You are listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart Podcasts.

Folks, it's a hug sound No, I haven't seen when USA look to see you there last.

Welcome to Hoax, a new podcast, or is it?

It is?

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

This is not just another scam and scandal podcast.

Oh no, these are stories of pranks and griffs throughout history, so big and bold they make us question why we believe.

I'm the ghost of Danis Schwartz and I'm the evil twin of Lizzie Logan.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Dana, Hey, I have what I think is going to be a very fun hoax for us today.

Good.

I could use a fun hoax, and to the point that I kind of think it's like some real Dana Lizzie shit.

Oh and I would even like to start off with two anecdot It's one from me, one from you.

Great, and I'll tell you what to anecdote.

I want you to tell car tell my anecdote.

Perfect, all right.

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

Heard of it.

Yep.

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 performed them late at night.

That does sound fun, that's very college.

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 analyzes of people.

But he drove me up the wall.

He drove a lot of people up the wall.

I think he sounds annoying.

We can look at his social media later.

I can't say, 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 night at Gmail or whatever, and the board would then read them all and vote, and there were a couple rounds of voting and you could submit them anonymously.

Okay, And so what I did run semester was I wrote a one page play and I submitted it under like a name that rhymed with his name, Oh Lizzy, And it was just making fun of all of his quirks and pretentiousness.

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 lately 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 hooks.

Fun gentle bullying, real nerdy bullying.

Yeah, 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.

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.

I was a mess in college.

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 at Guy in your MFA.

Oh, this is truly the start of my This is writing Dana origins.

This is Dana origin story.

I was pre med in college.

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

I went to Brown?

Heard her?

We went to Ivy League school.

We did 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 twenty fourteen or twenty thirteen, when these things were still like relatively fresh and funny.

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 bomb and we loved it and probably hundreds of thousands of followers.

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.

Yeah, just like water down David Foster Wallace.

They think they're the next chiever.

Yeah, and they're like, ah, like modern masculinity.

Yeah.

And I just like made this Twitter out and then it got enough attention that I 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.

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, you.

Can get a little mean and also those people are are It's.

What I'm easy to make fun of easy to take down a peg.

I think you'll see immediately why these things are relevant.

I can't wait.

What do you know about the hoax of ern Malley?

That name means absolutely nothing to me.

Fantastic.

We are in Australia in nineteen forty.

I love it already.

The war is on, the the World War, the second one.

In fact, nationalism is very high.

I'm sort of picturing it's almost like America post nine to eleven, 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.

Yeah, who are we?

And this is especially true within the poetry community.

Why not?

Why not?

There are some like poet and critic Ad 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.

The rhymes and is in niambic bin.

I mean poetry people.

You know that I'm getting the terms wrong, but basically like old fashioned poetry in the Western European tradition.

Yes, then there are the Jindy Warabacks cool 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.

We're gonna have an m dash in there as many as you want.

In fact, and this is like weirdly political.

People think modernist poetry is like communist, and that gets like fascist.

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

Yes, so people are really against modernist poetry.

They think it is related to communism.

There's related to communism.

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 bout 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.

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

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

Yes, not all, not all poems on Instagram, but sometimes sometimes.

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 Saint Peter's in Adelaide.

That sounds fancy.

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 like he's assigned to like dig latrines and he loves it because he just digs latrines and then the rest of the day like reading proost.

I mean that kind of sounds okay.

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

I do think you and Max would get along.

He he's an avowed anarchist, all right.

Less 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 relevantly.

There's not a ton of them in Australia.

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 my minded rhetoric.

Yeah.

When he's eighteen, so he's like a freshman in college, he starts a literary magazine called Angry Penguins, which is so tumblr core it is.

It's a line from one of his poems.

He named it after one of his own poems.

He named it after one of his own poems.

The first issue is fund by his mom.

Oh yeah, Angry Penguins is all about being avant garde and putting Australia on the map of modernist poetry.

Great, so's he's not one of the where European let's do classical European poetry.

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

Sure nineteen forty one.

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 going to 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.

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

And they're like, no, they need to humiliate you.

We're going to toss you in the river.

So that's what we're working with, 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.

I don't think you would be treated the same way.

I just I don't know we could cut that.

Maybe you wouldn't get along.

No, it's funny.

In nineteen forty two, 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 in 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 the very bohemian life.

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.

So maybe you would have been annoyed with Max in nineteen forty three, so he's still in college or sorry, as they would say, university UNI.

At UNI, he gets a letter from a woman named Ethel Malley, and Ethel says, my brother Erne just died at the age of twenty five, 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 enmamored of early death.

So she says, my brother Arn just died and I was going through his stuff and I found these poems, 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 here's a couple of poems for you.

And Max is like, this is the best fucking poet I've ever read.

Of course, ay a dead twenty five year old, He's like.

Send me all the poems.

I love this, And Ethyl writes back and gives him more details, like how she and Arn 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 more poems.

I think there are seventeen poems in total.

But basically Max now has all of the Ern Maley poems and his introduction and his conclusion to his manuscript, and everything Arn ever wrote is now in Max's possession.

And Ethel even says, like, you can have the rights to this wow, 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 there's no such thing as fake and real poetry, and you know, I take responsibility for this, like this is on me.

I vouch for these poems.

Wow.

All right, So he's explicitly saying that yes.

So he publishes all of them, all of them in the autumn nineteen forty four 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 nineteen forty four 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 and Australia starts in March, it starts in spring.

Yeah, it's our spring.

It's our spring.

But due to wartime delays, the autumn nineteen forty four issue of Angry Penguins comes out in early June nineteen forty four.

Let's screw it up.

It's really screwed up.

Get your Head on Straight Australia slash get yourn straight, Lizzie.

No, it's their fault, all right.

So this issue comes out.

It's dedicated to Earn 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 who 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, So they do.

People think the poems are good divided okay.

Also, jumping ahead of it, the poems do not last as poems very long.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, so it's not like, oh, outside of this whole story, these.

Are amazing poems TVD, TVD 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.

That's so mean, and that your professor burns.

And the like acrostic like the you know, first letter of every line or whatever it spells.

Max Harris hoax.

Oh that's funny.

It is funny.

It is funny.

It's funny.

It's mean that your professor did that, but something punching down.

People get really into it.

Reportedly, there's like students taking bets on who the real author of these poems is.

And Harris is like, well, I know I didn't write them.

I kind of wonder who did.

Yeah, so he hires an investigator two 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.

Yeah, And the investigator like checks all the records in the area and he's like, there's no malle family here, but there's just some rando who lives at that address and is Because this is where the Australian accent really trips you up.

They'd mixed up fourteen and forty.

Who's they?

I don't remember if which number is correct, but Max, in communicating with the investigator, said like forty, and the investigator heard a different number.

Sure, 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?

I'm going to guess someone.

Would it help you to read a poem?

Yeah?

Okay, I would actually love to.

Are they long?

Should we read them out loud?

I I bookmarked like two of the shorter ones.

Okay, this is great?

Shall I read it out loud?

Sure?

Okay.

This one's called Sweet.

William, allegedly by Earn Mallei, credited to Earn Malle credited to Earn MALLEI 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 you immediably 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 going to.

Say I don't do not like that she doesn't know anything about poem.

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 spoiler.

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

Write, I did say like I did think, like what if I was like Dana 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 those are the red flag.

Words for me.

We were just saying off mic that I have written one good poem in my whole life.

I wrote it when I was four or five, 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.

That that's a good poem, Like pretty good.

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

That's way better because you know what 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.

Well, maybe the confusion is part of the point.

Man.

Let's go back to nineteen forty three.

James McAuley and Harold Stewart are a few years older than Max.

They're in there like they're like twenty six and twenty seven, 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 mystery what they're actually doing all day.

Sure, but they are very much of the like you know when people see an abstract painting and they're like, my kid could do this.

They feel that way about modernist poetry.

Yeah, and sometimes it's really true.

So they decide to do a little prank.

So they using just like the books that are in their barracks, throw it again.

There's some poems they use lines of Shakespeare, they use random words out of the dictionary.

They 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.

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

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

It actually sounds like a really fun afternoon.

I bet I think they.

Were really amusing them.

I thought they had a flask.

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 cover.

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

Yeah, classic Hoaksman, classic hoax.

I gotta make you a paper look like it's been around the block.

You got a fourth grade book or report it?

Yeah, you gotta get the tea bags.

And they write the letter from Ethel and they send off the poems.

Once Max agrees to publish the poems, McCauley feels a little bit bad, and he sent Max a postcard that had some line on it.

I've never been able to find exactly what was on this postcard, but apparently it was like a clue that it was a hoax, Like he was not trying to tip him off, but Max didn't get it.

Yeah, so that I understand why he was trying to like assuage his guilt because he's like, if he gets this, then he's smart enough.

But then it's like you kind of like outsourcing the guilt.

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

Yeah.

They also mentioned the scheme to a friend of theirs, test Van Summers, cool name, who it is pretty good, who like wants to be a reporter.

When Angry Penguins comes out, Tests is immediately like, I recognize those poems.

Those are by by 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

McCauley 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 doup 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 McCauley and Stuart.

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 ten times fast, and they call Harris for a comment.

But he had like had I think, like a dental surgery, and they call him, I think, 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.

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

He's really he's really struggling.

He's twenty two and he's struggling.

So June twenty fifth, nineteen forty four, 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.

Yeah, 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.

M interesting analogy similar to the tennis.

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

That is what they say.

It also was possible they were just trying to embarrass this day.

They were trying to bully them.

But they have a really good explanation.

And you know what, as far as motivations go, embarrassing and annoying guy is.

Not the worst thing.

And that's not the worst.

It wasn't personal profit.

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 mister 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 mister Max Harris.

That possibly is not true.

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 conf used and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as a bait to the reader, 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 or did they keep going, keep going?

Two?

No care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities.

Three In style, the poems were to imitate, not mister Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Trees, and others.

Having completed the poems, we wrote a very pretentious and meaningless preface and statement which purported to explain the esthetic 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.

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.

Natt's story was more appealing to him than the poems itself.

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

Correct.

So the story that Stuart 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.

Yeah, and they were poets, and there's a bit of one of the Earned Maley poems that was like taken from one of James McCauley's earlier poems.

Some people think that maybe Ad Hope put them up to it.

Sure making a point.

Yeah, he was working on a very negative review of Max Harris's surrealist novel and he was known to say say get Maxie, like gotta get Axy.

So maybe he was the puppet master.

But in any case, McCauley and Stewart definitely were the ones who like wrote down and typed up the poems.

Sure Harris doesn't back down, He's 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, you know what.

Genuinely respect Max Harris, and he can also be like, it's cool that you did this elaborate thing.

T s Eliott Cables Harris and was like, I would have fallen for this.

There's some there's some okay lines in these poetry.

Also, like there's so much bad poetry in the world.

The idea that he 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.

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

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

You the reader mm hmm.

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.

Basically, he's a laughing stock.

Other than ts 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, and Catholicism is very much about like order and history and structure and like learning Latin.

Then he gets charged by the government because their sexuality in the poems.

No.

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 knights have sex, So that's gross case and points 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 poems, so I don't know what they mean by it in this context, but this is pretty gross, right.

Yeah, to Lee, it is famously illegal to use the word incestuous, Yes, even in a poem.

Max is boot at and spit on as he goes into court.

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

Yes, Max is I think sympathetic but not likable.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, but he doesn't.

He His defense is like, I just hope that the court like goes home and reads the poems and comes to their own conclusions.

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

And he also is like, poetry is about what you make of it, Like there's no one and you can't the government can't decide what this poem is about.

Everyone has to decide for themselves.

But yeah, he gets convicted.

He gets convicted.

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 ceizes operations.

I mean, literary journals are always like not long for this world.

But yeah, that's that's Angry Penguins.

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 a craft and structure.

But on the other hand, for Max, he shouldn't have to pay literal money because people didn't like his poems and he.

Just got tricked and what was he doing publishing a literary journal.

People thought he was.

But here's our epilogue.

McCauley and Stuart continued to write poems, not together, but they continued to write poems.

Nothing they wrote was ever as widely read as their earned Malee poems.

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

Sixties highly structured poems.

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 at it's a very conservative journal called Quadrant, which may have received some funding from the CIA.

Sure, and he later headed the University of Tasmania's English literature department.

So he had like a good, solid academic career.

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

Max Harris goes on to write a weekly newspaper column for almost thirty 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 Maxie is gonna say.

Yeah, 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.

Yeah.

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

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 Earn Mallee as he had been before.

Like, I think he was kind kind of taking a step back.

Yeah, But he continued to write and edit literary magazines for a couple of years.

He edited a magazine called Ern Malley's Journal Funny, and when asked about the hoax, he said, I still believe in Earn Malli.

He thought they were good poems till the end.

He died in nineteen ninety as like a pretty well regarded member of the literary community in Australia.

I mean I really respect that.

Like he didn't just disappear with his tale between his legs, Like he actually kept contributing to the literary world.

The ego was so big it could not be brought down by this hoax.

These two army guys were like, will show him, and Max was like, no, I'll show you.

And you know what, Max like opening bookstores, 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.

He was 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.

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

No, no, it's just funny.

It's just funny and people having a fun time, and people make an art.

People make an 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?

Yeah, I've rearranged letters on a serial box Yeah, 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.

Yah, England is like sipping their tea out of China, being like in Australia they're publishing hoax.

Yeah, there is still some abiding interest in arn 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.

Yeah, And I just have this thought of like if a hundred monkeys at a hund typewriters and then they write Hamlet, right, Yeah, 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 a poems?

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 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.

Yeah, 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 that I think that's cool, like as its own weird little meta art piece.

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

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.

Indeed, and speaking of Twitter accounts, do you remember Horse Underscore ebooks?

Vaguely?

It was this.

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

Yeah, and it would go viral all the time, and then there's like a big long I think Emilyinasbaum New Yorker piece about like sort of the rise and fall of Horse Underscore Ebooks, 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 ram them series of words.

It makes too much sense.

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

Yeah, do you think AI can make good art?

This is what I've been thinking about this whole time that I've been thinking about ern Malley, which is, like, I 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 I don't want it.

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 ghost written memoir because at the end of the day, someone wrote it, Like maybe it wasn't Prince Harry, but like whoever put this together, like the guy who wrote the Tender Bar, 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, like I don't know, maybe it would be kind of good.

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 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 going to spend any time making it, why should I spend any time exactly, you know, consuming it.

Something else that this brought to mind is, as you were saying, Instagram poetry, specifically Rupy Carr.

Oh.

Yeah.

She is the author of Milk and Honey, which there are these very short poems.

And they're like the most they're like the most best selling poetry aside from like The Odyssey.

It's like her and Amanda Gorman, Yeah, are like the big poets of our time.

I have I couldn't find it, but I have like a book of like parodies of her poems.

And there's a little like image that often gets like 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 is 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 was harder to pioneer a poetry style.

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.

It took a creative risk.

It's it's hard to make anything, yeah, and it is very easy and fun to make fun of things.

It is.

Those two facts are both true, which doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

No, it's easy and fun.

Yeah, but also it's hard to make good art, and I'm glad that people try.

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

Yeah, it's not even his real name, and like he's I mean, he won a Nobel Prize for poetry.

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

Yeah, and it's also funny because it made me think of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces.

Let me know the 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.

I mean, yeah, I do like that book.

I think it's a good and funny book, sure, 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 m where.

I couldn't sell as a novel, but then he sold it as a memoir.

Because the 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.

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 deer abby 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 ami the asshole thing on Reddit, like half of those are fake.

One hundred percent.

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 twenty nine.

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.

A piece of art, actually a poem, actually a poem actually like a piece of metal commentary.

I don't know, something something real interesting happened there.

So the moral of the story is, if we want to become best selling authors, we have to find like the angle on it, because do you remember that book Sweet Bitter Yeah, which was a huge bestseller.

But part of the story was that she was a waitress who.

Slipped a major editor was at at the restaurant who worked at, and she slipped her manuscript to him, and that was like the story like I was a waitress.

I did not know that, but it was.

And the novel is about it's about a restaurant.

But the truth is, I mean, she was a waitress, but she was also a writer with a manuscript 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 love the tip?

She had been a strip She had been a stripper.

So we just need to find because I grew up in the in the suburbs of Chicago, and I feel like I don't have a fun little tidbit.

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.

Yeah, all of this to say.

We we just tripped into a podcast studio and started talking.

We had no idea, we'd never met before.

We just there was a recording device on while we were chatting.

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.

I was a candy striper at the hospital.

Look up the Earn Malley poems and decide for yourself.

Decide for yourself.

We'll post them on Instagram.

Oh, we definitely like them.

We definitely will.

Dana, where can people find.

You on Instagram at Danish Shorts 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?

Right now?

I'm on Instagram Lizzie Logan with five z's every forty eight 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, We'll follow Holks on Instagram too, and then we'll we'll link that in the bio.

And as always, please hoax responsibly.

Hye Hoax is a production of iHeart Podcasts.

Our hosts are Danish Schortz and Lizzie Logan.

Our executive producers are Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer Rima L.

K Ali and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk.

Our theme music was composed by Lane Montgomery.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening.