The poetry hoax

This article is concerned with didactic hoaxes that are constructed to discredit their targets; the underlying question is whether a poetry hoax can do this. I compare the Sokal hoax with the Ern Malley hoax: in the first case (USA, 1996), an NYU physicist, Alan Sokal, wrote a bogus article claiming that the laws of physics should be seen as social constructs; in the second case (Australia, 1943) two poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, concocted the poems of an imaginary modernist, Ern Malley. In both cases the hoaxers realized their aim: Social Text, the magazine that published Sokal's article, and Angry Penquins, the magazine that celebrated the poems of Ern Malley, looked foolish. However, while the physics that Sokal used was bogus, what McAuley and Stewart had intentionally tried to write as bad poetry now reads as lively, comic and inventive. The poetry of "Ern Malley" now generates more interest than the genuine poetry of McAuley and Stewart. Thus, while Malley is a hoax-poet, it doesn't seem that the hoaxers succeeded in writing hoax-poetry.