| POETRY WAR? SEASLOTH REVIEW RESPONDS TO SATIRE
WHO IS THE REAL SEALILY CHUNDERWOOD? “I AM AMUSED”: C. LANGLEY DUNWOOD BREAKS SILENCE DOORKNOBS AT DAWN: LITERARY FEUD ERUPTS “MY DOORKNOBS ARE BRASS”: DUNWOOD HITS BACK WHO IS TOBY THALASSOCNUS? The Seasloth Review does not endorse these accounts. We have not read all of the articles in question, and some of the reporting appears to contain inaccuracies. We reproduce the headlines here only to indicate the atmosphere in which the story has been circulating. |
THE SEASLOTH REVIEW
Editor’s Note
This story has been circulating privately for several weeks and has generated considerable discussion.
We are publishing it here and in full so that readers may encounter the work itself rather than the various and somewhat scurrilous and inaccurate accounts and versions that have circulated in the media and elsewhere.
In the sidebar, you may see some of the inflammatory headlines the story has generated in the mainstream media.
We leave judgment to the reader.
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We further considered it appropriate to allow C.Langley Dunwood to offer her own dignified response.
Never Delete Correspondence: Or, Another Bonfire of the Vanities
by Toby Thalassocnus
The poet soul selects its own society, and Sealily Chunderwood had selected hers: Dickinson, of course, and Whitman. And naturally Elizabeth Bishop. She had considered Marianne Moore but didn’t like zoos. She really needed to diversify but that was so hard. For a moment she considered Derek Walcott but then she remembered. No, that would not be suitable. She sat in her shed considering whom to signal next.
Branch out. Auden, perhaps—but really he was too much, and one never knew when he might come out with something vulgar. Yeats was a bit too Celtic. Heaney the same—she was not someone who liked to think of peat bogs and bombs going off. Anne Sexton? but really, who wanted all those personal details? Telling the truth was one thing, but not like that. Edgy was good. Classy was better. Not too genteel, though. Somewhere in there, she believed, was a moral compass, and she believed she had one, and this belief required no further inspection.
With financial security settled, she had time to consider her options. As she courted the eminent, she must cultivate the emerging. Patrons above, loyalists below. A well-placed word here, a social media mention there, a generous blurb—dear friends who would rally after a bad review. Not that there was much danger of that. People did not give bad reviews. It was bad manners, far too risky. Still, insurance was useful.
A supporting cast—interviews, pamphlets, discreet praise. “These critics,” they would imply, “so out of touch.” Meanwhile she would write as if furnished with a philosophical interior—Wittgenstein somewhere in the mind, Freud in the psyche, Foucault in the margins, all three on loan and none of them read past the introduction.
That was the groundwork. Now the upgrade.
Billy Collins was secure—he had blurbed already. Once, but blurbs could be recycled. Dead poets were useful too, if handled sparingly—no more than one per week, as they were not around to deny the association. She had begun, lately, to think of them less as influences than as a kind of inventory.
She knew herself to be a quiet, elusive figure. Stylish. Good taste. Everything conveyed the right message: the porcelain doorknobs, the hand-crafted Italian suede chukka boots. She would catalogue every poet and artist she had ever met, ranked by distinction, each with a usable anecdote—a compost heap admired on a visit to the poet who grew his own corn, a cocktail conversation with the artist who later won the Sevinger Prize. Fruitful terrain, all of it, though she preferred to think of it as memory.
For she was, above all, a flâneuse—observant on boulevards, in bookshops and galleries. One must be careful not to seem merely one of the crowd. You are an iconoclast, she reminded herself, and for a moment almost believed it.
It must be a studio now, not a desk in the shed. A retreat, where she could entertain and enjoy solitude, though she had not yet worked out how both would happen in the same space. Minds like hers required such room. No more idling. This was incubation.
Biographies next—especially where they intersected with her own orbit. A launch attended, a name recognized, a photograph in which she stood slightly to the left of someone famous, cropped so it looked like the center.
And a vision. Not opinions—that was for ordinary people—but a Weltanschauung. She was cosmopolitan, not parochial, at the center of things, like Frank O’Hara, not someone who had grown up in New Jersey or Nassau County and attended a SUNY on Long Island. She had been to Paris. She had stayed in an apartment with two balconies.
She could move between worlds—art, literature, theater. Perhaps the ballet. Verlaine, Baudelaire, though it was a pity they wrote in French, which meant she had only ever loved them in translation and had never mentioned this to anyone. And who was that woman with the salon—not Gertrude Stein, the other one, who also wrote poems? She could not remember the name. She decided this was itself a kind of sophistication, the forgetting.
She disliked networking. It always seemed so terribly obvious. One simply became indispensable. Influence merely gathered around authenticity.
And yet. A word of praise here, a dropped reference there, just enough to remind everyone she was current. Entirely transactional when it came to a new volume, a reading, a poem in a journal. There was always a payoff to being generous.
She picked up the worn copy of The Golden Treasury of Poetry, the one she’d bought herself at thirteen with the birthday money she should have spent on something else. It fell open, as it always did, to the poem about hope and feathers. She read it. She felt, for perhaps four seconds, nothing she could use.
She sighed, and opened her laptop.
She imagined biographers burrowing in her files one day and chose her fonts accordingly. Then, more practically:
Step one: Donation to the Buy a Child a Book fund.
Step two: Studio adjacent to the shed. Speak with Ralph about the plans. Non-negotiables: open fireplace, northern light, screened porch, kitchen, private bedroom with en suite. Call Jo-Jo about the zoning variance.
Step three: Never delete correspondence.
C.Langley Dunwood responds in her own words
I want to begin by saying how touched I am. Truly. There is nothing more validating to a writer than discovering she has occupied enough space in someone’s imagination to inspire an entire piece of fiction about her—and about doorknobs, apparently, though I confess I don’t own porcelain ones; mine are brass, and rather good brass, if anyone’s counting, which I gather someone was.
I’ve always believed that satire is a compliment wearing a disguise it thinks is clever. I find I’m not angry. I find I’m amused. I find myself, in fact, thinking rather warmly of the author, whoever she or he is, and hoping s/he finds her/his own voice someday, rather than borrowing the shape of mine in which to speak.
I won’t be naming names. I won’t be dignifying gossip with detail. Although some things are glaringly obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention. Like most people, I am not such a person. I will say that anyone who has actually read my work—not skimmed it for material, not mined it for punchlines, but read it—knows that “Weltanschauung” appears exactly once in my collected work, in a poem about my grandmother’s kitchen, and was, if I recall, italicized ironically. I checked. I did check. Not because it mattered. It doesn’t matter. In a world where people are struggling to make ends meet, and we can see Democracy crumbling before our helpless eyes it truly fails to rise to significance.
What matters is the work. It has always been the work. I return to it now, gladly, and leave this small unpleasantness behind me, the way one leaves behind a gnat: without malice, without a backward glance, and without needing to mention it again, which is why I’ve mentioned it at this length exactly once.
To the author: I hope you find a subject worthy of you. Perhaps, someday, yourself.
I enclose a painting of an actual doorknob. It is by Ivan Albright and bears a long, philosophical title, That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door). The door itself becomes both object and threshold: an image of choice, regret, exclusion, possibility, and the moral consequences of entering—or failing to enter—the world. It is an evocative meditation on the choices and regrets in life. Albright considered The Door to be his most important picture, and he worked on it for ten years. You might find this instructive. Or perhaps you won’t, yet.
With affection, and no hard feelings whatsoever, C.L.D.
Several readers have written to ask whether “Toby Thalassocnus” can be identified with a former editorial intern whose manuscript was declined by this board some eighteen months ago, and who is further alleged, by persons we cannot name and claims we cannot verify, to have concealed the footwear of the entire editorial staff during a scheduled silent retreat in the Catskills. The Seasloth Review does not comment on personnel matters, past or present. We will say only that the retreat in question was, by every account we received at the time, restorative, and that several staff members completed it barefoot without complaint, which we mention not to lend credence to the rumor but in the interest of a complete record.
The Seasloth Review has no further comment.