Here's the poem so we all know what we're talking about
:
How to
If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,
say you’re pregnant––nobody gonna lower
themselves to listen for the kick. People
passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee
funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely
to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know
you is. What they don’t know is what opens
a wallet, what stops em from counting
what they drop. If you’re young say younger.
Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t
flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough
Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,
say you sin. It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.
If there were right-wing people championing this they either missed the point or they were just trying to piss off the left wing people who were attacking it. For sport. The editors say they published it because they originally thought it 'a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization.' I'd say that's a pretty good analysis and they should have stuck to their guns. I don't agree it 'edges on minstrelsy'.
Quote:
Philip Roth has his Zuckerman character fall in love with someone he convinces himself is Anne Frank. Can that even work if he isn't Jewish?
I can't seem to find the novel--and it generated a lot of controversy even among the Jewish population--but it came out a few years ago and Anne Frank survives and is quite vulgar in it. Can a non-Jewish person do that?
Mel Brooks made "The Producers" in the late 1960s. Could anyone else do that?
|
Yes, yes and yes. That was easy wasn't it? They could do it well or badly. In the same way that Jim Moonan, raised Catholic, can evoke the holocaust in his poem currently on non-met. I don't think Jim's poem is entirely successful, as I've told him, but I'd damn well defend him against anyone trying to make him apologise for writing it!