New York – One of the most onerous tasks in the magazine and book trade is the sifting of the slush pile. Slush piles, the collection of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts sent to publishers by beginning or would-be authors, are sometimes the source of future literary successes, but more often than not are the source of headaches and indigestion. Many editors privately complain and scream about the uselessness of slush piles, but fearing a backlash from beginning writers who already assume conspiracies keep their work from being printed, very few speak out about the quality and quantity of the material received.

With this in mind, the international literary community announced a special amnesty day for those long-suffering editors forced to sift through manuscripts where everything but the name of the author was misspelled on the title page. April 31, 2002 marks International Slushpile Bonfire Day, where editors and publishers are encouraged to collect all of the unreadable or unusable manuscripts that have built up in their offices, in some cases since 1968, and burn them while drinking wine and singing songs. Since one of the worst offenders is the science fiction / fantasy / horror triumvirate, SF, fantasy, and horror editors are allowed to place the first documents and light the pile when complete.

New York editors gather for Slushpile Bonfire Day

"We’re burning everything," said Pablo Redondo, the organizer of the event and the only editor willing to appear on television. "All of the manuscripts with no merit other than the tag ‘Member, SFWA"’ on the cover page. The manuscripts where the author didn’t bother to read the submission guidelines and dumped off the copy to a magazine that doesn’t buy that sort of fiction, or doesn’t buy fiction at all. The manuscripts where the author already registered the story for a copyright ‘to keep editors from stealing their work’. The Wesley / Worf slash fanfiction sent in ‘just in case we had an interest.’ The manuscripts sent in on toilet paper or on Hello Kitty note paper, and the manuscripts sent with death threats against any editor who plans to reject it, and the 3000-page ’sequels’ to popular books written because the author didn’t like how the original ended. We’re making a big pile in the middle of Times Square, and every editor with a slush pile is invited to pitch in. Big magazines, small book lines, Webzines, rantzines, and weekly newspapers: every editor in the world is welcome to start the healing here."

In return, the rest of the publishing community will protect the identity of the participants in the bonfire and blame the disappearance of the manuscripts on the Postal Service. "After all, they were all contaminated with . . . um . . . anthrax!" said Redondo. "That’s right: anthrax and Dutch Elm Blight! Maybe a bit of tobacco mosaic and some cane toad venom, but anthrax was definitely involved somewhere. Of course, considering the number of manuscripts we’ve received with any number of bodily fluids all over the envelope, nobody will be surprised in the slightest."

If this seems a bit extreme, the words of an editor who wished to remain nameless explained the situation. "We’re constantly reading in Locus or Speculations about the bad editors who take more than a week to accept or reject a story or novel, but these people don’t know what it’s like. An intern who takes eight weeks to reject a story is most likely needing that eight weeks to recover from jamming a set of ten Lee Press-on Nails in her eyes. By the time she’s able to see again, that same author may have sent another eight to ten stories to the slush pile, and the cycle begins again. Even at our best, we can only afford to publish three short stories and a novella a month, which means we publish a grand total of 36 short stories a year, and we get eight to ten THOUSAND manuscripts a month. This is the only way we can keep up with the overload without going insane and shooting at school buses once we got off work.

"Let’s put it another way," the editor continued. "I hear from one writer who suggests that because of the delay in response to his submissions, we call out HAZMAT teams to pluck his envelopes out of the incoming mail and decontaminate them before opening them. I can’t bring myself to tell him that we can’t afford a HAZMAT team, and each and every one of his stories makes me scrub my arms with carbolic acid whenever I open it. Each one of his stories literally takes away my will to live, and I shudder every time I see his return address on an envelope. And he’s one of hundreds out there, maybe thousands. I have to buy elbow-length rubber gloves on credit just to keep up."

Electronic manuscripts are no exception. "Since the advent of the Web, we’ve been receiving material from people who apparently learned to type by throwing their cats at the keyboard, and some of it is so horrible that we don’t let it dare escape," said Redondo. "Some of it is so foul that we’ve decided to include hard drives in the bonfire, because any hard drive or mail server that contained that story is obviously too contaminated for future use. The New York Fire Department had problems with this at first due to environmental issues, but when we explained the evil that would be removed from the universe by its extirpation, they understood."

An unsolicited submission is thrown on the fire

Surprisingly, no news of this action appeared in any of the journals dedicated to collecting existing and new writing markets, such as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Gila Queen’s Guide To Markets, and the innumerable Web sites cataloguing every market that pays in money, credit, advertising space, or raw meat still on the bone. Redondo said that this was deliberate. "The only publication that contained details was the American Editor’s Association newsletter Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, and anyone who leaked the details to the general public was to be appointed the person in charge of dealing with the repercussions. I myself am going into hiding in New Zealand after this, and I’m not returning to work until after I’ve had extensive cosmetic surgery."

The response from the beginning writer community was, as expected, swift and terrible. A representative of the Eltingville (New Jersey) Science Fiction Writer’s Circle and Costuming Guild released a statement that read, in part, "We decry any efforts to rid the world of our works, and the ESFWC&CG will start up a GeoCities site to hold all of these orphaned stories until the New York literary establishment comes to its senses and buys them back for their full value." When the representative was contacted and asked whether starting up a magazine or book line might be of more value than lambasting the existing editors, the response was "Of course not. They’re supposed to pay us for our work; we’re not supposed to pay to get it published. It’s not our fault that everyone submits stories but nobody pays to read the stories submitted, and we’ll all go to SFWA to complain if the magazines go under. Now go away: I have a Buffy / Farscape crossover novel that I have to get off to St. Martin’s this evening."

Although the editors and publishers in other countries were sympathetic to the idea, it is currently unknown whether or not they will participate. At least one Australian editor expressed support for the bonfire, saying "Australia has only six million people, and between the four science fiction magazines in the country, we’ve received submissions from at least four million. Either we have a lot of razorback hunters and crocodile skinners with plenty of free time in the evening who will suddenly buy subscriptions so they can see their stories in print, or we’re going to have a bonfire of our own in our future."

– Edgar Harris is the former Sports Editor at “Science Fiction Age”. After this article was first published, Harris retired from most forms of journalism, and now makes his living as a horticulturalist specializing in carnivorous plants. He is attempting to breed a species of Sarracenia that will feed on unsolicited manuscripts, to provide a year-round, ecologically-friendly alternative to the bonfire.

New York (31 May) — The city’s publishing establishment came together this evening in Times Square to celebrate International Slushpile Bonfire Day, an annual festival to purge the industry’s ever-growing backlog of unpublishable manuscripts. New York’s literary elite mingled with industry professionals to swap stories of the worst of the worst writing to come over the transom, while truckloads of paper holding the creative output of thousands of untalented writers were dumped into a prescribed area and ignited.

“The fire does not judge them for their confused and inconsistent tone, language, style and genre. The fire cares only for the quality of the paper.”

NY-based literary agent Samantha Nark, co-organizer of tonight’s bonfire, explained the purpose of the event: “Every year the publishing industry is deluged with unsolicited manuscripts, far more than even a motivated human could read in a lifetime. A very few are great works of literature that you’d be delighted to read, and that we’re proud to champion into print. But unfortunately, there’s always some so stultifyingly bad that you want to un-read them. Every one of these turd pastries I have to read robs me of a little piece of my soul, and they outnumber the great stuff by a ratio of ten to one. International Slushpile Bonfire Day is our chance, as a group, to reclaim some of the sanity we’ve lost to this puerile dross.”

An estimated fifteen thousand manuscripts were consumed in this year’s bonfire — a new record, claimed Miss Nark. “This represents the absolute bottom of a very deep barrel, the sediment of a two hundred and fifty postal days of slushpiles across the city being emptied and refilled. This is the stuff even the shredders won’t touch. But the fire does not judge them for their confused and inconsistent tone, language, style and genre, their utter lack of plot, theme, characterization, or emotion, or the absence of any redeeming moral, educational or entertainment value. The fire cares only for the quality of the paper.”

“The kind of person who refuses to correctly interpret ‘No unsolicited submissions’ is not going to take it well if they find out their precious manuscript was evaluated by a marshmallow on a stick.”

Agents and editors in attendance at tonight’s event all requested anonymity when interviewed, citing fear of reprisals from unpublished authors.

“Officially, we support everyone who chooses writing as their form of artistic expression, and feel privileged to have the opportunity to help guide their work into print,” said literary agent and industry veteran Kirby McCauley of the Pimlico Agency. “Unofficially, and off the record, some of the stuff in that pile was redrafted by being eaten, washed down with tabasco and vindaloo, then excreted onto fresh paper. My agency has had a full client list since I don’t remember when, but we still get this putrescence by the barrowload. The kind of person who refuses to correctly interpret ‘No unsolicited submissions’ is not going to take it well if they find out their precious manuscript was evaluated by a marshmallow on a stick.”

Charles Ardai, editor of Hard Case Crime, agrees. “Unpubs, as we call them, are a fickle lot at the best of times, but some of them are downright psychotic. They either think that their book is the best thing written since the Bible — sometimes including the Bible — and we should lick their boots for letting us read it, or they think it’s a pile of garbage too awful to be read quietly in a roomful of dead dogs, but they still expect us to read every damn word of it and reply with encouraging platitudes. If any of them knew I was here torching their babies, I can’t imagine the volume of nasty letters, emails, voicemails and conference accostings I’d get. I mean honestly, what part of ‘Hard Case Crime’ suggests we’d be interested in a passionate love story between two middle-aged greengrocers on a cooking holiday in Tuscany? I started a retro-themed crime imprint specifically because I never wanted to read the phrase ‘gay Hobbit’ in a query letter.”

Author Tom Wolfe was on hand to chronicle the event for the New Yorker. “I call this event the ‘Bonfire of the Inanities’. My editor told me that if it didn’t have ‘by Tom Wolfe’ on it, my last novel would’ve ended up here.’

Stephen Jayson Harris covers the New York literary scene for Guns & Ammo magazine. He once mailed himself to Random House to test their response time to unsolicited submissions. He was returned unopened.

Five years ago — about a month before I finally snapped, saw reason for the first time in twenty years, and stopped deluding myself that writing for science fiction publications was anything approximating a career — I had a bit of fun. At the time, I was writing regular articles for the Webzine Revolution Science Fiction on various subjects, and I was also letting my id run wild under the name of “Edgar Harris”. Edgar came from a rather large extended family of writers, and counted Raoul Duke, Cordwainer Bird, and Kilgore Trout as uncles and inspirations. As such, he proceeded to write all sorts of articles (until RevSF was taken over by the sort of people who think that winning a Writers of the Future competition actually means something) on such diverse subjects as: Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth being hospitalized for hate mail addiction; George Lucas suing to have the US ballistic missile defense system renamed “Star Wars”; Harlan Ellison as an extremely sophisticated literary warrior robot; and the saga of the official Jar-Jar Binks urinal cake.

However, the one that got any notice outside of the science fiction community was the coverage of International Slushpile Bonfire Day.

“Most wannabe writers, and many published ones, are completely delusional about their place in the universe and completely ignore any and all hints that they’re regularly mocked.”

Having been a nonfiction writer, save for occasional forays into attempts at humor, I was never asked the question “Where do you get your ideas?” the way fiction writers are apparently asked. (I was regularly asked if my parents’ divorce proceedings would still leave them brother and sister, but that was to be expected.) However, I was regularly asked, mostly by editors and beginning writers who couldn’t believe that I’d dare write something that inflammatory, “So where did you get the idea for that?”

By “that”, they meant “anything that crushed the dreams of the tens of wannabe writers who came across it”. Never mind that most wannabe writers, and many published ones, are completely delusional about their place in the universe and completely ignore any and all hints that they’re regularly mocked, in the same way that most English majors are delusional that their chosen degree is anything other than part of a plot to prevent wage inflation at Borders and Barnes & Noble chain bookstores. Precious few people actually noticed, for the same reasons why even pepper gas and tasers won’t prevent your friendly neighborhood Cat Piss Man from continuing to submit Doctor Who/The Red Green Show fanfiction to every venue in sight.

The concept was quite simple, and it tied directly into the same level of denial I’ve seen in other aspects of entertainment. We all know the crazed Trekkie, the one trying to get her ears bobbed so she can pass for Vulcan, who laughs and laughs about the famed William Shatner “Get a life” speech, because she knows someone else who’s a little too addicted to Star Trek. When the Robert Altman adaptation of Michael Tolkin’s book The Player first came out, everyone on Hollywood was talking about how they knew someone else who was as amoral and thoughtless as the fictional Gordon Mill. (What was particularly funny at that time was that I was working for the editor of a movie magazine who related all sorts of horror tales about similar treatment of writers by producers, and how it was just a matter of time before the writers struck back, all without realizing that he’d already cultivated such a reputation for fucking over writers that the only sound at his funeral would be the sound of hundreds of screwed-over freelancers and staffers shitting on his corpse.)

“The difference between base cruelty and cultivated sadism is knowing the right words to cause the most damage.”

Likewise, editors can pull out huge stacks of the sort of swill that regularly infects the mailbox at science fiction magazines and read them to huge crowds of laughing fans as examples of what they get every damn day, but the worst offenders go home smirking about how they’re the exception. They don’t see themselves as the problem, and they simply refuse to do so.

And that’s what set off the story of International Slushpile Bonfire Day.

The difference between base cruelty and cultivated sadism is knowing the right words to cause the most damage. For various horrible reasons, I found myself on the bulletin board for an online “resource” for science fiction writers (“resource” meaning “place to hide when the real world tells you that getting stories accepted at nonpaying online venues doesn’t make you famous, no more than having Fat Elvis’s gut, Buddy Holly’s glasses, and Phil Collins’s hair makes you a rock star”). When one of the regulars started whining about how he had such problems with getting responses to his submissions that he wondered if editors called HAZMAT teams when they saw his return address on manuscript envelopes, I didn’t tell him directly that at least one editor I knew visibly shuddered whenever one of his literary cowpies arrived, complete with the notice “Member, SFWA” on the cover letter, with the bills and junk mail. Naw, that would have been mean.

Instead, that little whimper built up nacre, combining with my own writing and editorial experiences, merging with the faces of the innumerable idiots who learn NOTHING when wasting their time at writer’s workshops and “How To Get Published” panels at conventions, and what crawled out was a new and much-needed holiday. Oh, and the howls of “I didn’t think that was funny at all” and “That was in extremely bad taste” echoed across the publishing community.

Five years later, I look back upon the vast majority of my published works with nothing but fear and loathing. The Alex Winter short film “Entering Texas” was the source for the best description of my or anyone else’s career in science fiction: after watching Butthole Surfers lead singer Gibby Haynes masturbate into a frying pan, one of the characters says “He’s just greasing the pan, dear. It’s special grease.”

However, I still have a bit of pride in the tale of International Slushpile Bonfire Day: whenever I get thoroughly tired of dolts telling me “You need to go back to writing,” I look back upon that little missive and smile. It’s not just enough to encourage the idea that the life work of most “writers” are so foul that their work automatically gets dumped into a furnace somewhere: we should all encourage the idea that the torching will be a public event. To paraphrase a bumper sticker given to me by a friend fifteen years ago, “Slushpiles don’t burn by themselves. You need to help. Learn to burn.”

– The only way Paul Riddell is returning to writing, particularly anything involving science fiction, is if that work is immediately followed by a large-caliber bullet in his brain. Robert E. Howard, H. Beam Piper, Ernest Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson had the right idea.

I’d like to thank Paul Riddell for so generously allowing me to resurrect and run with his concept. Perhaps someday I will.

1790: The United States signs the first “Fsck You Fanficcers!” bill into law, forcing homobsessed hacks to wait 14 years before peddling their derivative smut. Unless the work was first published outside the US. In the first knockoff edition of Oliver Twist, “Fagin” was a verb.

1977: Legendary schockmeister William Castle finally stopped making terrible movies, and marketing them with spectacularly awful gimmick campaigns like “Illusion-O” and the “Fright Break”.

2000: International Slushpile Bonfire Day staves off criticism about pollution by trading carbon credits with World No Tobacco Day. 

2005: Former FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt ruins a perfectly good mystery by admitting he was “Deep Throat” in the Watergate scandal.

“We appreciate the passion with which fans of Tolkein’s books have embraced our films, and our merchandise,” said WETA representative and Academy Award-winning effects supervisor Richard Taylor. “But our work on Lord of the Rings has long since ceased, and we have no practical use for stories exploring the sexual dynamics of a love triangle between Arwen, Grima Wormtongue and Sting the sword. I mean, even if the copyright issues could be resolved, Peter [Jackson] is too busy to make a seven minute erotic fantasy film. And I don’t want to spend my days gluing a prosthetic penis to Brad Dourif.”

“We copped a lot of flak from the hard-core fans about the liberties we took with Tolkein’s story,” said screenwriter Fran Walsh. “But that doesn’t mean we need hundreds of full-length screenplays showing us how we should have handled it. We are just not going to reshoot the movie with Danny de Vito as Sam Gamgee, or to retell the story from the orc’s point of view. “

The photorealistic model of Mount Doom will be lit at 8pm this evening. Rings director Peter Jackson will be on hand to supervise the burn, and to film some pick-up shots for the upcoming SuperUltraMegaWeta DVD boxset re-release of the film trilogy.

International Slushpile Bonfire Day
May 31, 2007

<p align=”center”><a href=”http://101reasonstostopwriting.blogspot.com/search/label/slushpile%20bonfire%20day”><img alt=”[International Slushpile Bonfire Day Logo]” src=”http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/8021/isbdlogo150in1.png” border=”0″></a><br><strong>International Slushpile Bonfire Day</strong><br>May 31, 2007</p>

International Slushpile Bonfire Day
May 31, 2007

<p align=”center”><a href=”http://101reasonstostopwriting.blogspot.com/search/label/slushpile%20bonfire%20day”><img alt=”[International Slushpile Bonfire Day Logo]” src=”http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/2374/isbdlogo100hj7.png” border=”0″></a><br><strong>International Slushpile Bonfire Day</strong><br>May 31, 2007</p>

International Slushpile
Bonfire Day
May 31, 2007

<div style=”float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; text-align: center”><a href=”http://101reasonstostopwriting.blogspot.com/search/label/slushpile%20bonfire%20day”><img alt=”International Slushpile Bonfire Day” src=”http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/8685/isbdlogo60jc4.png” border=”0″></a><br><span style=”font-size: small”>International Slushpile<br/>Bonfire Day<br/>May 31, 2007</span></div>

International Slushpile
Bonfire Day
May 31, 2007

<div style=”float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; text-align: center”><a href=”http://101reasonstostopwriting.blogspot.com/search/label/slushpile%20bonfire%20day”><img alt=”International Slushpile Bonfire Day” src=”http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/8685/isbdlogo60jc4.png” border=”0″></a><br><span style=”font-size: small”>International Slushpile<br/>Bonfire Day<br/>May 31, 2007</span></div>

Right now, you’re probably feeling some anxiety, maybe even outrage. What if one of your in-the-field submissions winds up on the fire? How dare those agents delight in combusting your opus?

Relax. The manuscripts that fuel today’s blazes are not tomorrow’s Kafkas and Nabakovs — they’re just decorated kindling, firewood that took a detour through a paper mill and a cheap inkjet printer before it found its flame.

Without a doubt, deep in the shadows of your fragile heart, you know that some of the stuff you’ve written has all the literary merit of initials carved in a tree the day before a forest fire. Why not discover the healing powers of ISBD for yourself, by making your own contribution?

• Get out all the old practice novels, the forgotten fragments, the dream-inspired short stories and the drug-poetry, anything you haven’t even re-read in years, and make your own bonfire. You’ve already learned the lessons from writing them. They’re worth as much as those “Good Sportsman” awards from high school. It’s one less packing box next time you move.
• If you can’t bear to light the match yourself, drive downtown, find the cluster of down-and-out failed writers who are wearing what’s left of their manuscripts in their jackets, and toss your papers into the oil drum. You’ll find comfort in knowing that your writings gave someone a warm feeling for five minutes. 
• All your old hard drives, the unmarked floppy disks and CDROMs that you think might contain something? Magnet, then sledgehammer, then barbecue pit. Anything you’ve written that’s worth keeping is already in your My Documents directory. You’ll never get around to sorting through the old files, and even if you did, it would just be the drivel I listed in the first point.

I’m sure that most of you have already booked your HAZMAT transport unit. You’re planning to spend the morning scraping out the dregs of your slushpiles, tossing the packages that are too heavy to be only a query, or too light to have an SASE, all the pink envelopes printed with quill clipart, everything with “Member, SFWA” written on it, or addressed to “The Editer”. You’ve made arrangement with the Random House guys to bring the marshmallows while you swing by 7-11 for the hot dogs and kabob sticks. You’ve checked the weather report so you won’t get covered in ashes when the staff writers from Dick Wolf Productions dump a metric ton of spec Law & Order scripts on the pyre. You love the smell of burning printer ink in the evening.

But if you’re new to the biz, or your office is too far from the nearest organised bonfire, or you’re hopelessly agoraphobic, fear not. You can still join the festivities:

• Sinks and metal bins make great locations for mini-bonfires, one disappointing partial at a time.
• At a pinch, you can torch a query letter in a coffee cup.
• If you’re in an area with other agents/editors (preferably from other houses), shred one of those one-act, one-character me-against-the-system diatribes, stuff it into a brown paper bag, leave it outside someone’s office and light it.
• Open your email client, select everything date more than three days ago and press Delete.
• Slip the postman five bucks to dump today’s mail in a dumpster across town, and hand him a book of matches.

Folks, it’s finally here. Time to light ‘em up! Throw another fanfic on the fire, Jimmy, we’re gonna be here all night.

The gist: A Missouri used bookseller decided to burn a portion of his old stock as a protest against “society’s diminishing support for the printed word.”

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

Of course, there’s a ripple of discontent at this news on the literary blogosphere. Google searches for “Wayne Prospero” and “book burn” since the story broke turn up almost two thousand blog posts, enough to fill a (bad) book.

(Challenge: try reading through those links to isolate the original thoughts, and you’ll know what it’s like to read the slushpile.)

Now, let’s try to look past the point that this is obviously a publicity stunt — not only to drum up business for the clearance sale, but to promote and fundraise for the bookseller’s self-publishing company. The bookstore’s press release (on their front page, as of now) states that:

For $1 a book (+ postage), you can save these books from the flame. We will not take these $s as profit, but will use them to publish new books.

The first book listed on the publisher’s website is a poetry collection written by one of the co-owners of the bookstore. (Not the one named in the AP story, but his name is on the press release.)

But we’re going to try looking past that.

The booksellers can bluster all they like about how their act of book-burning is “art” and/or “protest” (the two are not synonymous). Perhaps they’ll raise enough money from the ransom of random titles to print yet another volume of poetry. But for anyone who loves the (well-) written word, the process of reaction goes something like this:

Book Burning = Censorship = Nazis = Holocaust

While the adage “any publicity is good publicity” can seem true in theory, I doubt that the booksellers were prepared to be known as “the book burners” for the rest of their lives. In this world you are forever judged by your worst public act — if they followed this stunt with a cross-country murder spree, they’d still be known as “The Book-Burning Killers”.

But let’s look past that to the heart of the matter: our misplaced horror at the idea of book-burning.

What’s really going on here is not art, nor protest. It’s merely a creative solution to the problem that faces all used booksellers: overstock. Secondhand bookstores are not run by astute entrepreneurs. They’re run by readers, obsessive-compulsive collectors, and as Paul Riddell has observed, by frustrated writers desperate to pretend that they’re connected to publishing business. Under the ubiquitous “exchange for credit” system, they always have more stock coming in than going out. If the store survives the owner’s staggering fiscal incompetence, eventually the stock will fill the shelves, floor to ceiling, in double rows, and spill over into cardboard boxes, storage rooms, attics and crawlspaces, adjoining buildings, shipping containers, warehouses and (always) the owner’s house.

In the past, the typical solution to this was the cleansing warmth of an insurance fire. On some occasions, the books have to be destroyed because the owner died under the consequences of his own poor stacking technique, and only the hardiest of collectors are prepared to buy a book that smells of dead guy.

And what’s really being destroyed? Copies of written works, not the works themselves. Is anyone really shedding a tear at the destruction of one of the millions of copies of The Hunt for Red October? If the only surviving copy of some long-forgotten work is in a warehouse adjoining a used bookstore in Missouri, perhaps the fire is the best place for it.

The world is no poorer for the loss of a few battered copies of uninteresting books. The real crime is the exploitation of our fear/repulsion of censorship to make a few bucks, and to put more poetry into the world.

(Thanks to Paul Riddell for the link.)