one person's literary masterpiece.....

.....is another person's junk. I knew this for years, but it has really come back like a steel tipped boomerang recently when a poet/friend of mine from NY state sent me a large trove of goodies, which on closer inspection didn't seem so tasty. A fair amount of it was absolute garbage and it made me wonder about the collector's etiquette. I assume this is such a thing.

Specifically, I was thinking about how it is inappropriate to throw away something just given to you (be it pamphlet, booklet, chapbook, or flier) by "an artist" within eyeshot of that person. But why would one keep the item for years before deciding to purge it particularly if one knew it was garbage from the first moment they flipped through it? Are we by nature hoarders? Do we hoard things we like to collect simply because they managed to land in our hands?

How long, once you have identified a piece of tripe for what it is, must you keep it before the eventual PURGE? Why send something you have thought of as garbage to someone you know? Do you not think they would also believe it to be shite?

For me, any chapbook or booklet that contains pages of rejection slips from magazines or journals is in itself a good indication of being complete CRAP. If others have thought so, but the author doesn't, whose judgment are we supposed to trust?

I have a motto here on this blog, SAVE A TREE, and I felt that any number of the "authors" are so arrogant that their shitty poems were more important than the life of any number of trees that they are blind to the possibility (or reality) that they were in fact terrible at what they did. Just because a person possesses the technology or ability to publish doesn't mean they ought to. But this doesn't stop someone determined to make the world love their horrid poems. It should allow for people interested in the craft of chapbooks, or collectors in general, to recycle these items as soon as humanly possible.