In other news, I just read about this. The poem "Scholls Ferry Road" by Michael Dickman which was included in the July/August print issue of "Poetry"
has now been deemed racist and removed from the online edition and the archives.
Poetry first issued an apology a month ago for its appearance in the print edition, then just yesterday another statement.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/har...ichael-dickman
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...-5f0f1bc747964
The poem is a kind of stream of consciousness of the speaker's family memories that goes on for 15 pages. The problem seems to be centred purely on this small section where the speaker shares memories of his grandmother and her attitude to race and use of racialised language
Quote:
"Negress" was another word she liked to use
That's the nice way to say it
"Oh, they are always changing what they want to be called"
On the bus she dropped her purse
I was with her
A nice negress handed it back
She put out her hand to receive it the whole time looking out the window
never said a word
Hours later
"What a nice Hawaiian"
A river of Japanese businessmen step in front of the car
"Step on it,
Wendy"
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The decision seems to have been made in response to criticism started on Twitter. A pdf of the whole poem is on one of these threads too.
https://mobile.twitter.com/HanaShapi...43163690131456
https://mobile.twitter.com/hanashapi...55178662080518
Poetry's editor Don Share said
"The poem was submitted a year ago, and reading it made me realize how rare, if not unheard of, it is for white poets to confront in their work the intimate lineage of racism that exists within their own families. There are countless poems about family members, but to write them without explicitly acknowledging that racism is not only a sin of omission, it is an act of active complicity. That is because a virulent mechanism of racism is its transmission from those who are near, even nearest, to us. Racism requires honest exploration in poetry as it does in every other aspect of human life, and so I had read the poem as one of condemnation. But this wishful thinking does not justify the fact that “Scholls Ferry Rd.” egregiously voices offensive language that is neither specifically identified nor explicitly condemned as racist. It also centers completely on white voices, leaving room for no other presences"
So, while I certainly don't think the Dove poem is racist and see no reason why it shouldn't have been published, I also think the same about this one (questions of poetic quality regarding both poems are obviously a matter of taste). And I think the editor's words above are bad for poetry and bad for art in general as they seem to leave no room for irony, nuance or subtlety and give no credit to individual readers to come to their own conclusions. Following Poetry's stipulations for acceptability would presumably require the speaker of Dickman's poem to clumsily step out of his childhood memory reverie to "explicitly condemn" the way his grandma used to speak and behave. To me, this is ridiculous. Share's words strike the same disturbing note as the apology made for Carlson Wee's poem in
The Nation magazine where the editors said something I still can't believe came from the pen of a poetry critic: "As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received". Yet this room for nuance is exactly what
has been afforded, rightly, to the Rita Dove poem and has enabled us to discuss it.
Dove's poem doesn't seem to have created the same furore on Twitter
https://mobile.twitter.com/newyorker...24559410196480
Share's apology also weirdly echoes
The Nation apology elsewhere in its wording. Here's Share:
"We published this poem because we read it as an indictment of racism within white families; this was a mistake".
Here's The Nation:
"When we read the poem we took it as a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalisation. We can no longer read the poem in that way".
These apologies seem part of a really weird trend of fairly craven capitulation to a probably small, but inexplicably powerful, presence on social media who are not content with exercising their free speech and disapproval, but instead won't be happy until the thing that offends them is removed and the perpetrators re-educated.
Thoughts?