[W T Clark]

MARK,
Yeah, but it's fun going off topic, isn't it?

Regards,
Cameron

[Mark McDonnell]

Ah, going off topic is probably a good idea, Cameron. I swore 10 days ago I wouldn't get into these conversations again because hardly anyone agrees with me and I get told I'm susceptible to the right wing media. Which is weird because I purposefully avoid the right wing media (I found this story because I get the Poetry newsletter). To use a currently fashionable expression, it sometimes feels like I'm being gaslighted haha. I get involved in these conversations because I'm interested in poetry and I'm interested in issues around freedom of expression – always have been, ever since local councils were banning screenings of The Life of Brian in England and the religious right were banning Dead Kennedys albums in the US in the 80s. So these stories sort of combine the two. I do find these 'cancel culture' events morbidity fascinating, and the denial that there is anything at all disturbing about them by some people on the left equally fascinating. But yeah. Enough! Maybe one of my friends here could PM me a 'safe word' to give me a nod whenever these things come up for discussion so I can do some Zen breathing exercises...

[Matt Q]

Hi Mark,

The idea that any presentation of racism in a poem (or a film/book) without putting up a large banner that says: "but of course, racism is a very bad thing" does look a lot like the proverbial health-and-safety-gone mad. In that respect, I personally don't see an issue with the poem section you've quoted that warrants it's removal. That's me, though, someone who isn't American, black or Japanese/Japanese-American.

That said, the question of who is talking about whom does make a difference to me. The old punching up or down thing. For example, I'm more comfortable with say, a person a mental health problem making jokes about those who don't have m.h problems (or about others with m.h. problems) than the reverse. Or with gay men making jokes or about straight men rather than the reverse. After all it's gay men who are more likely get the shit beaten out of them by straight men on a Friday night than the reverse. So, I guess I do have different standards, in general, in this respect. And I don't really have a problem with that. Maybe I should.

Though I still wouldn't like to posit any absolute rules around when it's appropriate for who to say what about whom. For me (again) my response is going to come down to my perception of intent and consequences. Though that perception is going to be mine, and my knowledge of context and consequences may be limited.

For example, while I might be aware of the actual harm that ultimately results from stereotyping people with a psychotic illness as horror film villains, or assuming that anyone who carries out a mass shooting must have a mentally illness, or even perpetuating the idea that schizophrenia is the same as dissociative identity disorder etc. (variations on the old, "I'm schizophrenic and so am I" joke), but I might be less aware in other areas of what's going in other situations and power dynamics.

One situation where issues like the one you're raising has been discussed at some length in various places relates to Tony Hoagland's poem, The Change, in which the white N is watching a tennis match and rooting for the white European tennis player over the "big black girl from Alabama" with "corn-rowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms ... some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite / or something like that". (Venus Williams, I guess), because the white woman is "was one of my kind, my tribe, with her pale eyes and thin lips".

Here's Claudia Rankine's response, which presents her reaction to reading the poem and her dissatisfaction with Hoagland's response when she tackled him about it in person (under what circumstances it isn't clear). In which she says, "but I wanted my colleague to tell them right there in his poem that that kind of thinking…well, it's just not right".

Hoagland's response is here. He calls her approach to race "naive", and that it's naive "not to believe that [race] permeates the psychic collective consciousness and unconsciousness of most Americans in ways that are mostly ugly". Race is a topic for white people to address as well as for black people. The poet, he says,

"plays with the devil; that is, she or he traffics in repressed energies. The poet's job is elasticity, mobility of perspective, trouble-making, clowning and truth-telling. Nothing kills the elastic, life-giving spirit of humor more quickly—have you noticed?—than political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority."

What are the consequences of a white American exploring (his?) racism in public? How does that work for a black American reader? I don't know, I'm not black or American, and I very much doubt black Americans are a homogeneous group.

I guess an analogy might be to a man writing poems about to his (narrator's) rape fantasies without any clear indication of how the N/poet feels about them. Now here there are repressed energies. And truth-telling. And no doubt it's something useful for (some) men to investigate. But whether it's a useful/helpful thing to do in public, and how it would impact on (some) women I don't know.

But yes, with the above disclaimers, I personally didn't see an issue and think pulling that poem was an over the top. Hoagland's poem is still up -- along with Rankine's response and his to her. I'd say that was a better solution.

-Matt

[John Riley]

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.

This is true because there is a superficiality about language prevalent today that is directly attributable to coming to terms with institutional and individual racism. Perhaps it's inevitable. Most people are superficial so it stands to reason the response to the language of racism would be superficial. It's a mass movement.

I'm a poor white guy from the rural South U.S. and my earliest realizations of the contradictions in the white racism that I was being instructed in came through language. But because of the type of focus on language that dominates today it is impossible for me to talk about that without running the risk of being run out of town.

One example, with the necessary words removed. I was told over and over that African Americans (n-word removed) were no account, lazy people who wanted someone else to take care of them because they were too lazy to work. I was supposed to nod my head to this. Everyone around me nodded their head to this. At the same time, whenever many of the farmers and farmhands came in from a day's work they would sit down and wipe off the sweat and declare they had "worked like an African American" (n-word removed.) At a certain point the contradiction became apparent to me. Why were a people who were unconditionally lazy and irresponsible used as an example of hard work. If these men knew African Americans were lazy, why was working like them meant they had worked hard? This was the sort of thing that got caught in my brain when I was eight or so.

My point is that by not being able to use the language of racisim to underscore the stupidity of racism and point how it kept white people stupid is frustrating. No, not because I'm a closet racist but because I'm a writer and it's impossible to express the impact that contradiction had on a boy without demonstrating the brutality of the language. In my reading, that is what happens in the Dickman poem. He's demonstrating the culture he was raised in but has suffered unfairly because the same man who says it's strange white people aren't dealing with their racist past deleted his poem and held him up for shame in the face of people who are superficial about the language. It was a teachable moment and he caved.

I lived in a housing project for a while as a kid, before we moved to the country. We left the project because after losing a lawsuit battle the city had to integrate the project. Years later, me and my best friend, a black man from eastern North Carolina, wrote a fun little play titled "The (N-word plural) Are Coming, The (N-word plural) Are Coming." The title was a parody of a dumb movie about Russians. The idea was how ridiculous it was that every poor-white family in that project, and it was a large project covering several blocks, ran out of there like the place was on fire as soon as they received word it was going to be integrated. Many moved into much worse situations because they were single mothers as my mom was. The play was about the absurdity of white people, but because of the title, which wasn't so outrageous in the 80s when it was written, I could never pull it out now--if I could find it, which is doubtful.

I've gone on long enough. I have all respect for the damge language can do. I understand that words hurt and demoralize and humiliate. I also understand that history is history and when the moral focus becomes an algorithm it becomes impossible to ever truly and deeply take a look at our racist past.

Best

[James Brancheau]

No, of course not, and no, of course not. The poem is neither. And to insist Rita Dove keep in mind the same sensitivity about whites as whites should about blacks is willfully ignoring history and how history is still with us. Context is everything- poets should know that.

I thought of the same Hoagland poem, Matt. I'm a big Hoagland fan, but have reservations about the execution of that one. You're right about how it was handled. Both the response and the response to the response were well worth reading. Especially reading them one after the other. Thanks for that.

And I vote that Rita keep "So far."

[W T Clark]

Okay second pass because my first response was unfair and had both nothing to do with, and everything to do with the poem.

Mark, I'm wondering if you have mentioned the problem in your own paragraphs, that it's only a small section. Racism is a massive, weighty topic loaded with nuance and contradiction, so why does the author spend only a few stanzas in a vast poem on it? Isn't it better — rather than just going "Yeah, my granny was racist, that was bad, yeah. Okay let's move on.", to maybe exclude that certain memory from that certain poem, and write another poem for that memory? It may have seemed just like a small part of ordinary life, but aren't the smallest things charged with the greatest importance.
But you do have a point, no matter how accurate my explanation.

Regards,
Cameron

[derek fenton]

I was born and raised in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and had these two anti racist poems, and many others, published by the late Les Murray in Australia who, ironically, was labelled a racist by some, because he was the poetry editor of a conservative journal. As a new migrant, I had no idea of the journal’s leanings when I submitted my first lot of poems. Les, however, published poems from the whole spectrum and trod his own path..

TSHWALA*

The gruel bore no resemblance
to the amber Castle
my father used to drink
before going on to scotch;
plopping ice into crystal tumblers
cleaned and prepared by Dabson
the cook boy:
delivered diligently
as soon as he heard
the car’s hooter
and the gate
squeak open obsequiously.
Town , the garden boy,
twenty something old
and younger than Dabson
by twenty five
locked the working day out
with wire over a gate-post
and a bow to the baas.
The day done
he retired to the back step
for a tin of tea and a doorstep
of white bread and jam

We kids still in the bush
a few miles away
tracking the duiker
supposed to still live that close to town
chanced upon a forty-four gallon drum
of ‘kaffir beer’:
“Sis, it smells!”
We rocked it off its brick base
and guffawed as a Sunday party
flowed down a path fashioned by bare feet.

Dabson will not be able to afford
the mukiwa’s* Castle or Lion beer,
and the few tots of scotch
he pilfered
will not get him drunk enough
to shut out his life for the day.

There will be silence
from the bush this weekend!

*beer *white man

This poem contains many offensive terms which might not be accepted nowadays even though in 2008 I used them to highlight the way we whites completely ignored the plight of the blacks. I put the highly offensive “K” term in quotation marks to show this. I used the children’s complete disregard for, and ignorance of, the only escape the servants had as a metaphor for the whole system. When a friend first read this poem, she phoned me in tears saying that she would never be able to forgive herself for the way she once dismissed her parent’s servant who asked her to help him with some money, and that if she could find him she would give him anything! My poem had brought this all back to her.

The second one might just be acceptable these days since it wears its correctness on its sleeve.

HOOK, LINE AND SINKER.

For Fatima Meer: sociologist, anti apartheid activist, friend and biographer of Nelson Mandela, who taught me the most valuable lesson of my life during a tutorial in 1965.

She played us like a tiger fish-
We hardly felt the hook at all,
leaping out of the water,
ecstatically, as she gave us line.

Sitting serenely in her sari
she suggested that we accept
that it is the colder climates
which produce superior civilizations.

She let us run with it a while
and then started to wind us in
from our false sense of security,
whites wallowing in certainty.

She talked of Mesopotamia,
Mexico, Egypt and India
so carefully, so clearly,
that we didn’t notice how close

we were to the boat and gaff.
Just as Madiba* had his gaolers,
she dropped us on the deck in a flash
gently removing the hook.

She threw us back over the side
to struggle in the raging rapids
as she and her friend, Nelson,
swam strongly against the current.

She died just over a year ago
but the scar of her fishing hook
remains on my cheek like a brand.


*Nelson Mandela.

By refusing to accept any offensive terms in a poem without paying the reader the compliment of being able to put them in context would mean that such poems would not see the light of day!

[Mark McDonnell]

Hey guys.

What great, intelligent, nuanced responses. Thanks so much for indulging me. What comes across is that none of you think the Dickman poem should have been apologised for and removed, which is the main point I was making. Along with the implicit point that if this sort of thing becomes normalised it will have an inevitable effect on what poets feel they can write about and on what editors feel willing to publish. The straw man/slippery slope argument against this is that "free-speech advocates" just want some kind of license to be racist (or sexist or homophobic etc) but I think the examples of some of the things that have caused these problems show how simplistic this argument can be. One would hope that most editors, even without the threat of a Twitter onslaught, would still exercise good judgement about what they chose to publish.

Matt, I remember that discussion about the Hoagland poem, you showed it to me once before. It's a fascinating discussion, which is the point. Of course poetry, and art, and language use in general, should be up for debate, including strong criticism. Your point about mental health issues, and how we are acutely aware of art that stereotypes a group to which we belong but not so much aware of other groups, is an interesting one. On one level I agree with the need for caution, but on another I would worry about a world where, for example, Hitchcock's Psycho might be retrospectively shamed, cancelled, and rendered taboo in the way that, say, Gone With The Wind has been. Maybe I'm wrong to think this and there is some culturally sensitive utopia possible that I'm stubbornly resisting. It's true, I suppose, as has been pointed out in the past, that I don't belong to any identifiable protected group, so who am I to talk about this stuff. But of course, like everyone, I have my individual experiences. I wouldn't want a world where art had to be overly cautious about representing white working class Catholic families, or early parental death, or alcoholism. And if these things were suddenly deemed protected issues, I wouldn't want some self-appointed spokesperson on social media being offended on my behalf and calling for the removal of said art. I'd like to decide for myself. Yes, of course, would I feel the same if working class Catholics or people whose mothers had died when they were children had been historically persecuted and marginalised? Hmm. That's the thing I can never answer. I do know that there are a huge silent majority of people, including people of colour, who think that many of these examples of cultural sensitivity are over the top. And ironically, worryingly, these are the people whose votes are needed by the left, and yet, rightly or not, many of them associate the left at the moment with exactly this attitude of censorious scolding. I suppose I'm suspicious of the sterility of a cultural landscape where art is continually scrutinised and judged, and then potentially censored, with regard to how fair it is to various groups. I think one of the silliest retroactive criticisms Share wrote about Dickman's poem in his apology was how "It also centers completely on white voices, leaving room for no other presences". If an entire artistic culture were to do this it would be a problem, but to use this criticism as one of the reasons for withdrawing an individual poem seems ludicrous. Just as it would be to criticise a poem that only centred on black, or Chinese, or any other voices.

I agree with you on this.

I still wouldn't like to posit any absolute rules around when it's appropriate for who to say what about whom. For me (again) my response is going to come down to my perception of intent and consequences. Though that perception is going to be mine, and my knowledge of context and consequences may be limited.

I do think there is a trend towards a knee jerk capitulation to people who almost make a sport of viewing art, and speech in general, on a superficial level, with little regard to context, who see bad intent when it isn't there, and who posit a sometimes exaggerated idea of its potential for harm and possible consequences. This isn't to say that art and literature and words can't cause harm, but that the bar has been set very low recently in many cases.

John, they are fascinating reminiscences. The contradiction you noticed when you were eight is similar to the right wing trope that on the one hand immigrants are lazy, and on the other that they are stealing 'our' jobs.

Reading the controversy over Dickman's poem I thought of one of my own childhood memories. I remember a phrase that was used regularly when I was very young, whenever I would ask an adult where my mum was (I mean before she died; she would be at the shops or something). My dad, and my grandma I remember too, would answer, "She's run away with a black fella". This would be said flippantly, dismissively, in the sense of 'stop bothering me'. It was a common expression.

Now, I write a lot about my childhood, non-judgementally, impressionistically. I've never included this line in a poem, though it happened often and it's stuck with me. And it seems a fascinating and disturbing thing for an adult to say to a child, for many reasons, and ripe for poetry. Of course I also recognise it as an undoubtedly racist expression that plays on harmful stereotypes. I'm glad expressions like it have become unacceptable. But it somehow wouldn't feel right if I could only include it in a poem on the proviso that I "explicitly condemn" it, whatever that entails. Because I don't condemn the people who said it, and I don't really condemn them for saying it. Do I condemn anything? The world, I suppose. The course of history. Retrospectively condemning the spoken expression, those seven words from my childhood that I haven't heard for 40 years, would feel almost pointless and insulting to a reader. There would be a good poem to write about this, a way to do it well, but would it be worth it? Probably not. I suppose this is internalised censorship.

About Dickman's poem you say, "It was a teachable moment and he caved". My worry is that the culture at the moment makes it more difficult for people not to cave. I wish they wouldn't quite so often.

James - The "So far" line in Dove's poem is probably the most problematic for some people, I suppose, as it's the moment that seems to imply that these girls she's getting irritated by will inevitably become racist when they get older. Similarly, in Dickman's poem, I stopped short momentarily where he used the word negress for the second time, without the speech-marks. My issue with Dove's phrase wasn't so much its existence as its dramatic placement as a single sentence right at the end, which seemed a little on-the-nose to me poetically, a bit too much like a bad movie twist. Which is why I thought it might be better, not removed, but shifted slightly. The ending has grown on me, actually, started to feel more natural. I really like the poem. The point is that it's available for people to think what they like about. I agree that sensitivity about Dove's poem is pretty ridiculous given history, but that seems the general consensus anyway. Any calls for Dove's poem to be taken out of circulation on the grounds of 'reverse racism' would be, quite rightly, laughed out of the room, and there don't seem to be many. Instead we are having an interesting discussion about it. I just think this principle of reading something sympathetically, with nuance and context, should have been applied to Dickman's poem too, and others like it.

Cameron - interesting. I suppose the grandma's attitude just wasn't seen as a big deal, so it wasn't given much focus. And the poem is written sort of "in the moment", in memory flashes.

I just realise I'm replying to you all individually like I've posted a poem. I don't feel quite so gaslighted now haha. Thanks. Sorry for rambling. Here and in general. I feel like I'm done now. Basically, let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. Bye!

Derek: we cross posted. Nothing wrong with Les Murray. I'll read your poems.

[James Brancheau]

I think So far plays on the tone, angle of the poem, Mark. The train of thought. She checked herself for thinking negatively about white children. But even with those internal checks, especially about such supposed innocence, an expected decency, she returns to that thought. I think it's effective.

[James Brancheau]

To add to that, don't they have minders and over my shoulder, in proximity, is really skillful.

*correction: should be "just behind my shoulder"