pretty good. Yeah, I like that poem actually, And
I was like, Okay, I never need to write another
(20:58):
poem because I I that was a banger that I
came up with when I was four.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
That's way better because you know what that poem has
that this poem doesn't.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Is I know what that poem's about. I don't know
what's happening in this poem. Well, maybe the confusion is
part of the point. Man. Let's go back to nineteen
forty three. James McAuley and Harold Stewart are a few
years older than Max. They're in there like they're like
twenty six and twenty seven, and they are both amateur
poets and they're stationed together in the same barracks in
I think Melbourne, and it's very unclear what their job is.
(21:30):
They work for like the Army Intelligence Service, so it's
all very shrouded mystery what they're actually doing all day. Sure,
but they are very much of the like you know
when people see an abstract painting and they're like, my
kid could do this. They feel that way about modernist poetry. Yeah,
and sometimes it's really true. So they decide to do
(21:51):
a little prank. So they using just like the books
that are in their barracks, throw it again. There's some
poems they use lines of Shakespeare, they use random words
out of the dictionary. They there's one poem where the
first three lines are taken verbatim from a like pamphlet
(22:11):
that they had that was from America that was about
how to drain swamps, where mosquitoes are breeding.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Well, that makes me feel better because I could not
for the I was like, what is that poem about?
Speaker 1 (22:22):
And they put together the seventeen poems in they say
a single afternoon.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
It actually sounds like a really fun afternoon. I bet
I think they.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Were really amusing them. I thought they had a flask.
So they write them, and then when they're typing them up,
they make like deliberate spelling errors, and they do what
I think is becoming a trope of the hoaxes we cover.
They do the classic thing of like making the paper
look old by like exposing it to sun and dirt. Yeah,
classic Hoaksman, classic hoax. I gotta make you a paper
(22:51):
look like it's been around the block. You got a
fourth grade book or report it? Yeah, you gotta get
the tea bags. And they write the letter from Ethel
and they send off the poems. Once Max agrees to
publish the poems, McCauley feels a little bit bad, and
he sent Max a postcard that had some line on it.
(23:13):
I've never been able to find exactly what was on
this postcard, but apparently it was like a clue that
it was a hoax, Like he was not trying to
tip him off, but Max didn't get it.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, so that I understand why he was trying to
like assuage his guilt because he's like, if he gets this,
then he's smart enough. But then it's like you kind
of like outsourcing the guilt.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yes, And a lot of this is sort of just
a test of like what's going on in Max's brain. Yeah.
They also mentioned the scheme to a friend of theirs,
test Van Summers, cool name, who it is pretty good,
who like wants to be a reporter. When Angry Penguins
comes out, Tests is immediately like, I recognize those poems.
(23:52):
Those are by by two friends, Harold and James. And
she runs to the newspaper where she has a job
and she's like, guys, I got a scoop. And it
doesn't say this in any of the sources, but I
detect a hint of sexism there. All the editors are like,
nice tip, we'll take it from here. Yeah. Yeah. McCauley
and Stewart had kind of hoped that the hoax would
(24:14):
last a little longer, like maybe the poems would get
to Britain and they could doup more people. And they
also wanted it to be like a literary scandal, not
like a tabloid scandal. But too bad because Tess is
telling the reporters and they're gonna write the story with
or without McCauley and Stuart. So they just like a
(24:37):
week or two after Angry Penguins comes out, the Sun,
which is the paper, runs this like long statement from them,
and they also they do do their due diligence, say
that ten times fast, and they call Harris for a comment.
But he had like had I think, like a dental surgery,
and they call him, I think, like maybe not the
(24:59):
middle of the night, but he was like sleeping, So
he just says some nonsense and he comes off really
bad in this article. And he already didn't know how
to say numbers. He's really he's really struggling. He's twenty
two and he's struggling. So June twenty fifth, nineteen forty four,
this article comes out, and I'm going to read you
just some bits from the like long essay that they've
(25:22):
put together explaining why they did this hoax. Yeah, for
some years now we have observed with distaste the gradual
decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry it rendered its
devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination. Their
work appeared to us to be a collection of garish
images without coherent meaning and structure, as if one erected
(25:46):
a coat of bright paint and called it a house.
M interesting analogy similar to the tennis.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I also really like a hoax with a point, because
we've talked a little bit about hoax that were for
personal profit, and this was to hoax that the goal
of it was to get people who read poems to
think more critically.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
That is what they say. It also was possible they
were just trying to embarrass this day. They were trying
to bully them. But they have a really good explanation.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
And you know what, as far as motivations go, embarrassing
and annoying guy is.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Not the worst thing. And that's not the worst. It
wasn't personal profit. And they say, and this I think
is smart. However, it was possible that we had simply
failed to penetrate to the inward substance of these productions.
The only way of settling the matter was by experiment.
If mister Harris proved to have sufficient discrimination to reject
the poems, then the tables would have been turned, which
(26:38):
I think is a good point. They didn't make him
print them. Yeah, he thought they were good, and they
write there was no feeling of personal malice directed against
mister Max Harris. That possibly is not true. But they
also laid out their rules of composition. They had little
rules while they were putting the poems together. Okay, One,
there must be no coherent theme at most, only conf
(27:00):
used and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as
a bait to the reader, which.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Is kind of when people criticize poetry and they're like,
there's no point here. That is sort of the critique.
So I'm glad that that was like their purposeful rule.
Like they didn't make accidentally good poems or did they
keep going, keep going?
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Two? No care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally
to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities. Three In style,
the poems were to imitate, not mister Harris in particular,
but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from
the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Trees, and others. Having
completed the poems, we wrote a very pretentious and meaningless
(27:41):
preface and statement which purported to explain the esthetic theory
on which they were based. Then we elaborated the details
of the alleged poet's life. This took more time than
the composition of his works.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I mean, they're right. And what I think they hit
on is that sometimes with poetry, and with a lot
of art, it's less about the art itself and more
about the romance of the story around it. And I
think that people are attracted to like the cool story
where it's like I think that probably Harris Max Harris
was like more interested in the fact there was this
(28:14):
like working class mechanic who died in obscurity. Natt's story
was more appealing to him than the poems itself.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
It's definitely part of the appeal, Like, it's a huge
part of the appeal. Correct. So the story that Stuart
and McCauley have laid out is a tiny bit suspect.
Some people think that they spent more than an afternoon
on it. Like the idea that they just dashed them
off makes them look good but might not be true. Yeah,
and they were poets, and there's a bit of one
(28:43):
of the Earned Maley poems that was like taken from
one of James McCauley's earlier poems. Some people think that
maybe Ad Hope put them up to it. Sure making
a point. Yeah, he was working on a very negative
review of Max Harris's surrealist novel and he was known
to say say get Maxie, like gotta get Axy. So
(29:04):
maybe he was the puppet master. But in any case,
McCauley and Stewart definitely were the ones who like wrote
down and typed up the poems. Sure Harris doesn't back down,
He's really yeah, he's like, in creating this fictional character,
these two guys open themselves up creatively. They wrote the
best poems of their career, and I'm the one who
published them. That's on me. I think these poems rock,
(29:25):
you know what.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Genuinely respect Max Harris, and he can also be like,
it's cool that you did this elaborate thing.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
T s Eliott Cables Harris and was like, I would
have fallen for this. There's some there's some okay lines
in these poetry. Also, like there's so much bad poetry
in the world. The idea that he he should have
been able to tell that it was like that on
purpose is kind of impossible because there's so much poetry
so subjective.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
And also, I will say, as someone who said I
don't know poem because I don't know poem, I don't
know poem. I kind of do think the mark of
like good or effective poetry is if it affects.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
You the reader mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
And if it affected Max Harris, that's what matters. And
maybe the whole context is part of why it affected him,
but that doesn't mean it affected him any less.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Basically, he's a laughing stock. Other than ts Eliot, nobody's
really on his side. Weirdly, the Catholics are coming out
against him again. I think like part of this is
that he's Jewish, but they don't say that. They're sort
of saying, like, see what society has come to when
you don't go to church, you're falling for poetry hoaxes,
and Catholicism is very much about like order and history
(30:30):
and structure and like learning Latin. Then he gets charged
by the government because their sexuality in the poems. No. Yeah,
So the Australian government is very conservative and they censor
a lot of stuff, but this is the first time
they've ever censored a poem. They bring him up on
charges of publishing indecent material, and their only witness is
(30:52):
this like detective that they've hired, whose like job it
is is to show like why the poems are dirty.
And he's like, well, this one poem is about going
into the park at night, and I've seen people go
into the park at knights have sex, So that's gross
case and points yeah, and the other one. His other
big point is he's like, this poem has the word
incestuous in it, and I don't you know, it's poems,
(31:15):
so I don't know what they mean by it in
this context, but this is pretty gross, right.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, to Lee, it is famously illegal to use the
word incestuous, Yes, even in a poem.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Max is boot at and spit on as he goes
into court. Oh, Max, theoretically I'm back on Max's side. Yes,
Max is I think sympathetic but not likable. Yeah. Theoretically
Max could say, well, the authors themselves said that these
poems were meaningless, so if it doesn't have a meaning,
how can it be obscene? Yeah, but he doesn't. He
(31:46):
His defense is like, I just hope that the court
like goes home and reads the poems and comes to
their own conclusions. I mean, because he kind of has
to defend them as poems. And he also is like,
poetry is about what you make of it, Like there's
no one and you can't the government can't decide what
this poem is about. Everyone has to decide for themselves.
But yeah, he gets convicted. He gets convicted. He gets convicted,
(32:09):
and they offer him six weeks in jail or a fine,
so he pays the fine, and two issues later, Angry
Penguins ceizes operations. I mean, literary journals are always like
not long for this world. But yeah, that's that's Angry Penguins.
This is a sad story because I kind of don't
(32:30):
know who to root for. Like, on one hand, Max
sounds pretentious and like you said, unlikable, and also like
I don't I think like a lot of poetry is
not good and people can just kind of throw whatever
they want and be like it's a poem. But like
I do think writing needs a craft and structure. But
on the other hand, for Max, he shouldn't have to
pay literal money because people didn't like his poems and he.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Just got tricked and what was he doing publishing a
literary journal.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
People thought he was. But here's our epilogue. McCauley and
Stuart continued to write poems, not together, but they continued
to write poems. Nothing they wrote was ever as widely
read as their earned Malee poems. Yeah, Harold Stewart became
a Buddhist scholar and translator of haiku and moved to
Japan in the.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Sixties highly structured poems.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
James McCauley eventually like apologizes to Max Harris and they
have not like a friendship, but they like have a correspondence.
They're on good terms. He at it's a very conservative
journal called Quadrant, which may have received some funding from
the CIA. Sure, and he later headed the University of
Tasmania's English literature department. So he had like a good,
(33:42):
solid academic career.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
I feel like as nice a career as you can
have as a poet in Australia and Australia, you know, great.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Max Harris goes on to write a weekly newspaper column
for almost thirty years. He is often deliberately controversial and
very arrogant in the way that like, you know, it's
he's sort of doing clickbait people are buying the paper
to see what Maxie is gonna say. Yeah, Rupert Murdoch
says of Max Harris, every society needs a Max to
(34:10):
identify its successes as well as its failures, its forlorn hopes,
and its lost causes, and also to shake it out
of its smugness and hypocrisy, to act as a catalyst
and an irritant. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
I mean, I don't usually like to or ever want
to agree with Raypert Murdoch, but that kind of seems right.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
He went on to have a decent career. He opened
like a chain of bookstores, and he was sort of
a pioneer in the idea of like selling remaindered books.
He didn't write as much poetry post Earn Mallee as
he had been before. Like, I think he was kind
kind of taking a step back. Yeah, But he continued
to write and edit literary magazines for a couple of years.
(34:49):
He edited a magazine called Ern Malley's Journal Funny, and
when asked about the hoax, he said, I still believe
in Earn Malli. He thought they were good poems till
the end. He died in nineteen ninety as like a
pretty well regarded member of the literary community in Australia.
I mean I really respect that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Like he didn't just disappear with his tale between his legs,
Like he actually kept contributing to the literary world.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The ego was so big it could not be brought
down by this hoax. These two army guys were like,
will show him, and Max was like, no, I'll show you.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And you know what, Max like opening bookstores, like helping
with books. Like when you look at someone's lifetime and
you're like, what has someone contributed? He has contributed to
the literary community.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
He was He was not just he was obviously very
interested in attention, but he was not just doing it
for show. He legit loved books and poetry and like literature.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I like this hoax a lot because there aren't clear
heroes and villains.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
No, no, it's just funny. It's just funny and people
having a fun time, and people make an art. People
make an art. The incident did set modernist poetry back
in Australia, obviously, because nobody wants to publish something and
have anyone be like, are you fucking for real? Yeah,
I've rearranged letters on a serial box Yeah, it's like
fridge magnet poetry. And it also a little bit set
(36:10):
Australia back in the eyes of the world because it's like,
oh yeah, that backwater town that can't tell real poems from.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Yah, England is like sipping their tea out of China,
being like in Australia they're publishing hoax.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Yeah, there is still some abiding interest in arn Malley.
His poetry is published or his their poetry is published
in a volume called The Darkening Ecliptic. You can find
it online. You can read most of these poems online.
And I don't know, I think it's interesting. Like I
got for Christmas one year a book that was the
author had cut out words from his favorite novel and
(36:48):
like when you laid the pages on top of each other,
it created a whole other story. And like found poetry
is like a thing now. Yeah, And I just have
this thought of like if a hundred monkeys at a hund
typewriters and then they write Hamlet, right, Yeah, that has
no meaning to the monkeys, But that doesn't mean that
the work isn't meaningful. So isn't it possible that by
accident they wrote really good poems or do you have
(37:11):
to be trying to write good poems to write a poems?
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
I will say that the context and history of it.
That to me, that makes the poems interesting.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
To me, that it was.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Two dudes purposefully trying to make meaningless poems to trick someone.
That context makes the poems more interesting than the poems themselves. Like,
I think history and context makes all art more interesting. Yeah,
I always find like at an art museum, I love
the I want the placard explaining it to me, I
want the tour. I want to like learn the context
(37:44):
of the art so that I think that's cool, like
as its own weird little meta art piece.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah, I mean, I think Harris's point of view is
basically like these sort of formalist guys finally got out
of their own way, and because they weren't putting their
name on it, took a bunch of risks and they
can say that they didn't mean anything by it, but
there's legit poetry in here. I mean, it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
I think he's right, Like the fact that these two
guys made this poem for that reason is interesting. It's
more compelling and more interesting than a lot of formalist poems.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Indeed, and speaking of Twitter accounts, do you remember Horse
Underscore ebooks? Vaguely? It was this. It was basically a
bot that would like troll weird like databases of text
and pull out meaningless phrases that, out of their context
were really weird and funny. Yeah, and it would go
(38:39):
viral all the time, and then there's like a big
long I think Emilyinasbaum New Yorker piece about like sort
of the rise and fall of Horse Underscore Ebooks, and
the person who had set it up eventually, whoever took
it over, was trying to do it on purpose, and
readers could tell they were like, no, this isn't truly
just a ram them series of words. It makes too
(39:01):
much sense.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
It's kind of like that question, because it's like the
art of it was that it was oblivious. Yeah, do
you think AI can make good art?
Speaker 1 (39:10):
This is what I've been thinking about this whole time
that I've been thinking about ern Malley, which is, like,
I the reason that I don't want to consume AI
art a host of reasons, but the main thing is
that to me, it's like art is like a gift
that the artist has made for you. And I'm like, well,
(39:32):
nobody made this for me, so I don't want it.
Like I don't want to find out what the computer
thinks is a good poem. I want to find out
what Dana thinks is a good poem. Or like it's
the same reason that I'm like okay to read a
ghost written memoir because at the end of the day,
someone wrote it, Like maybe it wasn't Prince Harry, but
like whoever put this together, like the guy who wrote
the Tender Bar, Yeah, that guy put these words in
(39:53):
this order. Like for me, I actually have not read
that book, but theoretically it was well written. Yeah, so
that's why I am not interested in AI art. But
if I guess, like an AI program can pull random
sentences out of different can like make a found poem,
like I don't know, maybe it would be kind of good.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
I guess for me, I'm like, even if this poem
is bad on purpose, the context of these two guys
making it to trick Max Harris, that is interesting and
funny to me, where it's just like an AI poem
has no interesting context, where it's like at least the
horse ebook thing was like interesting and weird and like
(40:33):
no one was doing that on Twitter at the time,
where that context makes it interesting to me, But like
most AI art, you're like, well, if you're going to
spend any time making it, why should I spend any
time exactly, you know, consuming it.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Something else that this brought to mind is, as you
were saying, Instagram poetry, specifically Rupy Carr. Oh. Yeah. She
is the author of Milk and Honey, which there are
these very short poems.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
And they're like the most they're like the most best
selling poetry aside from like The Odyssey.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
It's like her and Amanda Gorman, Yeah, are like the
big poets of our time. I have I couldn't find it,
but I have like a book of like parodies of
her poems. And there's a little like image that often
gets like tossed around the Internet to show what a
bad poet she is that isn't actually by her. It's
someone making fun of her and then people falling for
(41:23):
it and being like, Haha, she's such a bad poet,
and then other people being like, well, she is bad
enough that people fell for this, but also she's not
so bad that she actually wrote this. Like it's such
a weird thing when you it's so easy to copy
a poetry style, and it was harder to pioneer a
poetry style.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Absolutely, I mean, I do think not to be Marnie
from Girls, but like, haha, go make fun of the
girl who took a creative risk put herself out there.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
It took a creative risk.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
It's it's hard to make anything, yeah, and it is
very easy and fun to make fun of things.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
It is. Those two facts are both true, which doesn't
mean you shouldn't do it. No, it's easy and fun.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, but also it's hard to make good art, and
I'm glad that people try.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
And I also just want to point out like it
is not just I mean, it is really fun to
think about these two guys just like shooting the shit
writing these poems, and then they needed to come up
with a character who could have written them. People do
this all the time, Like everything we know about Bob
Dylan's childhood is like pretty much a lie. Yeah, it's
(42:30):
not even his real name, and like he's I mean,
he won a Nobel Prize for poetry.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
People fully understand that the story and context that art
comes from makes it more interesting.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, and it's also funny because it made me think
of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces.
Let me know the story. He really did have his
manuscript discovered by his mom after he had died, and
I think that's a big part of why people like
that book.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I mean, yeah, I do like that book. I think
it's a good and funny book, sure, but I think
absolutely part of the story and lore behind it is
because it's like someone committed suicide and left this manuscript behind,
and then you get to feel kind of like a
genius for seeing the genius in the manuscript. I mean,
it's the whole thing with also like I mean, it's
(43:17):
not the same but with a million little pieces m where.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
I couldn't sell as a novel, but then he sold
it as a memoir.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Because the story of it. People loved the rags to
riches I mean not literal but like drug addict to
sobriety story that we could all get behind.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Everybody does it, We all love it. We all love
a good story. The last two things that this reminded
me of that I want to bring up are I
read I don't remember where it was, but it was
this guy confessing that he sort of wrote as a hobby,
but he wasn't like a professional writer. But he realized
that he was really good at coming up with like
(43:54):
fake deer abby letters and he got them published like
on Salon, like everywhere, and it was just his thing
of like seeing how many he could do. So I
think it is worth always taking a grain of salt,
Like if you're looking at an ami the asshole thing
on Reddit, like half of those are fake.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
One hundred percent. Our relationships, I feel like a lot
of times are like weird, like alt right guys writing
as women being like I left my husband because I
thought I could do better, but it turns out I
can't and now I'm an old hag at twenty nine.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Which I also think is such a good lesson for
people really like to extrapolate and try to make a
point about society, which I think is kind of what
the Catholics did here, Like people will take some anonymous
Reddit post and people on the left do it all
the time where they're like, see, this is why we
need to take on Trump is because this person didn't
(44:49):
even like know she was pregnant until she get and
it's like that could be fake. You know what I mean,
like we just live in reality and not in these
little stories. And then the final thing that this reminded
me of, of course, is Kim Kardashian's picture of herself
in a bikini, and she was like, North posted this.
I don't know how she chose it. That's crazy. A
(45:11):
piece of art, actually a poem, actually a poem actually
like a piece of metal commentary. I don't know, something
something real interesting happened there. So the moral of the
story is, if we want to become best selling authors,
we have to find like the angle on it, because
do you remember that book Sweet Bitter Yeah, which was
a huge bestseller. But part of the story was that
(45:32):
she was a waitress who.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Slipped a major editor was at at the restaurant who
worked at, and she slipped her manuscript to him, and
that was like the story like I was a waitress.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
I did not know that, but it was. And the
novel is about it's about a restaurant. But the truth is,
I mean, she was a waitress, but she was also
a writer with a manuscript to go, and I think,
like an agent already. But you know what a great
little tidbit, and then we all get to be like
she was a waitress. And I remember when Diablo Cody
wrote Juno, how much everyone like love the tip? She
(46:06):
had been a strip She had been a stripper. So
we just need to find because I grew up in
the in the suburbs of Chicago, and I feel like
I don't have a fun little tidbit.
Speaker 3 (46:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
I think it's always good to take with a grain
of salt. People being like I just fell into acting.
I got discovered one day. I never meant to. It's
like you went to auditions. Yeah, all of this to say.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
We we just tripped into a podcast studio and started talking.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
We had no idea, we'd never met before. We just
there was a recording device on while we were chatting.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
I actually I woke up from a coma and my
doctor had said, if you're able to talk about hoaxes,
it might help you jog your memory.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
And so that's what this whole thing is. I was
a candy striper at the hospital. Look up the Earn
Malley poems and decide for yourself. Decide for yourself. We'll
post them on Instagram. Oh, we definitely like them. We
definitely will. Dana, where can people find.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
You on Instagram at Danish Shorts with three z's occasionally
also on TikTok same name and who knows, maybe making
fake poems under a fake account.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Where can the people find you? Right now? I'm on
Instagram Lizzie Logan with five z's every forty eight hours,
I feel a strong urge to change my handle because
we're all going through identity crises all the time. So
if that's not it by the time this episode is
out or by the time you're listening to it, just
really try to find me.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
You guys, We'll follow Holks on Instagram too, and then
we'll we'll link that in the bio.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
And as always, please hoax responsibly.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
Hye Hoax is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Our hosts are Danish Schortz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive
producers are Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer
Rima L. K Ali and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk.
Our theme music was composed by Lane Montgomery. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
You are listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart Podcasts. Folks,
it's a hug sound No, I haven't seen when USA
look to see you there last. Welcome to Hoax, a
(00:22):
new podcast, or is it? It is? Every episode we
sort through the lies we wish we're true, and truths
that sound like lies. This is not just another scam
and scandal podcast. Oh no, these are stories of pranks
and griffs throughout history, so big and bold they make
us question why we believe. I'm the ghost of Danis
Schwartz and I'm the evil twin of Lizzie Logan. Welcome
(00:43):
to the show. Hello, Dana, Hey, I have what I
think is going to be a very fun hoax for
us today. Good. I could use a fun hoax, and
to the point that I kind of think it's like
some real Dana Lizzie shit. Oh and I would even
like to start off with two anecdot It's one from me,
one from you. Great, and I'll tell you what to anecdote.
(01:04):
I want you to tell car tell my anecdote. Perfect,
all right. I spent my first two years of undergrad
at Columbia University in the City of New York. Heard
of it. Yep. The thing that I was really into
while I was there was a program called Late Night
where we wrote short one act plays and cast each
other in them and performed them late at night. That
(01:24):
does sound fun, that's very college. It was very college.
It was really fun. And there was this one guy
sort of like in the community, in the program, in
the club who was actually a pretty talented playwright, but
was so annoying and had so many like ticks and
quirks and just like he was just this He just
(01:47):
kind of drove me crazy. And I will be the
first to admit that I was not in the best
headspace at Columbia, and I could have been a lot
more generous and a lot nicer with all of my
analyzes of people. But he drove me up the wall.
He drove a lot of people up the wall. I
think he sounds annoying. We can look at his social
media later. I can't say, but he had a very
distinctive way of writing that was like pretty pretentious. And
(02:10):
the way that you got your play into Late Night
was that you wrote it and you sent it into
like you know, whatever late night at Gmail or whatever,
and the board would then read them all and vote,
and there were a couple rounds of voting and you
could submit them anonymously. Okay, And so what I did
run semester was I wrote a one page play and
(02:32):
I submitted it under like a name that rhymed with
his name, Oh Lizzy, And it was just making fun
of all of his quirks and pretentiousness. And he was
on the board, so then he had to read it.
And apparently it got through the first round of voting,
and everyone was just signing on to me like very
(02:52):
lately bullying this guy, and apparently he was really mad,
and that was the end of it. You know, there
was no big dust up or anything. But keep that
in mind when we talk about our hooks. Fun gentle bullying,
real nerdy bullying. Yeah, I would say, like it wasn't awful.
(03:12):
I didn't call him like a terrible person. I was
making fun of his writing more than I was making
fun of him. No, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Also, I want to say, like, anyone listening to this
who knew me in college, really no you didn't.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah, I was. I was a mess in college. But
and this is a great segue, Dana fans out there,
if you don't know this crucial piece of Dana lore. Yeah,
you need to know it. Dana, Will you quickly tell
the listeners at home about at Guy in your MFA. Oh,
this is truly the start of my This is writing
(03:42):
Dana origins. This is Dana origin story. I was pre
med in college. I was just like, where'd you go
to college? I went to Brown? Heard her? We went
to Ivy League school. We did okay, so we're at Brown.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I was pre med thinking, well, yeah, I'm a writer,
but like, how does anyone become a writer?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Like make money?
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And I was very insecure about just the fact that
I'm like, well, I don't know how to do this
thing that I like to do. So I made a
parody Twitter account. And in my defense, it was twenty
fourteen or twenty thirteen, when these things were still like
relatively fresh and funny.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Oh yes, I remember. There was a parody account that
was just big Ben and every hour it would just
tweet out bong bong bong bomb and we loved it
and probably hundreds of thousands of followers.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, so this is the era we're writing in. And
I created this parody Twitter account called Guy in Your
MFA because Guy in your writing workshop was too long
for the Twitter name. It was just basically making fun
of like the pretentious lit bros in your undergraduate or
graduate in this case writing workshops who are like just
(04:46):
writing really boring stories about men on trains.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, just like water down David Foster Wallace.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
They think they're the next chiever. Yeah, and they're like, ah,
like modern masculinity.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
And I just like made this Twitter out and then
it got enough attention that I got a book agent,
and I was like, Oh, I can like make something
in the world that then will reach reach quote unquote
real people. And I made my friend Simon put on
like a beanie and stand in the library and I
took a picture of him, and that's this is some
Dana Lore.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
This is real Dana Lore. I remember this account. It
was very funny, and it really showed that people were
ready to make fun of this type of person and
also that Dana is a very funny writer. And it
also I think speaks to both of our anecdotes, speak
to like the power of anonymity. You can get a
little meaner, you.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Can get a little mean and also those people are
are It's.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
What I'm easy to make fun of easy to take
down a peg. I think you'll see immediately why these
things are relevant. I can't wait. What do you know
about the hoax of ern Malley? That name means absolutely
nothing to me. Fantastic. We are in Australia in nineteen forty.
I love it already. The war is on, the the
(06:00):
World War, the second one. In fact, nationalism is very high.
I'm sort of picturing it's almost like America post nine
to eleven, where everyone's like waving their flags, like very
like we are Australia, Like we have our values and
we're committed to that. Australia is backing Britain, but they
(06:21):
are no longer part of Britain and Australia is still
a fairly new country and they're sort of trying to
find their Australian cultural identity. Yeah, who are we? And
this is especially true within the poetry community. Why not?
Why not? There are some like poet and critic Ad
Hope who say Australians are essentially Europeans. We might not
(06:43):
be on the European continent, but we are a European
people and we should write sort of like formalist poetry.
The rhymes and is in niambic bin. I mean poetry people.
You know that I'm getting the terms wrong, but basically
like old fashioned poetry in the Western European tradition. Yes,
then there are the Jindy Warabacks cool who are writing
(07:06):
bush ballads about the outback and Aboriginal culture. None of
them are Aboriginal, but they're like, you know what Australia
has that no other country has is all of these
features of the terrain, So why don't we make that
the hallmark of our poetry? And ad Hope is like
that's some bullshit. Yeah. And then there's modernism. So modernism,
(07:32):
for those who don't know, is in the tradition of
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. And it's like, you know,
adding interesting line breaks and maybe it doesn't conform to
a particular format. We're gonna have an m dash in
there as many as you want. In fact, and this
is like weirdly political. People think modernist poetry is like communist,
(07:57):
and that gets like fascist.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Also, I remember it's like reading about the beef between
Carl Sandberg and Robert Frost about poems rhyming and Robert
Frost apparently like had beef with the poet Carl Sandberg,
and he said that writing free verse poetry was like
playing tennis without a net.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yes, so people are really against modernist poetry. They think
it is related to communism. There's related to communism. Yeah,
So there's this whole idea that like people who like
modernist poetry are just engaged in like a group delusion
or like groupthink where if you and this applies to
(08:40):
all modernist art. So Hope's sort of example that he
gives is he's like, these people are so delusional. They'll
look at a Picasso, which is obviously just a bout
of ugly shapes, and they'll call it beautiful because they've
been brainwashed, similar to how Hitler's minions have been brainwashed.
Like they're not quite drawing the line, but there's this
(09:00):
feeling in the air that it's like, no, like the
rise of fascism and putting aside your own critical thinking
is the same as putting aside this critical thinking that
obviously these poems are so bad.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
I mean, I will say sometimes I do read Instagram
poems and I'm like, wait, everyone else thinks these are good.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
That is so exactly where your head needs to be
right now.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yes, not all, not all poems on Instagram, but sometimes sometimes.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Exactly into this atmosphere comes Max Harris. Max is a
literary prodigy. He taught himself to read as a toddler.
He comes from very humble beginnings. But he goes to
Saint Peter's in Adelaide. That sounds fancy. He's a little
bit pretentious. He is sort of in the army the
(09:47):
way that like everyone is in the army, but he
doesn't have to go into combat. Really. He tells this
story about like he's assigned to like dig latrines and
he loves it because he just digs latrines and then
the rest of the day like reading proost.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I mean that kind of sounds okay. Sometimes I do
think that like if I had a job that was
just like physical labor, that was like not all day,
just like a short period of time, then you could
like be creative, Like that's not that's not bad.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
I do think you and Max would get along. He
he's an avowed anarchist, all right. Less he's also Jewish,
which nobody in the story is going to bring up.
But I think sort of colors the whole like you're
too far up your butt with your intellect. I think
the fact that he's Jewish is like kind of relevantly.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
There's not a ton of them in Australia.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Well, there's not a ton in Australia. And it's also
like we're not known for being the most practical people.
We're known for like a lot of my minded rhetoric. Yeah.
When he's eighteen, so he's like a freshman in college,
he starts a literary magazine called Angry Penguins, which is
so tumblr core it is. It's a line from one
of his poems. He named it after one of his
(10:56):
own poems. He named it after one of his own poems.
The first issue is fund by his mom. Oh yeah,
Angry Penguins is all about being avant garde and putting
Australia on the map of modernist poetry. Great, so's he's
not one of the where European let's do classical European poetry. No,
he's like, I worship Dylan Thomas and we need to
(11:18):
be hip and with the times. Sure nineteen forty one.
He's so annoying on campus and he's so loud and
proud about being an anarchist that all the other students
call a meeting and they're like, we need to teach
this guy a lesson. We don't like his you know,
(11:39):
communist magazine that he keeps passing out. They decide that
he and like three of his writer friends. They're like,
we're going to toss you in the river. And Max goes, Okay,
hold on, if you guys take up a donation for
the Red Cross, I'll just jump in the river. Okay,
that's actually that's that's cute. And they're like, no, they
(12:00):
need to humiliate you. We're going to toss you in
the river. So that's what we're working with, all right.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, so I'm gonna not take it as too much
of an insult that you said that we would get along,
but a little bit.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
I don't think you would be treated the same way.
I just I don't know we could cut that. Maybe
you wouldn't get along. No, it's funny. In nineteen forty two,
his co editor is killed in action. Oh no, so
he is. You know. The idea that he's just like
a sheltered college boy does become his reputation, but it's
not necessarily true. People who work in angry Penguins are
(12:34):
dying in the war, Angry Penguins picks up some steam.
They're bringing Dylan Thomas and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Australia,
not like bringing them physically, like printing their words. They
get some backers. There's this like lawyer in his wife
who sort of take a shine to Max and are like,
you can use our mansion to like have big vegetarian
dinners and play with our cats and sort of use
(12:55):
it as like a not a commune, but like a
little artist retreat. And they're living the very bohemian life.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I will say in college, I was a member of
a co ed literary fraternity, so I feel like I'm
very familiar with these people who cook communal vegetarian dinners,
and they get very annoying very quickly.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
So maybe you would have been annoyed with Max in
nineteen forty three, so he's still in college or sorry,
as they would say, university UNI. At UNI, he gets
a letter from a woman named Ethel Malley, and Ethel says,
my brother Erne just died at the age of twenty five,
which Ethel doesn't write this, but Max is probably would know.
(13:35):
That's the age that Keats was when he died. So
you know, I don't know if you know this about poets,
but they're a little bit enmamored of early death. So
she says, my brother Arn just died and I was
going through his stuff and I found these poems, and
I don't know anything about poetry, but I showed them
to my friends and they think that they're like pretty good.
So yeah, like, here's here's a couple of poems for you.
(13:58):
And Max is like, this is the best fucking poet
I've ever read.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Of course, ay a dead twenty five year old, He's like.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Send me all the poems. I love this, And Ethyl
writes back and gives him more details, like how she
and Arn were orphans and he never went to UNI.
He was a mechanic and he sold insurance. He had
Graves disease and refused treatment, and she includes more poems.
I think there are seventeen poems in total. But basically
(14:26):
Max now has all of the Ern Maley poems and
his introduction and his conclusion to his manuscript, and everything
Arn ever wrote is now in Max's possession. And Ethel
even says, like, you can have the rights to this wow,
And Max is like, obviously he's the voice of Australia modernism,
and conveniently he's dead. So as his editor, I get
all the glory. People immediately have suspicions. They're like, this
(14:51):
sounds a little bit convenient. And Max's response is like, well,
you know what, it's not really my job to decide
whether or not this woman is telling the truth about
her brother. Yeah, it's my job to decide if these
poems are any good. And I think they're really good,
and there's no such thing as fake and real poetry,
and you know, I take responsibility for this, like this
(15:11):
is on me. I vouch for these poems. Wow. All right,
So he's explicitly saying that yes. So he publishes all
of them, all of them in the autumn nineteen forty
four issue of Angry Penguins, about a year after he
got them. Now pause for a second to talk about
how I'm stupid, because I immediately was like, oh, the autumn
(15:34):
nineteen forty four issue, Like, you know how the September
issue Vogue comes out in August, So I was like, okay,
so like probably came out in September. But then a
bunch of stuff happens in June that references this, and
I was so confused until finally one of the sources
I was reading was like, it's Australia, so the seasons
are different. So autumn and Australia starts in March, it
(15:57):
starts in spring. Yeah, it's our spring. It's our spring.
But due to wartime delays, the autumn nineteen forty four
issue of Angry Penguins comes out in early June nineteen
forty four. Let's screw it up. It's really screwed up.
Get your Head on Straight Australia slash get yourn straight, Lizzie.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
No, it's their fault, all right.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
So this issue comes out. It's dedicated to Earn Malley.
It's all of his poems, it's Max's poems about his poems.
It's art like inspired by the poems, and Max writes,
I am firmly convinced that this unknown mechanic and insurance
Peddler is one of the most outstanding poets that we
have produced. Here. Immediately people who are like, no, there's
(16:45):
some speculation that maybe some other poets sort of in
his orbit kind of wrote them. But the main theory
is that these are Max's poems, So they do.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
People think the poems are good divided okay.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Also, jumping ahead of it, the poems do not last
as poems very long. Yeah. They almost immediately become part
of the story of these poems.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, so it's not like, oh, outside of this whole story, these.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Are amazing poems TVD, TVD all Right. Brian Elliott, who
is a lecturer at Adelaide University and Harris's teacher, thought
Max Harris was the author, and he wrote a parody
review like in the style of modernist poetry.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
That's so mean, and that your professor burns.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
And the like acrostic like the you know, first letter
of every line or whatever it spells. Max Harris hoax.
Oh that's funny. It is funny. It is funny. It's funny.
It's mean that your professor did that, but something punching down.
People get really into it. Reportedly, there's like students taking
(17:53):
bets on who the real author of these poems is.
And Harris is like, well, I know I didn't write them.
I kind of wonder who did. Yeah, so he hires
an investigator two and I can't believe he didn't do
this way earlier, but he hires an investigator to just
go to the address that Ethel had listed as her
address and see who lives there. Yeah, And the investigator
(18:15):
like checks all the records in the area and he's like,
there's no malle family here, but there's just some rando
who lives at that address and is Because this is
where the Australian accent really trips you up. They'd mixed
up fourteen and forty. Who's they? I don't remember if
which number is correct, but Max, in communicating with the investigator,
said like forty, and the investigator heard a different number. Sure,
(18:39):
And so they can't figure it out. And it takes
all of like a week or two for the true
story behind these poems to come out. Dana, Do you
want to guess how these poems came about? I'm going
to guess someone. Would it help you to read a poem? Yeah? Okay,
I would actually love to. Are they long? Should we
read them out loud? I I bookmarked like two of
(19:01):
the shorter ones. Okay, this is great? Shall I read
it out loud? Sure? Okay. This one's called Sweet.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
William, allegedly by Earn Mallei, credited to Earn Malle credited
to Earn MALLEI I have avoided your wide English eyes,
but now I am whirled in their vortex. All right,
I'm gonna pause and say already, if a poem has
the word vortex.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I'm kind of out.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
So I'm gonna say I don't think this is a
good poem. My blood becomes a damaged man most like
your albion, and I must go with stone feet down
the staircase of flesh.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Same thing with flesh.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's another word to me, that that's like a poem
red flag to where, in a shuddering embrace, my toppling
opposites commit the obscene, the unforgivable rape. One moment of daylight,
let me have like a white arm thrust out of
the dark and self denying wave. And in the one moment,
I shall you immediably attest, how though, with sobs and
(19:55):
torn cries bleeding, my white swan of quietness lies sanctified
on my black swan's breast. I don't know anything about poem,
but I'm going to.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Say I don't do not like that she doesn't know
anything about poem.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I don't know anything about poem, and I know that
this is obviously colored because I know that this is
a hoax, because this podcast is called hoax spoiler. And
maybe if you had come to me and been like,
this is the most amazing poem I've ever.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Write, I did say like I did think, like what
if I was like Dana I wrote that, I know
I would feel bad.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I don't like a poem with like there are certain
words to me that just feel like cliche poemy, and
it's like flesh and vortex and those those are the
red flag.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Words for me. We were just saying off mic that
I have written one good poem in my whole life.
I wrote it when I was four or five, and
I'll recite it to you now because it's very short,
good night, good night, good night, good night, A cat
on a windowsill good night. That that's a good poem,
Like pretty good. Yeah, I like that poem actually, And
I was like, Okay, I never need to write another
(20:58):
poem because I I that was a banger that I
came up with when I was four.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
That's way better because you know what that poem has
that this poem doesn't.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Is I know what that poem's about. I don't know
what's happening in this poem. Well, maybe the confusion is
part of the point. Man. Let's go back to nineteen
forty three. James McAuley and Harold Stewart are a few
years older than Max. They're in there like they're like
twenty six and twenty seven, and they are both amateur
poets and they're stationed together in the same barracks in
I think Melbourne, and it's very unclear what their job is.
(21:30):
They work for like the Army Intelligence Service, so it's
all very shrouded mystery what they're actually doing all day. Sure,
but they are very much of the like you know
when people see an abstract painting and they're like, my
kid could do this. They feel that way about modernist poetry. Yeah,
and sometimes it's really true. So they decide to do
(21:51):
a little prank. So they using just like the books
that are in their barracks, throw it again. There's some
poems they use lines of Shakespeare, they use random words
out of the dictionary. They there's one poem where the
first three lines are taken verbatim from a like pamphlet
(22:11):
that they had that was from America that was about
how to drain swamps, where mosquitoes are breeding.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Well, that makes me feel better because I could not
for the I was like, what is that poem about?
Speaker 1 (22:22):
And they put together the seventeen poems in they say
a single afternoon.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
It actually sounds like a really fun afternoon. I bet
I think they.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Were really amusing them. I thought they had a flask.
So they write them, and then when they're typing them up,
they make like deliberate spelling errors, and they do what
I think is becoming a trope of the hoaxes we cover.
They do the classic thing of like making the paper
look old by like exposing it to sun and dirt. Yeah,
classic Hoaksman, classic hoax. I gotta make you a paper
(22:51):
look like it's been around the block. You got a
fourth grade book or report it? Yeah, you gotta get
the tea bags. And they write the letter from Ethel
and they send off the poems. Once Max agrees to
publish the poems, McCauley feels a little bit bad, and
he sent Max a postcard that had some line on it.
(23:13):
I've never been able to find exactly what was on
this postcard, but apparently it was like a clue that
it was a hoax, Like he was not trying to
tip him off, but Max didn't get it.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, so that I understand why he was trying to
like assuage his guilt because he's like, if he gets this,
then he's smart enough. But then it's like you kind
of like outsourcing the guilt.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yes, And a lot of this is sort of just
a test of like what's going on in Max's brain. Yeah.
They also mentioned the scheme to a friend of theirs,
test Van Summers, cool name, who it is pretty good,
who like wants to be a reporter. When Angry Penguins
comes out, Tests is immediately like, I recognize those poems.
(23:52):
Those are by by two friends, Harold and James. And
she runs to the newspaper where she has a job
and she's like, guys, I got a scoop. And it
doesn't say this in any of the sources, but I
detect a hint of sexism there. All the editors are like,
nice tip, we'll take it from here. Yeah. Yeah. McCauley
and Stewart had kind of hoped that the hoax would
(24:14):
last a little longer, like maybe the poems would get
to Britain and they could doup more people. And they
also wanted it to be like a literary scandal, not
like a tabloid scandal. But too bad because Tess is
telling the reporters and they're gonna write the story with
or without McCauley and Stuart. So they just like a
(24:37):
week or two after Angry Penguins comes out, the Sun,
which is the paper, runs this like long statement from them,
and they also they do do their due diligence, say
that ten times fast, and they call Harris for a comment.
But he had like had I think, like a dental surgery,
and they call him, I think, like maybe not the
(24:59):
middle of the night, but he was like sleeping, So
he just says some nonsense and he comes off really
bad in this article. And he already didn't know how
to say numbers. He's really he's really struggling. He's twenty
two and he's struggling. So June twenty fifth, nineteen forty four,
this article comes out, and I'm going to read you
just some bits from the like long essay that they've
(25:22):
put together explaining why they did this hoax. Yeah, for
some years now we have observed with distaste the gradual
decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry it rendered its
devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination. Their
work appeared to us to be a collection of garish
images without coherent meaning and structure, as if one erected
(25:46):
a coat of bright paint and called it a house.
M interesting analogy similar to the tennis.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I also really like a hoax with a point, because
we've talked a little bit about hoax that were for
personal profit, and this was to hoax that the goal
of it was to get people who read poems to
think more critically.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
That is what they say. It also was possible they
were just trying to embarrass this day. They were trying
to bully them. But they have a really good explanation.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
And you know what, as far as motivations go, embarrassing
and annoying guy is.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Not the worst thing. And that's not the worst. It
wasn't personal profit. And they say, and this I think
is smart. However, it was possible that we had simply
failed to penetrate to the inward substance of these productions.
The only way of settling the matter was by experiment.
If mister Harris proved to have sufficient discrimination to reject
the poems, then the tables would have been turned, which
(26:38):
I think is a good point. They didn't make him
print them. Yeah, he thought they were good, and they
write there was no feeling of personal malice directed against
mister Max Harris. That possibly is not true. But they
also laid out their rules of composition. They had little
rules while they were putting the poems together. Okay, One,
there must be no coherent theme at most, only conf
(27:00):
used and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as
a bait to the reader, which.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Is kind of when people criticize poetry and they're like,
there's no point here. That is sort of the critique.
So I'm glad that that was like their purposeful rule.
Like they didn't make accidentally good poems or did they
keep going, keep going?
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Two? No care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally
to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities. Three In style,
the poems were to imitate, not mister Harris in particular,
but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from
the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Trees, and others. Having
completed the poems, we wrote a very pretentious and meaningless
(27:41):
preface and statement which purported to explain the esthetic theory
on which they were based. Then we elaborated the details
of the alleged poet's life. This took more time than
the composition of his works.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I mean, they're right. And what I think they hit
on is that sometimes with poetry, and with a lot
of art, it's less about the art itself and more
about the romance of the story around it. And I
think that people are attracted to like the cool story
where it's like I think that probably Harris Max Harris
was like more interested in the fact there was this
(28:14):
like working class mechanic who died in obscurity. Natt's story
was more appealing to him than the poems itself.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
It's definitely part of the appeal, Like, it's a huge
part of the appeal. Correct. So the story that Stuart
and McCauley have laid out is a tiny bit suspect.
Some people think that they spent more than an afternoon
on it. Like the idea that they just dashed them
off makes them look good but might not be true. Yeah,
and they were poets, and there's a bit of one
(28:43):
of the Earned Maley poems that was like taken from
one of James McCauley's earlier poems. Some people think that
maybe Ad Hope put them up to it. Sure making
a point. Yeah, he was working on a very negative
review of Max Harris's surrealist novel and he was known
to say say get Maxie, like gotta get Axy. So
(29:04):
maybe he was the puppet master. But in any case,
McCauley and Stewart definitely were the ones who like wrote
down and typed up the poems. Sure Harris doesn't back down,
He's really yeah, he's like, in creating this fictional character,
these two guys open themselves up creatively. They wrote the
best poems of their career, and I'm the one who
published them. That's on me. I think these poems rock,
(29:25):
you know what.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Genuinely respect Max Harris, and he can also be like,
it's cool that you did this elaborate thing.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
T s Eliott Cables Harris and was like, I would
have fallen for this. There's some there's some okay lines
in these poetry. Also, like there's so much bad poetry
in the world. The idea that he he should have
been able to tell that it was like that on
purpose is kind of impossible because there's so much poetry
so subjective.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
And also, I will say, as someone who said I
don't know poem because I don't know poem, I don't
know poem. I kind of do think the mark of
like good or effective poetry is if it affects.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
You the reader mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
And if it affected Max Harris, that's what matters. And
maybe the whole context is part of why it affected him,
but that doesn't mean it affected him any less.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Basically, he's a laughing stock. Other than ts Eliot, nobody's
really on his side. Weirdly, the Catholics are coming out
against him again. I think like part of this is
that he's Jewish, but they don't say that. They're sort
of saying, like, see what society has come to when
you don't go to church, you're falling for poetry hoaxes,
and Catholicism is very much about like order and history
(30:30):
and structure and like learning Latin. Then he gets charged
by the government because their sexuality in the poems. No. Yeah,
So the Australian government is very conservative and they censor
a lot of stuff, but this is the first time
they've ever censored a poem. They bring him up on
charges of publishing indecent material, and their only witness is
(30:52):
this like detective that they've hired, whose like job it
is is to show like why the poems are dirty.
And he's like, well, this one poem is about going
into the park at night, and I've seen people go
into the park at knights have sex, So that's gross
case and points yeah, and the other one. His other
big point is he's like, this poem has the word
incestuous in it, and I don't you know, it's poems,
(31:15):
so I don't know what they mean by it in
this context, but this is pretty gross, right.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, to Lee, it is famously illegal to use the
word incestuous, Yes, even in a poem.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Max is boot at and spit on as he goes
into court. Oh, Max, theoretically I'm back on Max's side. Yes,
Max is I think sympathetic but not likable. Yeah. Theoretically
Max could say, well, the authors themselves said that these
poems were meaningless, so if it doesn't have a meaning,
how can it be obscene? Yeah, but he doesn't. He
(31:46):
His defense is like, I just hope that the court
like goes home and reads the poems and comes to
their own conclusions. I mean, because he kind of has
to defend them as poems. And he also is like,
poetry is about what you make of it, Like there's
no one and you can't the government can't decide what
this poem is about. Everyone has to decide for themselves.
But yeah, he gets convicted. He gets convicted. He gets convicted,
(32:09):
and they offer him six weeks in jail or a fine,
so he pays the fine, and two issues later, Angry
Penguins ceizes operations. I mean, literary journals are always like
not long for this world. But yeah, that's that's Angry Penguins.
This is a sad story because I kind of don't
(32:30):
know who to root for. Like, on one hand, Max
sounds pretentious and like you said, unlikable, and also like
I don't I think like a lot of poetry is
not good and people can just kind of throw whatever
they want and be like it's a poem. But like
I do think writing needs a craft and structure. But
on the other hand, for Max, he shouldn't have to
pay literal money because people didn't like his poems and he.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Just got tricked and what was he doing publishing a
literary journal.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
People thought he was. But here's our epilogue. McCauley and
Stuart continued to write poems, not together, but they continued
to write poems. Nothing they wrote was ever as widely
read as their earned Malee poems. Yeah, Harold Stewart became
a Buddhist scholar and translator of haiku and moved to
Japan in the.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Sixties highly structured poems.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
James McCauley eventually like apologizes to Max Harris and they
have not like a friendship, but they like have a correspondence.
They're on good terms. He at it's a very conservative
journal called Quadrant, which may have received some funding from
the CIA. Sure, and he later headed the University of
Tasmania's English literature department. So he had like a good,
(33:42):
solid academic career.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
I feel like as nice a career as you can
have as a poet in Australia and Australia, you know, great.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Max Harris goes on to write a weekly newspaper column
for almost thirty years. He is often deliberately controversial and
very arrogant in the way that like, you know, it's
he's sort of doing clickbait people are buying the paper
to see what Maxie is gonna say. Yeah, Rupert Murdoch
says of Max Harris, every society needs a Max to
(34:10):
identify its successes as well as its failures, its forlorn hopes,
and its lost causes, and also to shake it out
of its smugness and hypocrisy, to act as a catalyst
and an irritant. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
I mean, I don't usually like to or ever want
to agree with Raypert Murdoch, but that kind of seems right.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
He went on to have a decent career. He opened
like a chain of bookstores, and he was sort of
a pioneer in the idea of like selling remaindered books.
He didn't write as much poetry post Earn Mallee as
he had been before. Like, I think he was kind
kind of taking a step back. Yeah, But he continued
to write and edit literary magazines for a couple of years.
(34:49):
He edited a magazine called Ern Malley's Journal Funny, and
when asked about the hoax, he said, I still believe
in Earn Malli. He thought they were good poems till
the end. He died in nineteen ninety as like a
pretty well regarded member of the literary community in Australia.
I mean I really respect that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Like he didn't just disappear with his tale between his legs,
Like he actually kept contributing to the literary world.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The ego was so big it could not be brought
down by this hoax. These two army guys were like,
will show him, and Max was like, no, I'll show you.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And you know what, Max like opening bookstores, like helping
with books. Like when you look at someone's lifetime and
you're like, what has someone contributed? He has contributed to
the literary community.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
He was He was not just he was obviously very
interested in attention, but he was not just doing it
for show. He legit loved books and poetry and like literature.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I like this hoax a lot because there aren't clear
heroes and villains.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
No, no, it's just funny. It's just funny and people
having a fun time, and people make an art. People
make an art. The incident did set modernist poetry back
in Australia, obviously, because nobody wants to publish something and
have anyone be like, are you fucking for real? Yeah,
I've rearranged letters on a serial box Yeah, it's like
fridge magnet poetry. And it also a little bit set
(36:10):
Australia back in the eyes of the world because it's like,
oh yeah, that backwater town that can't tell real poems from.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Yah, England is like sipping their tea out of China,
being like in Australia they're publishing hoax.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Yeah, there is still some abiding interest in arn Malley.
His poetry is published or his their poetry is published
in a volume called The Darkening Ecliptic. You can find
it online. You can read most of these poems online.
And I don't know, I think it's interesting. Like I
got for Christmas one year a book that was the
author had cut out words from his favorite novel and
(36:48):
like when you laid the pages on top of each other,
it created a whole other story. And like found poetry
is like a thing now. Yeah, And I just have
this thought of like if a hundred monkeys at a hund
typewriters and then they write Hamlet, right, Yeah, that has
no meaning to the monkeys, But that doesn't mean that
the work isn't meaningful. So isn't it possible that by
accident they wrote really good poems or do you have
(37:11):
to be trying to write good poems to write a poems?
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
I will say that the context and history of it.
That to me, that makes the poems interesting.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
To me, that it was.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Two dudes purposefully trying to make meaningless poems to trick someone.
That context makes the poems more interesting than the poems themselves. Like,
I think history and context makes all art more interesting. Yeah,
I always find like at an art museum, I love
the I want the placard explaining it to me, I
want the tour. I want to like learn the context
(37:44):
of the art so that I think that's cool, like
as its own weird little meta art piece.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah, I mean, I think Harris's point of view is
basically like these sort of formalist guys finally got out
of their own way, and because they weren't putting their
name on it, took a bunch of risks and they
can say that they didn't mean anything by it, but
there's legit poetry in here. I mean, it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
I think he's right, Like the fact that these two
guys made this poem for that reason is interesting. It's
more compelling and more interesting than a lot of formalist poems.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Indeed, and speaking of Twitter accounts, do you remember Horse
Underscore ebooks? Vaguely? It was this. It was basically a
bot that would like troll weird like databases of text
and pull out meaningless phrases that, out of their context
were really weird and funny. Yeah, and it would go
(38:39):
viral all the time, and then there's like a big
long I think Emilyinasbaum New Yorker piece about like sort
of the rise and fall of Horse Underscore Ebooks, and
the person who had set it up eventually, whoever took
it over, was trying to do it on purpose, and
readers could tell they were like, no, this isn't truly
just a ram them series of words. It makes too
(39:01):
much sense.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
It's kind of like that question, because it's like the
art of it was that it was oblivious. Yeah, do
you think AI can make good art?
Speaker 1 (39:10):
This is what I've been thinking about this whole time
that I've been thinking about ern Malley, which is, like,
I the reason that I don't want to consume AI
art a host of reasons, but the main thing is
that to me, it's like art is like a gift
that the artist has made for you. And I'm like, well,
(39:32):
nobody made this for me, so I don't want it.
Like I don't want to find out what the computer
thinks is a good poem. I want to find out
what Dana thinks is a good poem. Or like it's
the same reason that I'm like okay to read a
ghost written memoir because at the end of the day,
someone wrote it, Like maybe it wasn't Prince Harry, but
like whoever put this together, like the guy who wrote
the Tender Bar, Yeah, that guy put these words in
(39:53):
this order. Like for me, I actually have not read
that book, but theoretically it was well written. Yeah, so
that's why I am not interested in AI art. But
if I guess, like an AI program can pull random
sentences out of different can like make a found poem,
like I don't know, maybe it would be kind of good.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
I guess for me, I'm like, even if this poem
is bad on purpose, the context of these two guys
making it to trick Max Harris, that is interesting and
funny to me, where it's just like an AI poem
has no interesting context, where it's like at least the
horse ebook thing was like interesting and weird and like
(40:33):
no one was doing that on Twitter at the time,
where that context makes it interesting to me, But like
most AI art, you're like, well, if you're going to
spend any time making it, why should I spend any
time exactly, you know, consuming it.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Something else that this brought to mind is, as you
were saying, Instagram poetry, specifically Rupy Carr. Oh. Yeah. She
is the author of Milk and Honey, which there are
these very short poems.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
And they're like the most they're like the most best
selling poetry aside from like The Odyssey.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
It's like her and Amanda Gorman, Yeah, are like the
big poets of our time. I have I couldn't find it,
but I have like a book of like parodies of
her poems. And there's a little like image that often
gets like tossed around the Internet to show what a
bad poet she is that isn't actually by her. It's
someone making fun of her and then people falling for
(41:23):
it and being like, Haha, she's such a bad poet,
and then other people being like, well, she is bad
enough that people fell for this, but also she's not
so bad that she actually wrote this. Like it's such
a weird thing when you it's so easy to copy
a poetry style, and it was harder to pioneer a
poetry style.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Absolutely, I mean, I do think not to be Marnie
from Girls, but like, haha, go make fun of the
girl who took a creative risk put herself out there.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
It took a creative risk.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
It's it's hard to make anything, yeah, and it is
very easy and fun to make fun of things.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
It is. Those two facts are both true, which doesn't
mean you shouldn't do it. No, it's easy and fun.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, but also it's hard to make good art, and
I'm glad that people try.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
And I also just want to point out like it
is not just I mean, it is really fun to
think about these two guys just like shooting the shit
writing these poems, and then they needed to come up
with a character who could have written them. People do
this all the time, Like everything we know about Bob
Dylan's childhood is like pretty much a lie. Yeah, it's
(42:30):
not even his real name, and like he's I mean,
he won a Nobel Prize for poetry.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
People fully understand that the story and context that art
comes from makes it more interesting.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, and it's also funny because it made me think
of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces.
Let me know the story. He really did have his
manuscript discovered by his mom after he had died, and
I think that's a big part of why people like
that book.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I mean, yeah, I do like that book. I think
it's a good and funny book, sure, but I think
absolutely part of the story and lore behind it is
because it's like someone committed suicide and left this manuscript behind,
and then you get to feel kind of like a
genius for seeing the genius in the manuscript. I mean,
it's the whole thing with also like I mean, it's
(43:17):
not the same but with a million little pieces m where.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
I couldn't sell as a novel, but then he sold
it as a memoir.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Because the story of it. People loved the rags to
riches I mean not literal but like drug addict to
sobriety story that we could all get behind.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Everybody does it, We all love it. We all love
a good story. The last two things that this reminded
me of that I want to bring up are I
read I don't remember where it was, but it was
this guy confessing that he sort of wrote as a hobby,
but he wasn't like a professional writer. But he realized
that he was really good at coming up with like
(43:54):
fake deer abby letters and he got them published like
on Salon, like everywhere, and it was just his thing
of like seeing how many he could do. So I
think it is worth always taking a grain of salt,
Like if you're looking at an ami the asshole thing
on Reddit, like half of those are fake.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
One hundred percent. Our relationships, I feel like a lot
of times are like weird, like alt right guys writing
as women being like I left my husband because I
thought I could do better, but it turns out I
can't and now I'm an old hag at twenty nine.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Which I also think is such a good lesson for
people really like to extrapolate and try to make a
point about society, which I think is kind of what
the Catholics did here, Like people will take some anonymous
Reddit post and people on the left do it all
the time where they're like, see, this is why we
need to take on Trump is because this person didn't
(44:49):
even like know she was pregnant until she get and
it's like that could be fake. You know what I mean,
like we just live in reality and not in these
little stories. And then the final thing that this reminded
me of, of course, is Kim Kardashian's picture of herself
in a bikini, and she was like, North posted this.
I don't know how she chose it. That's crazy. A
(45:11):
piece of art, actually a poem, actually a poem actually
like a piece of metal commentary. I don't know, something
something real interesting happened there. So the moral of the
story is, if we want to become best selling authors,
we have to find like the angle on it, because
do you remember that book Sweet Bitter Yeah, which was
a huge bestseller. But part of the story was that
(45:32):
she was a waitress who.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Slipped a major editor was at at the restaurant who
worked at, and she slipped her manuscript to him, and
that was like the story like I was a waitress.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
I did not know that, but it was. And the
novel is about it's about a restaurant. But the truth is,
I mean, she was a waitress, but she was also
a writer with a manuscript to go, and I think,
like an agent already. But you know what a great
little tidbit, and then we all get to be like
she was a waitress. And I remember when Diablo Cody
wrote Juno, how much everyone like love the tip? She
(46:06):
had been a strip She had been a stripper. So
we just need to find because I grew up in
the in the suburbs of Chicago, and I feel like
I don't have a fun little tidbit.
Speaker 3 (46:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
I think it's always good to take with a grain
of salt. People being like I just fell into acting.
I got discovered one day. I never meant to. It's
like you went to auditions. Yeah, all of this to say.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
We we just tripped into a podcast studio and started talking.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
We had no idea, we'd never met before. We just
there was a recording device on while we were chatting.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
I actually I woke up from a coma and my
doctor had said, if you're able to talk about hoaxes,
it might help you jog your memory.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
And so that's what this whole thing is. I was
a candy striper at the hospital. Look up the Earn
Malley poems and decide for yourself. Decide for yourself. We'll
post them on Instagram. Oh, we definitely like them. We
definitely will. Dana, where can people find.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
You on Instagram at Danish Shorts with three z's occasionally
also on TikTok same name and who knows, maybe making
fake poems under a fake account.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Where can the people find you? Right now? I'm on
Instagram Lizzie Logan with five z's every forty eight hours,
I feel a strong urge to change my handle because
we're all going through identity crises all the time. So
if that's not it by the time this episode is
out or by the time you're listening to it, just
really try to find me.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
You guys, We'll follow Holks on Instagram too, and then
we'll we'll link that in the bio.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
And as always, please hoax responsibly.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
Hye Hoax is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Our hosts are Danish Schortz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive
producers are Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer
Rima L. K Ali and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk.
Our theme music was composed by Lane Montgomery. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
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