Dear Editor,
Thank you for Jason Guriel’s lively recap of the Spectric Poets [February 2013]. Your readers might also want to look into a hoax from down under. In 1944 James McAuley and Harold Stewart were able to get published in Angry Penguins, under the name of Ern Malley. The jokesters concocted the story that, after his death from Grave’s disease, Ern’s sister Ethel found a sheaf of poems in the attic. The editor of Angry Penguins, Max Harris, wrote, “Ern Malley prepared for his death quietly confident that he was a great poet, and that he would be known as such.” Like the Spectric perps Bynner and Ficke, Aussies McAuley and Stewart left clues ensuring that they would be caught. That was the fun of it.
Neal Whitman is professor emeritus at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He was an early advocate for supplementing the science of medicine with literary, performing, and visual arts. In transition into retirement, he began writing general poetry in 2005, adding haiku in 2008 and tanka in 2011. Whitman’s poems are widely published in journals and anthologies and his work has been recognized…