Hi Mark,
I wonder if an essay engaging with the subject of identity politics can avoid being political. In response to the political debate around identity, identification, power, exclusion and inclusion, I can make a point about (non)-identity and the role of the poet, for sure, but is that a non-political point? Is art not part of the
polis?
Quincy says he'd like the article to name its opponents. I'd like to at least see the arguments being responded to clearly laid out and contextualised. Which version of the argument is the author responding to? Does it necessarily contradict the author's views on (non)identity, imagination and reading and so on? How do I understand this claim:
"the claim that a writer creating a character is somehow appropriating the experience of other people completely misunderstands the nature of imagination and reading. The experience of a character is not your experience or my experience. It is the experience of
that character."
if it's not made clear what's entailed by the original claim of appropriation?
"Is it really the case that diverse and minority voices are being excluded or silenced?". I googled and found this
2018 survey of (larger) British poetry magazines over a five-year period, which concludes that white and male poets are consistently over-represented in a number of major publications (and also on average across the publications they sampled); white male critics/reviewers are even more over-represented, and white male critics tend to review the work of white male poets at disproportionately high rates (e.g. male critics are twice as likely to review other male poets; whereas female critics tend to review in equal numbers).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell
I completely agree with you that there's something very unedifying about the sight of members of a comfortable majority making a lot of noise about reverse discrimination when they are accused, justly or not, of bigotry or of not recognising the extent of their privilege. It's an insult to victims of true discrimination and brutality.
[...]
Googling 'identity poem controversy' brings up two main cases. Neither are of minority poets being silenced or marginalised by white poets appropriating their experience. One is of a white poet being pressured into apologising, along with the editors of The Nation magazine who published him, for writing a persona poem in the voice of a black homeless person. The other is of a white poet adopting a Chinese pseudonym in order to help get his 40 times rejected poem published, which it then fairly quickly was, ending up in Best American Poetry 2015. In neither case did the poets' whiteness help them.
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Is the connection I see between these two paragraphs intended? These stories relate to "reverse discrimination" and to being "accused, justly or not, of bigotry". So maybe this just tells us which two stories generated the most noise, the biggest controversy.
What would a story about "minority poets being silenced or marginalised by white poets appropriating their experience" look like? Wouldn't those affected by this largely be invisible, statistical, hypothetical even? (I do sometimes wonder if there's a poet with a Chinese background out there somewhere who might otherwise have been published in BAP-2015, but I couldn't show him or her to you).
best,
-Matt