Blacklisting Quadrant Poets
 

Beware, John Whitworth and Co., Quadrant is now being blacklisted by a major journal in Australia:

Australian magazine blacklists poets who publish in conservative Quadrant: http://theam.cn/1dTHrF9. More: http://theam.cn/1dOoe9t

Correction: Poets Blacklisted
 

It's actually poets who are being blacklisted. Those who publish in Quadrant are blacklisted:

Australian magazine blacklists poets who publish in conservative Quadrant: http://theam.cn/1dTHrF9. More: http://theam.cn/1dOoe9t

Find inspiration where you can. Tin-foil Loopers would make an interesting name for a journal, a poem, a whole school of poetry. Always remember: "Never let the bastards grind you down."

True, so true
 

Well said, Curtis. I live your motto.

The cynic in me wonders if this kind of thing happens more often than you think, except without the fanfare. At least here the journal/editor has been forthcoming, made folks aware, maybe saved a few people some money on postage.

Or inspired a great pseudonym.

Well, that is needlessly silly and provocative (though those of us on the actual left still probably face more overt blacklisting in general). Why someone would actually wish to appear in a journal that has mainly made the news in recent years for genocide denial is beyond me, though....

(The Raintown has and will no doubt continue to publish authors who have appeared in Quadrant, if needs be said.)

I'll add in quickly that I am not overly familiar with either journal/magazine, and, as a rule, I am skeptical in general of mission statements.

Wow! I am a blacklisted poet!!! :eek: At least the blacklister was honest enough to state it in writing and not under the cover of literary taste. :p

Actually, until I see something from Minter on this matter--indeed, a quick search reveals a great deal of denunciation from right-wing sources--I kind of feel as if one quote from personal correspondence, clearly written in a state of exasperation, doesn't really give us a good sense of exactly what it was he said--and in my rooting around on Google, that's what I have. Nazi analogies are inflammatory, sure, but I get his point--one does lend one's name and reputation to journals in which one appears, including journals that are primarily political, and publishing in them is a political act. As for the "blacklist," it might be wise to wait for Minter to make some sort of statement before going too ape$#!t about it.

Editing in, a look at Minter's faculty page tells us a lot:

http://sydney.edu.au/arts/english/st...minter.330.php

The guy specializes in Aboriginal literature! Given Quadrant's position on what was done to the Aborigines, his position as an editor makes a great deal more sense. I'm not saying I agree with it, but it does give a fair bit of context.

I must confess I have never heard of Overland nor of its editor. Perhaps I would have done had I I lived in Australia. He could be a lineal descendant of the Angry Penguin, I suppose. Is it possible that the Melbourne Shakespeare Society has deprived me of my dollars because my poems are published by Les Murray? Surely not?

It does not need saying that Les, a Christian, has no sympathy with Nazis anywhere.The man Minter sounds a very silly fellow. but I do know, from reading Quadrant, that Australian academia is stuffed with very silly fellows. Much like ours, don't you know.

Raintown Review. Good to know, Quincy. Good to know. You wouldn't consider paying - like Les does.

Well for the last few minutes I've been trying to figure out if this poem published in the most recent Overland is an erasure poem or got hit by a tornado.

Those are minutes I won't get back, but I wasn't going to do anything with them anyway.

Per payment, John, how's this? Poets get paid as soon as I do.

Sounds reasonable, Quincy. Do you have anything of mine in your files? If I'm not blacklisted, that is.

A poem in the soon-to-appear issue, as it happens, John.

Wow. Just, wow. Who is Windshuttle, and what is his relation to the journal in question? It would be easy to do some kind of whitewash sensationalist defense of free expressionism, but if Windshuttle is an editor, why would *anyone* send *anything* there?

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2...-manne/comment

"Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the “orthodox” historians and by the authors of the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report Bringing Them Home. More importantly, the Aboriginal children removed by force were not “stolen”. They were removed for the same welfare reasons neglected white children were. While some of the compounds or “half-caste” institutions to which the children were removed were not ideal, others were no worse and indeed often better than the equivalent institutions that housed white children at the same time. Anti-Aboriginal racism played virtually no part in the removal process. Even though Windschuttle now accepts that the Protectors in interwar Western Australia and the Northern Territory advocated a program known as “breeding out the colour”, it was neither an instance of eugenics nor at any time a formal government policy. Nor was it even connected to their child-removal practices. Far from being concerned to destroy Aboriginality, let alone perpetrate genocide on the Aboriginal people, the removals were almost always justified and motivated by good intentions. For all these reasons, Windschuttle regards the idea of the stolen generations as an un-Australian left-wing myth, whose purpose is to defame both the many decent Australians who worked selflessly on behalf of Aboriginal children and, even more importantly, the nation."

I don't know if that's a good faith summation of Windshuttle's argument. But if it's even close...

Oh, and calling people "Insufferable Prigs" in a headline isn't very likely to generate much rational discourse.

Best,

Bill

(ps. John, reading Minter's Vitae (http://sydney.edu.au/arts/english/st...minter.330.php) I'm not sure the word 'silly' was the first thing that came to mind. 'Dedicated to his causes,' perhaps, but some of that stuff looks fairly interesting.

Apparently, Keith Windschuttle is the editor of Quadrant.

But Quadrant at its birth had funding from the CIA, via the usual circuitous route.

The difference between Quadrant and similar stooge journals, though, is that the CIA felt that Quadrant was too right-wing!

I think it's good for poets—anyone, really—to have some understanding of the journals publishing their writing. Each person can make the decision about how he feels having his writing published therein.

But lumping everyone together under the same ideology, based upon the ideology of the journal or a single editor of the journal, and blacklisting them, seems silly. We're back to judging persons, not poems, and worrying about politics and not everything else that is important in this world.

So did Encounter, a jolly good journal, edited by the poet AnthonyThwaite and alas no more -- the journal not Anthony who flourishes like the green bay tree. I don't care about the idea of tainted money perhaps as much as I should. The British Labour Party's journal Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, its worthy if rather unsuccessful leader, kept going on Russian money, often stuffed into Foot's pocket in crisp banknotes. Many journals in the UK and not a few publishers, including my own, are kept going on government money. Is not the British Government at least as wicked as the CIA?

As the Emperor Vespasian said to his son, picking out a coin which came into the Imperial coffers by way of the tax on, er, ordure, 'Does it smell, my son?'

A little context:

Minter's bona fides have been cited.
Keith Windschuttle (born 1942) is an Australian writer, historian,[1][2] and former ABC board member.

Major published items include Unemployment, (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, (1984), on the political economy and content of the news and entertainment media; The Killing of History, (1994), a critique of postmodernism in history;[3] The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past;[4] The White Australia Policy, (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history;[5] and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth. He has been editor of Quadrant magazine since 2008.[6] He has been the publisher of Macleay Press since 1994.

This [Bold-face] seems to be the crux or source of the animosity. Wiki is the source.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/hist...ation-deniers/

These two editors are at cross-purposes. I suspect a professional difference of opinion has become deeply personal.

While we're on the subject of literature subsidized by the government for the purpose of furthering an ideological agenda, I'd like to recommend Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan's latest novel.

Duncan

Suppose I’m seriously put off by some editor’s political views and public statements, and I decide on that basis not to submit my poems to his or her magazine. You might respond to that decision in a number of different ways.

You might applaud me for taking a principled stand and refusing to lend the luster of my name and reputation to that villain’s journal.

You might think that I really need to get over myself, that I’m doing nothing more noble than defining the boundaries of my personal comfort zone -- perfectly OK, but not especially praiseworthy.

You might take the position that my boycott of the journal is pointless and irrelevant, that publishing my poems there would not taint me in any way, and would not amount to an endorsement of the editor’s views.

Whatever your assessment of my decision -- admirable, self-important, reasonable, silly -- you probably would not think I was doing something morally wrong.

Now suppose I’m a journal editor as well as a poet. I decree that not only will I not publish my poems in Editor X’s journal, I will refuse to consider submissions from anybody who does. At this point, you might conclude that I’ve crossed some sort of moral line.

Keith is the editor in chief of Q, so he is Les' boss.

[Never mind]

Actually, we probably would never know. Unless you advertised it. And then—?

;)

Politics and Poetry
 

The disturbance we hear is Paul Stevens rolling over in his grave.

-o-

Paul certainly did not like Quadrant. However.....

Paul held strong views and was certainly not backward in expressing them. However, when it came to editing his journals he judged the poem, not the poet. I hope I will always live up to his example.

You know, the more I think about this, the sillier the panic-mongering seems. In the first place, we're talking about some journal that has explicitly left-leaning editorial tastes saying, in essence, that those who publish in a particularly right-wing magazine should submit their work elsewhere. Perhaps Minter did it crudely, but I can't think of anyone who writes columns for The Nation and The National Review simultaneously. Minter is not (and I've read the entirety of the appropriate Facebook thread) calling for a general boycott of said poets. Here's the key bit for me:

The journal with which I'm associated is not political--certainly not in the way Overland is--but I can see where he's coming from in the context of his own journal, and the second quoted paragraph is worthy of rereading if one leans left but submits right.

This, for me, seems ludicrous. As if publishing in his journal rather than Quadrant will actually have any effect on global warming or what happened in the past in Australia. Any effect whatsoever. Does having a "higher-order moral fibre" mean, well, blabbering on to no effect whatsoever as long as the words sound pretty?

Quadrant is an influential journal (at least in certain quarters), and its editor is a significant public figure. Maybe, Curtis, you don't think that words matter. If so, I pity you. However, I would not submit a poem to Gut-Toting White Supremacist Quarterly as I am not a gun-toting white supremacist nor in sympathy with such people. Let's say, though, that I repeatedly appeared in Gun-Toting White Supremacist Quarterly--one might draw certain inferences. The point--and it is a rather basic one--is that one does not lend one's voice (e.g. one's writing) to causes one abhors. That is, if one thinks such things are important.

Quincy, I rather doubt that any poem you might get published in Gun-Toting White Supremacist Quarterly would have any effect whatsoever on gun culture or the prevalence of white supremacy.

The inference that might be made: Quincy's a white-supremacist! Quincy is in favor of unregulated gun ownership and use! But the world would not tip one way or another. And if you don't submit for publication in that journal? Someone else will; there'll still be a poem filling that space.

Now, if Pope Francis published a poem in that journal, maybe there would be some effect.

I'm absolutely not an absolutist.

But that's not the point, is it? If one thinks the journals one publishes in don't matter, well, tell that to the HUAC. Tell it to the CDF. Such things have always mattered.

Frankly, there are journals, here and abroad, I wouldn't want to be associated with. I wouldn't want my name, obscure as it is, linked to what they do. Do I have friends, even close friends, who publish in some of those places? Yes, I do. Does that mean I think less of them? Well, I get a quizzical look on my face when I think about it, but in the end, I love them no matter what.

And just as frankly, many of those journals wouldn't have me any way. I'm not part of their circle. And even within sub-circles, this tendency exists. Association works both ways.

Best,

Bill

Well, yes, Bill. Look at my examples of inferences, from my last comment. Or my first two sentences in comment #18 above.

That's all understandable. But "higher-order moral fibre" as the label applied to, "What I think will best benefit my own image".....eh?

You are associated, whether you like it or not, by the crowd you run with. In the same way, a writer earns or is given a reputation by the places that writer publishes.

Most certainly there are publications I would not submit to. I made that error once. Never again (I hope).

When seeking publication, one might ask: What would Ritsos and Montale do?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenio_Montale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiannis_Ritsos

It's been brought to my attention that I did not name the translator of the above; he is Translated by A. S. Kline. I know I went back to enter his name after I posted, but I must not have done a save. I took that translation from the Internet because I was/am short on time and did not have time to type it in. Here is the link and I will remove the poem.

My personal favorite among the translations I know of is by George Kay and its title is Hitler Spring. It is my favorite because it is good and because it is the first translation I read. Jonaton Galassi has a fine translation in his bilingual Montale Collected Poems 1920-1954. It is titled The Hitler Spring.

However

Cross-posted with a few folks. Like Quincy, I too have friends who are political innocents and publish non-political poems, and only non-political poems, in places where I would not, but I would not unfacebook them for that. I just hope they wise up someday.

I do think that the words matter. I do not think that some poem about a family snapshot, published in Quadrant, would be the same as a poem titled Verse Manifesto on Our Present Need for Genocide. Saying that the two would have identical effect, simply because of where they appear, seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding about "the power of words."

This is not to say that other power effects will not occur. For instance the Poet X vs Pope Francis type of example: there, it's about persons, or personalities, and whatever glamour of [moral] authority attaches to either. Even so, in a world like our own where some issues are so polarized, I'm not sure that net effects are always great.

What happens when one lends one's good name to a nasty little fascist magazine is that it gives it an air of legitimacy.

In fact that is how a poem of mine ended up once long ago in a place I regret. I saw "respectable" poets had been published there, and I as not aware that it was a front for dissemination of dark propaganda I sent work there too. But at least I wised up.

Dear me, where all getting a liitle pompous here, as Quincy says. I do't think magazine of the conservative persuasion is a nasty little fascist magazine, unless fascist is being used in the well-known student way equalling someone I don't approve of. Let's all publish where we like, shall we? I don't think a poem by me has a snowball's chance in hell of appearing in this chap's journal. I'll bet he hates rhymes.

John, to clarify, I was not talking about Quadrant or in any way referencing you.

I can tell you from personal experience that keith and les are good guys