As someone who was once involved in the poetry world, I can tell you that nothing will change. Shame is beneath them. This prank will only pique their deluded self-righteousness.

Most poets today are in lockstep with the academic world (the MFA industrial complex) to which they are inextricably linked. There’s no mention in the article of the ideological influence of academia in the literary arts and how it makes situations like this possible in the first place.

Before MFA Creative Writing programs metastasized into the beast they collectively are today—pumping out thousands of poets and writers suddenly assured of their mastery over an art they’ve barely studied, taught by professors who are so thoroughly terrified of being labeled a bigot of one kind or another that they don’t tell students the truth about their subpar work, and they don’t teach poetry unless the poet is of a particular identity—poets used to be freethinking individuals.

As English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Fast-forward 200 years, and it’s safe to say that poets are the enforcers of ideological standards that are inherently toxic to the creation of poetry and every other art form. They’ve lost their rebel spirit. They are shills.

Poets have all the resources available to them to do it on their own, to form collectives, to publish and review each other, and to establish a counter movement. Some of us are doing exactly that.