In case you haven’t read Anders Carlson-Wee’s poem and the editors’ apology at the center of debate that led to Grace Schulman’s op-ed in the New York Times, here’s a link.
In his dramatic monologue, the poet uses the persona of a homeless man giving advice to someone begging on the streets. The dialect suggests the speaker is black, though several commenters in the Times said it sounded more Southern than specifically African-American. In any case, it’s inconsistent. Sometimes the speaker drops the conjugation of the verb “to be,” and sometimes he doesn’t—there are several “they’re”s there. Though John McWhorter writes in the Atlantic “There’s Nothing Wrong with Black English,” I’d argue that no one actually talks this way.
The controversy has two parts. The first is whether the poem ought to have been published. The second is whether the editors should have apologized for publishing it. I have my doubts about both.
The question of cultural appropriation has been cast by many commentators as whether writers have the right to create characters outside their personal experience, using any language they choose. Othello and Huckleberry Finn were often cited in the Times comments section, while commenters ignore the fraught history of Twain’s book—it was banned in Boston on publication, and it’s still among the books most likely to be stripped from public school reading lists.
Responses among writers seem split along generational lines. For those of us who came of age during the New Criticism, a poem is a self-contained unit that stands or falls on its structural integrity. Biography and history don’t impinge on interpretation. To post-structuralists, context is all (of course, I’m simplifying here). As a writer, I have to work with the first assumption, but as a reader, I can listen to both.
To quote Michael Ahn in his response to a Facebook post by Askold Melnyczuk:
“I watched the debate unfold in real time in FB, from when Anders first posted to announce the publication, to people posting their discomfort, to others posting in defense of Anders and the poem, to the whole thing turning into personal attacks and accusations. From what I initially read, before the thing exploded into hyperbole, was that people had issues with the publication of the poem because they believed POC’s work has been ignored for a very long time (i.e. forever), by publications such as The Nation, and it was especially galling to them that the magazine would choose publish something written by a white (apparently wealthy) man about a poor woman of color, told from her point of view [though I’m not sure there’s a cue that the speaker is female]. These people felt that, given their lifelong struggle to be heard, this choice was ironic and cruel. No one argued that experiences can’t be imagined, or shared. The outrage had to do with power, and who continues to have it, and how – even unconsciously and with the best intentions – POC can be excluded from telling their own story.”
Such is the context I considered when judging a local chapbook contest for an arts organization in Ft. Myers this year. The chapbook would celebrate National Poetry Month with a sampling of work by local poets. Since this was a community project, I looked for diversity—including diversity of age (a lot of writers I meet in SWF are over 60 and retired) and diversity of place (I didn’t want everyone from Sanibel). The contest attracted a few dozen entries, and if I’d been editing a journal I might have selected half a dozen. But six poems don’t make a chapbook, so I considered poems that had some interesting turn, even if they weren’t successful. One of these was in the voice of a black woman, and used dialect. I read it several times, until I got the impression the writer was neither black nor a woman. The plot was, ultimately, stereotypical, and the sentiment predictable. That a white man was representing the thoughts of a black woman in this way made me queasy. I called the contest coordinator—the submissions were anonymous—and he confirmed my suspicion. If I’d ever thought of including the poem, that thought was gone.
Was I right to consider the poet’s race and sex? Either way, if I’d chosen the poem, flawed as it was, I’d like to think I’d stick by my decision. I join Askold, Grace Schulman, and Sharon Bryan in condemning the poetry editors’ craven self-criticism. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. It’s time for the current poetry editors of The Nation to resign.