Joseph Massey
speaker
47 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 30 Apr
Joseph Massey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It was a forged letter written by somebody who claimed they met me at a poetry reading. And then I called her hot. And it was put on a WordPress website. And then this woman that I had been involved in, involved with, posted the link with malicious intent. And it just spread like wildfire through the poetry community and beyond. Into the wider literary world, it was mentioned in Publishers Weekly.
There was a disgusting, defamatory article published about me in some magazine that's defunct now. But at the time, it got a lot of traction. And so I immediately lost jobs. I lost a job I had at the University of Pennsylvania. I lost book deals. I had a book coming out with Wesleyan University Press that was scrapped. And I lost all my friends. I lost all my social networks.
So it took a year, all of 2018 and most of 2019 to kind of just rebuild a sense of self again, which I did through God, through Jesus Christ, and through the Catholic Church specifically. And then I was able to re-engage my poetry in a way that was even more vital and important. I realized that I never wrote poetry to become successful. It was always a survival, kind of a survival skill for me.
What's to stop me? Other poets are the ones. You're not allowed back once you've been canceled. And in my case, I'm even more of a boogeyman to them because, well, I published that essay in Quillette, which at that time in 2019, they were all screaming, oh, he's publishing in a fascist publication, Quillette of all things. And then I dared to self-publish and appear on your show.
And I started expressing political opinions on X or then Twitter. And so now I'm not called the things that they were calling me before. Now I'm the fascist. And the funniest thing I was called recently because of the inaugural poem I wrote was the poet laureate of white people. which I thought about including as a blurb on the back of the book, but then I decided against it.
That's solely the reason. That's the only reason. And when I posted a picture of myself wearing a Trump t-shirt, it was like being canceled all over again. Getting messages from friends or people I thought were friends. I can't believe you would do this. I can't believe it. I'm like, what? Why? And they never really have any concrete arguments. It's just pure reactivity.
And it's not the kind of behavior I ever expected from poets. Growing up and reading poetry, reading Rimbaud and Blake and et cetera, I mean, these people were outliers. They were rebels, right? They weren't just towing the line. And poets these days, like every other artist in every other field, they seem to just tow the line to keep the federal, to keep the grand money coming.
Yes, yeah, yeah. And I wonder what percentage of them just do it to keep themselves out of the line of fire, you know?
Yeah, yeah. Oh, I know. There's apparently a big cancellation going on right now. I won't say any details, but it's just as ugly as it was in 2018. And so I realized a year or two after the cancellation started that I wasn't going to be allowed back. And I'm going to have to do it myself. And so this book and the prior two books, three books are published under my own imprint.
And so they can't cancel me. They can't pull my book because they think I'm a fascist or the poet laureate of white people.
It does drive them crazy. Yeah. And I can't say I mind.
Well, I would like to take the number one spot from Maria Shriver. Maria Shriver has a book of poetry out and it's abysmal. She's not a poet. She's not a poet. She could have not broken the lines up and it would have been probably maybe a better book, but she's not a poet.
I should take that spot.
That's absolutely right. Yeah. I was living in substandard conditions in a basement apartment and just starting to make it, working at UPenn part-time. And then the cancellation happened and it lost everything. And so it's been a steady process of rebuilding. But you're right, I've never stopped rebuilding. And that drive to write poetry has been with me since I was a child.
You know, it's always been a survival tool. It's always been something I use to process the world and make sense of the world around me. They can't take that from me. And any real artist isn't going to let a mob take that from them. So anyone who's being canceled, just keep doing what you're doing.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I, I live in an, in an amazing apartment that has heat and, uh, doesn't have mold on the walls. I have a great cat. I don't ask. Jarvis is great. I have a wonderful tuxedo cat who makes sure he makes sure I get to bed at a certain time and wakes me up at four in the morning. It's like living in a monastery or something. And, um, Yeah, I live in upstate New York now.
It's great. It's beautiful. The landscape is great. My poetry is paying for my groceries and paying my utilities and paying my rent. That's not a common situation for a poet, unless you're Maria Shriver.
Yeah, it's a contemplative thing. lifestyle i walk a lot and while i'm walking i'm thinking about poetry or i'm praying and prayer is a big part of my life and all of that is inextricably connected to my creative life to the poetry um i feel like most things i do are in service to the work um
Even when I'm on the couch watching White Lotus, for example, like I need to come down a little bit from all of it and kind of tune it out. But everything's in service to the work. And that's the way it should be.
You know, that's the way I've always lived, whether I was canceled or not canceled or standing at a wine and cheese party after a poetry reading and just wanting to run out the back door. It's always just been about the art for me.
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