Ern Malley Poetry

Summary

Hoax! Podcast – "Ern Malley Poetry"

iHeartMedia | Hosts: Dana Schwartz & Lizzie Logan | September 15, 2025

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Overview

This episode delves into the fascinating story of the Ern Malley literary hoax—one of the most notorious incidents in poetry history. Through personal anecdotes, playful banter, and a thorough retelling, Dana Schwartz and Lizzie Logan explore why the hoax worked, what it reveals about art, belief, and status-seeking, and how the fallout affected reputations, modernist poetry, and the culture at large. The episode is both a wry commentary on literary pretensions and a thoughtful meditation on the interplay between story, art, and authenticity.

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Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why We Fall for Hoaxes (02:32–09:32)

• Relatability & Setup:
  Lizzie and Dana open with personal stories about anonymous literary pranks and parody—themes that neatly set up the Ern Malley saga.

  • Lizzie: Submitting a parody play under a pseudonym to gently lampoon an annoying peer (04:58).
  • Dana: Creating the popular “Guy in your MFA” parody Twitter account to satirize pretentious workshop writers (06:25).

  "You can get a little meaner [when anonymous]... and also those people are sometimes easy to make fun of."
  — Dana Schwartz (08:05)

2. Setting the Stage: Australia’s Poetry Wars (09:03–13:44)

• 1940s Australia:
  Political, artistic, and national identity are in flux amid WWII.
  • Competing literary camps:
    • Formalists: Insist on European forms, rhyme, and meter.
    • Jindi Warabaks: Celebrate bush ballads and (somewhat appropriative) nationalist poetry.
    • Modernists: Inspired by Dickinson and Whitman, seek innovation in form ("as many EM dashes as you want").
  • Modernism is viewed with suspicion—sometimes as a symptom of communism or cultural decline.
  • Notable quote:

    "Writing free verse poetry was like playing tennis without a net."
    — Robert Frost, cited by Dana (10:50)

3. Enter Max Harris and ‘Angry Penguins’ (13:44–15:44)

• Max Harris:
  • Young literary prodigy; pretentious and bohemian.
  • Founds Angry Penguins, a modernist literary magazine, funded by his mom and supported by avant-garde patrons.
  • Known for both his talent and his abrasiveness:

    "He's so annoying on campus... students call a meeting, they're like, 'we need to teach this guy a lesson.'"
    — Lizzie (13:53)

  • Sets the stage for him as the perfect target for a literary prank.

4. The Hoax Unfolds: The Arrival of Ern Malley (15:44–18:48)

• A Letter from Ethel Malley:
  • Supposedly, Ethel sends Max the poems of her recently deceased brother, Ern, who died young and unknown.
  • Max, enthralled, calls them the best modernist poems he’s seen and dedicates a whole issue to Ern Malley (18:41).
• Immediate Suspicion:
  • Many believe "Ern Malley" is a cover—possibly for Max himself.
  • Harris insists the poems stand on their own merit regardless of provenance.

5. The Poems and Comedic Absurdity (23:01–28:55)

• Max's teacher reviews the poems with a parody:

  "Oh, that's so mean that your professor burns you that way... [His poem] spells 'Max Harris hoax.'"
  — Dana (23:01)

• Dana and Lizzie read aloud a poem ("Sweet William"):

  "Already, if a poem has the word vortex, I'm kind of out."
  — Dana Schwartz (25:39)

  • They agree the poems are clichéd and intentionally obtuse—red flags for parody more than genuine art.

6. The Big Reveal: Who Wrote Ern Malley? (26:46–30:57)

• Culprits Exposed:
  • James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two army poets, compose the poems in an afternoon as a deliberate pastiche—using random sources, pamphlets, snippets from their own earlier work, and meaningless imagery.
  • Lizzie reads from the perpetrators' statement:

    "If Mr. Harris had sufficient discrimination to reject the poems, then the tables would have been turned."
    — Quoting McAuley & Stewart (31:52)

• Motivation:
  • To ridicule credulity and pretentiousness in modernist poetry; also perhaps to specifically embarrass Harris.

7. The Fallout: Legal and Cultural Backlash (36:03–38:00)

• Public and Institutional Ramifications:
  • Max Harris is tried for "publishing indecent material" (36:11) due to sexual content.
  • He is convicted and fined; Angry Penguins soon folds.
  • Max becomes a public laughingstock, except for a cable from T.S. Eliot:

    "T.S. Eliot cables Harris and was like, I would have fallen for this."
    — Lizzie (35:05)

8. Reflection: Was There Any ‘Talent’ in the Hoax? (38:00–47:18)

• Debate about whether accidental or intentionally bad poetry can ever be "real" art.

  "Isn't it possible that by accident they wrote really good poems? Or do you have to be trying to write good poems to write good poems?"
  — Lizzie (45:42)

• The hosts compare the Ern Malley hoax to found poetry, AI art, Twitter bots, and Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur, exploring how context, expectation, and story shape our response to art.

  "The context and history ... makes the poems interesting. That ... is more interesting than the poems themselves."
  — Dana (45:53)

9. Legacy: Where Are They Now and Why It Matters (41:38–44:59)

• McAuley & Stewart:
  • Never again as famous; one becomes a Buddhist poet in Japan, the other an English department chair and conservative editor (possibly supported by the CIA!).
• Max Harris:
  • Careers in journalism, bookselling (pioneering remaindered books), and literary controversy. Remains unbowed:

    "I still believe in Ern Malley."
    — Max Harris, quoted by Lizzie (43:33)

  • Murdoch calls him "a catalyst and an irritant"—a necessary gadfly for society (42:46).

10. Art, Authenticity, and the Allure of a Good Story (47:18–54:46)

• Powerful stories surrounding art—from fake memoirs to viral poems—often matter as much as the work itself.

  "People fully understand that the story and context that art comes from makes it more interesting."
  — Dana (51:15)

• Examples:
  • Confederacy of Dunces, sold as a posthumous discovery;
  • The memoir/novel “A Million Little Pieces”;
  • Diablo Cody’s Juno & the power of autobiographical branding;
  • The temptation to believe in characters, not just creators.
• The episode ends noting how easily we’re captivated by stories—real or fake—especially when they align with what we want to believe.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On poetic pretension:

  "I created this parody Twitter account called guy in your mfa … making fun of the pretentious lit bros in your writing workshops who are just writing really boring stories about men on trains."
  Dana Schwartz (06:46)

• On the power of a story:

  "The romance of the story around [art] … is more appealing to him than the poems itself."
  Lizzie Logan (33:54)

• On literary hoaxes:

  "He thought they were good poems till the end. He died in 1995 as a pretty well regarded member of the literary community."
  Lizzie Logan on Max Harris (43:44)

• On context making art:

  "History and context makes all art more interesting … I want the placard explaining it to me … I want to learn the context."
  Dana (46:16)

• On making and mocking art:

  "It's hard to make anything. And it is very easy and fun to make fun of things. Those two facts are both true."
  Dana (50:32)

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• Personal anecdotes on literary parody: 03:38–08:11
• Australian poetry scene/set-up: 09:03–13:44
• The emergence of Ern Malley: 15:44–18:48
• Reading & critiquing the ‘Ern Malley’ poems: 24:27–26:41
• Hoax revealed & pranksters confess: 26:46–31:44
• Max Harris’s trial and public shaming: 36:03–38:00
• Parallels to modern “found” poetry, AI art, Instagram poets: 43:59–50:32
• Reflections on the value of backstory and context in art: 51:08–55:04

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Takeaways

• The Ern Malley hoax is as much about craving a compelling narrative as it is about questioning artistic merit.
• The context, intention, and mythology behind creative works can matter more than the works themselves.
• Even deliberate pranks can create lasting art and provoke ongoing debate about authenticity and value.
• In an age of “fake news,” viral memes, and AI, the Ern Malley story is an enduring reminder to ask not just is this true? but why do I want it to be?

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Final Word:

"Look up the Ern Malley poems and decide for yourself."
— Dana Schwartz (55:26)

Transcript

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[Dana Schwartz]

Are listening to Hoax, a production of I Heart Podcasts, folks. It's a hoax album.

[Lizzie Logan]

No one ever seems to believe me.

[Dana Schwartz]

When I swear I never was deceiving no blast wondering. Welcome to Hoax. A new podcast.

[Lizzie Logan]

Or is it?

[Dana Schwartz]

It is.

[Lizzie Logan]

Every episode, we sort through the lies we wish were true and truths that sound like lies.

[Dana Schwartz]

This is not just another scam and scandal podcast. Oh, no.

[Lizzie Logan]

These are stories of pranks and grifts throughout history so big and bold they make us question why we believe.

[Dana Schwartz]

I'm the ghost of Dana Schwartz.

[Lizzie Logan]

And I'm the evil twin of Lizzie Logan.

[Dana Schwartz]

Welcome to the show.

[Lizzie Logan]

Hello, Dana.

[Dana Schwartz]

Hey.

[Lizzie Logan]

I have what I think is gonna be a very fun hoax for us today.

[Dana Schwartz]

Good. I could use a fun hoax and.

[Lizzie Logan]

To the point that I kind of think it' some real Dana Lizzie shit. And I would even like to start off with two anecdotes. One from me, one from you.

[Dana Schwartz]

Great.

[Lizzie Logan]

And I'll tell you which anecdote I want you to tell me. Tell my anecdote.

[Dana Schwartz]

Perfect.

[Lizzie Logan]

All right. I spent my first two years of undergrad at Columbia University in the city of New York.

[Dana Schwartz]

Heard of it? Yep.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 perform them late at night.

[Dana Schwartz]

That does sound fun. That's very college, though.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 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 analyses of people, but he drove me up the wall, and he drove a lot of people up the wall.

[Dana Schwartz]

I think he sounds annoying.

[Lizzie Logan]

We can look at his social media later and you can decide. But he had a very distinctive way of writing that was, like, pretty pretentious. And 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 nightmail or whatever. And the board was. Would then read them all and vote. And there were a couple rounds of voting and you could submit them anonymously.

[Dana Schwartz]

Okay.

[Lizzie Logan]

And so what I did one semester was I wrote a one page play and I submitted it under, like, a name that rhymed with his name.

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh, Lizzie.

[Lizzie Logan]

And it was just making Fun of all of his quirks and pretentiousness. Yep. 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 lightly 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 hoax.

[Dana Schwartz]

Fun, gentle bullying.

[Lizzie Logan]

Real nerdy bullying. I would say, like, it wasn't awful. I didn't call him, like, a terrible person. I was making fun of his writing more than I was making fun of him.

[Dana Schwartz]

No, that's funny. Also, I want to say, like, anyone listening to this who knew me in college, really? No, you didn't. Yeah, I was a. I was a mess in college.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 Guy in your mfa?

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh, this is truly the start of my writing.

[Lizzie Logan]

Dana origin story.

[Dana Schwartz]

This is Dana origin story. I was pre med in college.

[Lizzie Logan]

I was just like, where'd you go to college?

[Dana Schwartz]

I went to Brown. Heard of it?

[Lizzie Logan]

Heard of it.

[Dana Schwartz]

We went to Ivy League schools.

[Lizzie Logan]

We did.

[Dana Schwartz]

Okay, so we're at Brown. I was pre med, thinking, well, yeah, I'm a writer. But, like, how does anyone become a writer? Like, make money? 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 24, 2014, or 2013, when these things were still, like, relatively fresh and funny.

[Lizzie Logan]

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, bong.

[Dana Schwartz]

And we loved it.

[Lizzie Logan]

And probably hundreds of thousands of followers.

[Dana Schwartz]

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 writing really boring stories about men on trains.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. Just like, water down David Foster Wallace.

[Dana Schwartz]

They think they're the next Cheever.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

And they're like, like, modern masculinity. Yeah. And I just, like, made. Made this Twitter account, and then it, like, got enough attention that I, like, 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.

[Lizzie Logan]

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.

[Dana Schwartz]

You can get a little mean. And also those people are. Are sometimes easy to make fun of.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. Easy to take down a peg. I think you'll see immediately why these things are relevant.

[Dana Schwartz]

I can't wait.

[Lizzie Logan]

What do you know about the hoax of Ern Malley?

[Dana Schwartz]

That name means absolutely nothing to me.

[Lizzie Logan]

Fantastic. We are in Australia in 1940.

[Dana Schwartz]

I love it already.

[Lizzie Logan]

The war is on.

[Dana Schwartz]

The.

[Lizzie Logan]

The World War, The. The second one, in fact. Nationalism is very high. I'm sort of picturing. It's almost like America post 9, 11, 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 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. Who are we?

[Lizzie Logan]

And this is. Is especially true within the poetry community.

[Dana Schwartz]

Why not?

[Lizzie Logan]

Why not? There are some, like, poet and critic A.D. hope who say Australians are essentially Europeans. We might not be on the European continent, but we are a European people. And we should write sort of like formalist poetry that rhymes and is in Niambic. I mean, poetry people, you know that I'm getting the terms wrong. But basically like old fashioned poetry, like.

[Dana Schwartz]

In the Western European tradition.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes. Then there are the Jindi Warabaks.

[Dana Schwartz]

Cool.

[Lizzie Logan]

Who are writing 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, 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

We're gonna have an EM dash in there.

[Lizzie Logan]

As many as you want, in fact. And this is, like, weirdly political. People think modernist poetry is, like, communist, and they get, like, fascist. Also.

[Dana Schwartz]

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 Sandburg, and he said that writing free verse poetry was like playing tennis without a net. Yes.

[Lizzie Logan]

So people are really against modernist poetry. They think it is related to communism.

[Dana Schwartz]

There's related to communism?

[Lizzie Logan]

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 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 bunch 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 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, I will say sometimes I do read Instagram poems, and I'm like, wait, everyone else thinks these are good?

[Lizzie Logan]

That is so exactly where your head needs to be right now.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yes. Not all. Not all poems on Instagram, but sometimes. Sometimes.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 St Peter's in Adelaide.

[Dana Schwartz]

That sounds fancy.

[Lizzie Logan]

He's a little bit pretentious. He is sort of in the army the way that, like, everyone is in the army, but he doesn't have to go into combat, really. He tells this story about. He's assigned to dig latrines, and he loves it because he just digs latrines and then spends the rest of the day reading Proust.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, that kind of sounds okay. Sometimes. I do think that if I had a job that was just physical labor, that was not all day, just a short period of time, then you could be creative. That's not. That's not bad.

[Lizzie Logan]

I do think you and Max would get along. He's an avowed anarchist, all right.

[Dana Schwartz]

Less.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 relevant.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. There's not a ton of them in Australia.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 high minded rhetoric. When he's 18, so he's like a freshman in college, he starts a literary magazine called Angry Penguins, which is so tumblrcore. It is. It's a line from one of his poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

He named it after one of his own poems.

[Lizzie Logan]

He named it after one of his own poems. The first issue is funded by his mom.

[Dana Schwartz]

Aww.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. Angry Penguins is all about being avant garde and putting Australia on the map of modernist poetry. Great.

[Dana Schwartz]

So he's not one of the. We're European. Let's do classical European poetry.

[Lizzie Logan]

No, he's like, I worship Dylan Thomas and we need to be hip and with the times.

[Dana Schwartz]

Sure.

[Lizzie Logan]

1941. 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, communist magazine that he keeps passing out. They decide that he and like three of his writer friends, they're like, we're gonna 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Okay, that's actually, That's. That's cute.

[Lizzie Logan]

And they're like, no, we need to humiliate you. We're gonna toss you in the river. So that's what we're working with.

[Dana Schwartz]

All right. 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.

[Lizzie Logan]

I don't think you would be treated the same way. I just, I don't know. We can cut that. Maybe you wouldn't get along.

[Dana Schwartz]

No, it's funny.

[Lizzie Logan]

In 1942, 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 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 and 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 it as like a, not a commune but like a little artist retreat. And they're living this very bohemian life.

[Dana Schwartz]

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.

[Lizzie Logan]

So maybe you would have been annoyed with Max in 1943. So he's still in college or sorry, as they would say university uni. At Unique. He gets a letter from a woman named Ethel Malley. And Ethel says, my brother Ern just died at the age of 25. Which Ethel doesn't write this, but Max is probably would know 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 enamored of early death. So she says, my brother Ern just died and I was going through his stuff and I found these poems and, 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 a couple poems for you. And Max is like, this is the best fucking poetry I've ever read.

[Dana Schwartz]

Of course a 20, a dead 25 year old wrote that.

[Lizzie Logan]

He's like, send me all the poems, I love this. And Ethel writes back and gives him more details like how she and Ern 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, I think there are 17 poems in total. But basically Max now has all of the urn, Malley poems and his introduction and his conclusion to his manuscript and everything urn ever wrote is now in Max's possession. And Ethel even says like, you can have the rights to this.

[Dana Schwartz]

Wow.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 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 I. There's no such thing as fake and real poetry. And you know, I I take responsibility for this. Like, this is on me. I vouch for these poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

Wow.

[Lizzie Logan]

All right.

[Dana Schwartz]

So he's explicitly saying that.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes. So he publishes all of them. All of them in the Autumn 1944 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 1944 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 in Australia starts in March.

[Dana Schwartz]

It starts in spring. Yeah, it's our spring.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's our spring. But due to wartime delays, the autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins comes out in early June 1944.

[Dana Schwartz]

That's screwed up.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's really screwed up.

[Dana Schwartz]

Get your head on straight, Australia.

[Lizzie Logan]

Slash. Get your head on straight, Lizzie.

[Dana Schwartz]

No, it's their fault.

[Snap Judgment Host (Glenn Washington)]

You think you know. Snap Judgment. Yes, it's on npr. It's a podcast. It's storytelling. But snap has gone deeper, stranger, wilder. We've taken you places that the New York Times, the Rolling Stones, the Ambies, the Webbies, the Gracies, all stood up for.

[Podcast Hall of Fame Announcer]

Welcome to the podcast hall of fame.

[Dana Schwartz]

Glenn Washington.

[Snap Judgment Host (Glenn Washington)]

Award winning stories, original beats, soundscapes that drop you into the heart of the story. Find Snap Judgment from KQED every Thursday, wherever you get your podcast.

[Podcast Announcer]

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[Lizzie Logan]

All right, so this issue comes out. It's dedicated to Ern 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 are like, no. There's 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

So they do people think the poems are good, Divided. Okay.

[Lizzie Logan]

Also, jumping ahead a bit, the poems do not last as poems very long.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

They almost immediately become part of the story of these poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. So it's not like, oh, outside of this whole story, these are amazing poems.

[Lizzie Logan]

Tbd.

[Dana Schwartz]

Tbd.

[Lizzie Logan]

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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh, that's so mean that your professor burns you that way.

[Lizzie Logan]

And the like acrostic, like the, you know, first letter of Every line or whatever it spells Max Harris hoax.

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh. I mean, that's funny.

[Lizzie Logan]

It is funny. It is funny.

[Dana Schwartz]

It's funny. It's mean that your professor did that.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's a little punching down.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

People get really into it. Reportedly, there's, like, students taking bets on who the real author of these poems is.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

And Harris is like, well, I know I didn't write them, but I kind of wonder who did.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

So he hires an investigator to. 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

And the investigator, like, checks all the records in the area, and he's like, there's no Malley family here, but there's just some rando who lives at that address. And it's because this is where the Australian accent really trips you up. They'd mixed up 14 and 40. Who's they? I don't remember if which number is correct, but Max, in communicating with the investigator, said, like 40, and the investigator heard a different number.

[Dana Schwartz]

Sure.

[Lizzie Logan]

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?

[Dana Schwartz]

I'm going to guess someone.

[Lizzie Logan]

Who? Would it help you to read a poem?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

I would actually love to. Are they long? Should we read them out loud?

[Lizzie Logan]

I bookmarked, like, two of the shorter ones.

[Dana Schwartz]

Okay.

[Lizzie Logan]

This is great.

[Dana Schwartz]

Should I read it out loud?

[Lizzie Logan]

Sure. Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

This one's called Sweet William, allegedly by Ern Malley.

[Lizzie Logan]

Credited to Ern Malley.

[Dana Schwartz]

Credited to Earn Malley. 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, I'm kind of out. 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. Same thing with flesh. 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 irremediably attest how though with sobs and 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 gonna say I don't do not like that poem.

[Lizzie Logan]

She doesn't know anything about poem.

[Dana Schwartz]

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.

[Lizzie Logan]

Spoiler.

[Dana Schwartz]

And maybe if you had come to me and been like, this is the most amazing poem I've ever read.

[Lizzie Logan]

I did say, like, I did think, like, what if I was like, dana.

[Dana Schwartz]

I wrote that, I know I would feel bad. 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 are the red flag words for me.

[Lizzie Logan]

We were just saying off mic that I have written one good poem in my whole life. I wrote it when I was 4 or 5, 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

That's a good poem.

[Lizzie Logan]

Like, pretty good. Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

I like that poem, actually.

[Lizzie Logan]

And I was like, okay, I never need to write another poem, because that was a banger that I came up with when I was four.

[Dana Schwartz]

That's way better. Because you know what that that poem has that this poem doesn't is. I know what that poem's about. I don't know what's happening in this poem.

[Lizzie Logan]

Well, maybe the confusion is part of the point.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Let's go back to 1943.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yep.

[Lizzie Logan]

James McCauley and Harold Stewart are a few years older than Max. They're in their, like, they're, like, 26 and 27, 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. They work for, like, the Army Intelligence Service. So it's all very shrouded in mystery what they're actually doing all day.

[Dana Schwartz]

Sure.

[Lizzie Logan]

But they are very much of the. Like, you know, when people see a abstract painting and they're like, my kid could do this. They feel that way about modernist poetry.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. And sometimes it's true.

[Lizzie Logan]

Sometimes it's true. So they decide to do a little prank.

[Dana Schwartz]

Mm.

[Lizzie Logan]

So they, using. Just, like, the books that are in their barracks, throw together some poems. They use lines of Shakespeare. They use random words out of the dictionary. There's one poem where the first three lines are taken verbatim from a, like, pamphlet that they had that was from America that was about how to drain swamps where mosquitoes are breeding.

[Dana Schwartz]

Well, that makes me feel better. Cause I could not for the. I was like, what is that poem about?

[Lizzie Logan]

And they put together the 17 poems in. They say a single afternoon.

[Dana Schwartz]

It actually sounds like a really fun afternoon. I bet.

[Lizzie Logan]

I think they were really amusing themselves.

[Dana Schwartz]

I bet they had a blast.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 covered. They do the classic thing of, like, making the paper look old by, like, exposing it to sun and dirt.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. Classic hoax movie classic hoax 101.

[Lizzie Logan]

You gotta make your paper look like it's been around the block.

[Dana Schwartz]

You got a fourth grade book reporter.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. You gotta get the teabags. And they write the letter from Ethel, and they send off the poems. Once Max agrees to publish the poems, Macaulay feels a little bit bad. And he sent Max a postcard that had some line on it. I've never been able to, like, find exactly what was on this postcard, but apparently it was, like, a clue that it was a hoax. He was trying to tip him off. But Max didn't get it.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

So that.

[Dana Schwartz]

That I understand why he was trying to, like, assuage his guilt. Cause he's like, if he gets this, then he's smart enough. But then it's like you're kind of, like, outsourcing the guilt.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes. And a lot of this is sort of just a test of, like, what's going on in Max's brain.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

They also mention the scheme to a friend of theirs. Tess Van Sommers.

[Dana Schwartz]

Cool name.

[Lizzie Logan]

Who. It is pretty good. Who, like, wants to be a reporter. When Angry Penguins comes out, Tess is immediately like, I recognize those poems. Those are by my 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Macaulay and Stewart had kind of hoped that the hoax would last a little longer. Like, maybe the poems would get to Britain and they could dupe 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 Macaulay and Stewart. So they just, like a 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 10 times fast. And they call Harris for a comment. But he had, like, had, I think, like, dental surgery. And they call him, I think, in, like, maybe not the middle of the night, but he was, like, sleeping. So he just says some nonsense. And he comes off really bad in this article.

[Dana Schwartz]

And he already didn't know how to say numbers.

[Lizzie Logan]

He's. He's really. He's really struggling. He's 22 and he's struggling. So. June 25, 1944, this article comes out, and I'm going to read you just some bits from the, like, long essay that they've put together explaining why they did this hoax.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 a coat of bright paint and called it a house. Interesting analogy, similar to the tennis.

[Dana Schwartz]

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 a hoax that the goal of it was to get people who read poems to think more critically.

[Lizzie Logan]

That is what they say. It also is possible they were just trying to embarrass this guy.

[Dana Schwartz]

They were trying to bully him, guys.

[Lizzie Logan]

But they have a really good explanation.

[Dana Schwartz]

And you know what? As far as motivations go, embarrassing and annoying guy is not the worst thing in the world.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's not the worst.

[Dana Schwartz]

It wasn't personal profit.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 Mr. Harris proved to have sufficient discrimination to reject the poems, then the tables would have been turned, which 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 Mr. Max Harris.

[Dana Schwartz]

That. That possibly is not true.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as a bait to the reader.

[Dana Schwartz]

Which 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.

[Lizzie Logan]

Or did they?

[Dana Schwartz]

Or did they? Keep going, keep going.

[Lizzie Logan]

2. No care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities. 3. In style, the poems were to imitate not Mr. Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and others. Having completed the poems, we wrote a very pretentious and meaningless preface and statement which purported to explain the aesthetic 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

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, like, working class mechanic who died in obscurity. That story was more appealing to him than the poems itself.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's definitely part of the appeal. Like, it's a huge part of the appeal.

[Dana Schwartz]

Correct.

[Lizzie Logan]

So the story that Stewart 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

And they were poets. And there's a bit of one of the Ern Malley poems that was, like, taken from one of James McCauley's earlier poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

Aw.

[Lizzie Logan]

Some people think that maybe A.D. hope put them up to it.

[Dana Schwartz]

Sure. Making a point.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. He was working on a very negative review of Max Harris's surrealist novel. And he was known to say, get maxi. Like, gotta get maxi. So maybe he was the puppet master. But in any case, Macaulay and Stewart definitely were the ones who, like, wrote down and typed up the poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

Sure.

[Lizzie Logan]

Harris doesn't back down. He's like, 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

You know what? Genuinely respect Max Harris.

[Lizzie Logan]

Respect Max Harris.

[Dana Schwartz]

And he can also be like, it's cool that you did this elaborate thing.

[Lizzie Logan]

T.S. eliot cables Harris and was like, I would have fallen for this. There's some. Okay. Lines in this poetry also, like, there's so much bad poetry in the world. The idea that 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

And also, I will say, as someone who said, I don't know poem, because I don't know poem.

[Lizzie Logan]

You don't know poem.

[Dana Schwartz]

I kind of do think the mark of, like, good or effective poetry is if it affects you, the reader. 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.

[Lizzie Logan]

Basically, he's a laughingstock. Other than T.S. 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

And, you know, Catholicism is very much about, like, order and history and structure.

[Lizzie Logan]

And, like, learning Latin. Then he gets charged by the government because there's sexuality in the poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

No.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 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 night to have sex. So that's gross.

[Dana Schwartz]

Case and point.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 a poem, so I don't know what they mean by it in this context, but it's pretty gross, right?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. It is famously illegal to use the word incestuous.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. Even in a poem. Max is booed at and spit on as he goes into court.

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh, Max. Theoretically, I'm back on Max's side.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes. Max is, I think, sympathetic, but not likable.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Theoretically, Max could say, well, the authors themselves said that these poems were meaningless. So if it doesn't have meaning, how can it be obscene?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

But he doesn't. His defense is like, I just hope that the court goes home and reads the poems and comes to their own conclusions.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean. Cause he kind of has to defend them as poems.

[Lizzie Logan]

And he also is like, poetry is about what you make of it. Like, there's no one. You can't. The government can't decide what this poem is about. Everyone has to decide for themselves. But yeah, he gets convicted.

[Dana Schwartz]

He gets convicted.

[Lizzie Logan]

He gets convicted and they offer him six weeks in jail or a fine. So he pays the fine and two issues later, Angry Penguins ceases operations. I mean, literary journals are always like, not long for this world. But yeah, that's Angry Penguins.

[Snap Judgment Host (Glenn Washington)]

I'm Glenn Washington, the host of KQED's Snap Judgment podcast. And on Snap, we don't just tell stories, we live them. Every week a different journey, like on a plane with Rihanna, a racetrack in Tijuana, a year inside an Oakland homeless encampment. Real people, real voices with original music and cinematic sound. Snap Judgment from kqed New episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Dana Schwartz]

This is a sad story because I kind of don't 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, like, craft and structure. But on the other hand, poor Max.

[Lizzie Logan]

He shouldn't have to pay literal money because people didn't like his poems and.

[Dana Schwartz]

He just got tricked. And what was he doing publishing a literary journal? He wasn't hurting anyone.

[Lizzie Logan]

Most people thought he was. But here's our epilogue. Macaulay and Stewart continued to write poems. Not together, but they continued to write poems. Nothing they wrote was ever as widely read as their Ern Malley poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Harold Stewart became a Buddhist scholar and translator of haiku and moved to Japan in the 60s.

[Dana Schwartz]

Highly structured poems.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 edits a very conservative journal called Quadrant, which may have received some funding from the CIA.

[Dana Schwartz]

Sure.

[Lizzie Logan]

And he later headed the University of Tasmania's English Literature department. So he had, like, a good, solid academic career.

[Dana Schwartz]

I feel like, as nice a career as you can have as a poet in Australia. In Australia, you know. Great.

[Lizzie Logan]

Max Harris goes on to write a weekly newspaper column for almost 30 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 Maxi is going to say.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Rupert Murdoch says of Max Harris, every society needs a Max to 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. I mean, I don't usually like to or ever want to agree with Rupert Murdoch, but that kind of seems right.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 Ern Malley as he had been before. Like, I think he was kind of. Kind of taking a step back. Yeah. But he continued to write and edit literary magazines for a couple years. He edited a magazine called Ern Malley's Journal.

[Dana Schwartz]

Funny.

[Lizzie Logan]

And when asked about the hoax, he said, I still believe in Ern Malley. He thought they were good poems till the end. He died in 1995 as, like, a pretty well regarded member of the literary community in Australia.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, I really respect that. Like, he didn't just disappear with his tail between his legs. Like, he actually kept contributing to the literary world.

[Lizzie Logan]

The ego was so big, it could not be brought down by this hoax. These two army guys were like, we'll show him. And Max was like, no, I'll show you.

[Dana Schwartz]

And you know what? Max like, opening bookstores and 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.

[Lizzie Logan]

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.

[Dana Schwartz]

I like this hoax a lot because there aren't clear heroes and villains.

[Lizzie Logan]

No, no, it's just funny.

[Dana Schwartz]

It's just funny and people having a fun time and people making art.

[Lizzie Logan]

People making 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?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, I rearrange letters on a cereal box. Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's like fridge magnet poetry. And it also a little bit set Australia back in the eyes of the world because it's like, oh, yeah, that backwater town that can't tell real poems from joke poems.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. England is like sipping their tea out of China and being, like, out in Australia. They're publishing hoaxes. Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

There is still some abiding interest in Ern 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, 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

And I just had this thought of, like, if 100 monkeys at a hundred typewriters and then they write Hamlet, right?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 to be trying to write good poems to write good poems?

[Dana Schwartz]

I. I don't know. I will say that the context and history of it, that, to me, that makes the poems interesting. To me, that it was two dudes who 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.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

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 of the art. So I think that's cool. Like, as its own weird little meta art piece.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. I mean, I think Harris point of view was basically, like, these sort of formalist guys finally got out of their own way, and because they weren't putting their name on it, they took a bunch of risks. And they can say that they didn't mean anything by it, but there's legit poetry in here.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, it's interesting. 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.

[Lizzie Logan]

Indeed. And speaking of Twitter accounts, do you remember Horseebooks?

[Dana Schwartz]

Vaguely.

[Lizzie Logan]

It was this. It was basically a bot that would, like, troll weird databases of text and pull out meaningless phrases that, out of their context, were really weird and funny.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

And it would go viral all the time. And then there's like, a big, long, I think, Emily Nussbaum New Yorker piece about, like, sort of the rise and fall of horseebooks. 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 random series of words. It makes too much sense.

[Dana Schwartz]

It's kind of like that question because it's like the art of it was that it was oblivious.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

Do you think AI can make good art?

[Lizzie Logan]

This is what I've been thinking about the whole time that I've been thinking about Earn Malley, which is like, 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, nobody made this for me, so why don't you? 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 ghostwritten memoir. Because at the end of the day, someone wrote it. Like, maybe it wasn't Prince Harry, but, like, whoever put this together.

[Dana Schwartz]

Like the guy who wrote the Tender Bar.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah, that guy put these words in 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. I don't know, Maybe it would be kind of good.

[Dana Schwartz]

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, which was, like, interesting and weird and, like, 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 not gonna spend any time making it, why should I spend any time?

[Lizzie Logan]

Exactly.

[Dana Schwartz]

You know, consuming it.

[Lizzie Logan]

Something else that this brought to mind is, as you were saying, Instagram poetry. Specifically, Rupi Kaur.

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh, yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

She is the author of Milk and Honey, which. They're these very short poems, and they're like, the most.

[Dana Schwartz]

They're like the most best selling poetry aside from the Odyssey.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's like her and Amanda Gorman are the big poets of our time. I have. I couldn't find it, but I have a Book of parodies of her poems. And there's a little image that often gets 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 it and being like, haha, she's such a bad poet. And then other people being like, well, she's 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 is harder to pioneer a poetry style.

[Dana Schwartz]

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, took a creative risk. It's hard to make anything.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

And it is very easy and fun to make fun of things.

[Lizzie Logan]

It is.

[Dana Schwartz]

Those two facts are both true.

[Lizzie Logan]

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. No.

[Dana Schwartz]

It's easy and fun, but also it's hard to make good art. And I'm glad that people try.

[Lizzie Logan]

And I also just want to point out it is not just. I mean, it is really fun to think about these two guys just 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 pretty much a lie.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's not even his real name. And I mean, he won a Nobel Prize for poetry.

[Dana Schwartz]

People fully understand that the story and context that art comes from makes it more interesting.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. And it's also funny because it made me think of John Kennedy Toole who wrote Confederacy of Dunces. You already know this 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, yeah, I do like that book. I think it's a good and funny book.

[Lizzie Logan]

Sure.

[Dana Schwartz]

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 not the same, but with a million little pieces, it couldn't.

[Lizzie Logan]

Sell as a novel, but then he sold it as a memoir because the.

[Dana Schwartz]

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.

[Lizzie Logan]

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, fake Dear Abbey 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 am I the asshole Thing on Reddit, like.

[Dana Schwartz]

Half of those are fake, 100%. 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 29.

[Lizzie Logan]

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 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

A piece of art. Actually a poem.

[Lizzie Logan]

Actually a poem. Actually like a piece of meta commentary. I don't know, something real interesting happened there.

[Dana Schwartz]

So the moral of the story is, if we want to become best selling authors, we have to find like the. The angle on it. Because do you remember that book Sweet Bitter?

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

Which was a huge bestseller. But part of the story was that she was a waitress who slipped a major editor was at the restaurant she worked at and she slipped her manuscript to him. And that was like the story, like, I was a waitress.

[Lizzie Logan]

I did not know that, but it was. And the novel is about working at a restaurant.

[Dana Schwartz]

But the truth is, I mean, she was a waitress, but she was also a writer with a manuscript ready 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, loved the tidbit.

[Lizzie Logan]

She had been a stripper.

[Dana Schwartz]

She had been a stripper. So we just need to find. Because I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and I feel like I don't have a fun little tidbit.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah, 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.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

All of this to say we just.

[Dana Schwartz]

Tripped into a podcast studio and started talking.

[Lizzie Logan]

We had no idea we'd never met before. We just. There was a recording device on while we were chatting.

[Dana Schwartz]

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. And so that's what this whole thing is.

[Lizzie Logan]

I was a candy striper at the. Look up the Ern Malley poems and decide for yourself.

[Dana Schwartz]

Decide for yourself. We'll post them on Instagram. Oh, we definitely will.

[Lizzie Logan]

We definitely will.

[Dana Schwartz]

Dana, where can people find you on Instagram? Aina Schwartz with three z's occasionally. Also on TikTok. Same name. And who knows, maybe making fake poems under a fake account. Where can the people find you?

[Lizzie Logan]

Right now, I'm on Instagram. Lizzy Logan with 5Zs every 48 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, you guys.

[Dana Schwartz]

Well, follow Hoax on Instagram too, and then we'll link that in the bio.

[Lizzie Logan]

And as always, please Hoax responsibly.

[Dana Schwartz]

Bye.

[Lizzie Logan]

Hoax is a production of I Heart Podcasts. Our hosts are Dana Schwartz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive producers are Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer Rima El Kayali and producers Gnomes Griffin and Jesse Funk. Our theme music was composed by Lane Montgomery. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartrade radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

[Podcast Hall of Fame Announcer]

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[Lizzie Logan]

Learn [e-mail] Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan, Chase bank and a member.

[Dana Schwartz]

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