The Self-proclaimed Legend of Gainesville, Fl. Jim Valvis

I have been in quite a few little semi-comical confrontations with Jim Valvis, a hornblowing subpoet whose been fouling up the waters of the small-press for quite a few years now. He’s one of those mopes who skulks and prowls around Facebook all day either ass-kissing or whining and getting in arguments. A teetotaling Biblethumper devoid of both wit and a job (his wife supports both him and his daughter), his chief characteristic, or Hauptzug, as the good folks here in Germany call it, is his bloated self-importance. I once heard him blowing and boasting to people that in the 90s, when he went to school in Gainesville, Florida, he used to give poetry readings and was considered by many something of a “local legend.”

“The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit” ~ Aesop

I have been to Gainesville many times, and when I think of their local legends, I think of people like River Phoenix, Tom Petty, maybe even Harry Crews. Sometimes it’s someone who makes the national news. It’s a big college town and a football town. It’s not a town that pays attention to the fly-by-night scrubs of the local poetry reading scene, viz., Valvis, the 300lb. orca & folk hero of his own mind, prattling off his innocuous verse in whatever coffee shop or seagull dump would have him…