New York Times arts reporter Jennifer Schuessler wrote about an odd controversy in the poetry world in Wednesday's edition-- a white poet, discouraged by multiple rejections, found success when he submitted under a Chinese-sounding pseudonym, even gaining a place in a "Best American Poetry" anthology and causing embarrassment to the editor and rancor among other poets for his "reactionary" use of "yellowface."
Schuessler's account assumed the inherent righteousness of the angry liberal, multi-cultural position of hostility toward poet Michael Derrick Hudson. She forwarded attacks from other poets who, perversely, comes off as quite reactionary and stuffy in their humorlessness and outraged sense of poetical propriety over a stunt that demonstrated what editor Sherman Alexie confessed was his own "racial nepotism" in giving the poem extra consideration.
This year’s edition of the anthology “Best American Poetry” has come under criticism for including a poem by a white poet writing under a Chinese pseudonym, touching off intense online debate about diversity, inclusion and racial entitlement in the poetry world.
“The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was submitted to the anthology, published on Tuesday by Scribner, by a little-known poet named Michael Derrick Hudson, under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou. After the poem’s selection, Mr. Hudson revealed his identity to the volume’s editor, Sherman Alexie, who decided to include it anyway, along with a note explaining the use of the pseudonym.
In an essay on the Best American Anthology blog on Monday, Mr. Alexie, a Native American, defended his decision, saying he had paid closer attention to the poem because of the author’s name -- a kind of “racial nepotism,” he said -- but ultimately chose it because he liked it.
When Mr. Hudson revealed his use of a pseudonym, Mr. Alexie wrote, he debated how to deal with this instance of “colonial theft,” but decided that dropping the poem “would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen” and “implied that I chose poems based only on identity.”
....
Mr. Hudson’s blunt explanation drew outrage and ridicule online. “Never thought I’d see poets using yellowface to get published in 2015 but here we are,” Saeed Jones, a poet and the literary editor of Buzzfeed, said on Twitter. Jezebel ran a post under the headline “If You’re a White Man Who Can’t Get Published Under Your Own Name, Take the Hint.”
Ken Chen, a poet and executive director of the Asian American Writers Workshop, said Mr. Hudson was guilty of “cynical mischief” in the service of a “reactionary fantasy.”
But Hudson has supporters too, at least among the hoi polloi in the comments section of the left-wing UK newspaper The Independent and other places, who pointed out the racial double standard in play, and pondered precisely how much advantage being white really was in the poetry world, given that Hudson's poem was rejected on 40 occasions under his name and only got published when someone thought it was by a Chinese writer. But the Times totally ignored such arguments.
Rigoberto González, a poet who teaches at Rutgers University, Newark, said that Mr. Hudson had inadvertently “given a language to the anxiety that’s out there” among nonwhite writers: that they are included as tokens.
Sarah Kaplan at the Washington Post had a slightly more balanced take, though she found some other poets to smear Hudson's ploy as racist.
Hudson, who is white, wrote in his bio for the anthology that he chose the Chinese-sounding nom de plume after “The Bees” was rejected by 40 different journals when submitted under his real name. He figured that the poem might have a better shot at publication if it was written by somebody else.
“If this indeed is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent,” reads his unabashed explanation.
Anecdotally, Hudson’s calculation was correct. The literary journal Prairie Schooner, one of nine places to receive a submission from “Yi-Fen Chou,” accepted “The Bees” and three other poems for its Fall 2014 issue. The poem was referred to Best American Poetry, where Alexie came across it, and wound up in the collection, where Brooklyn-based writer and snarky Tumblr poetry-commentator Jim Behrle found it and posted it to his site.
Kaplan at least pointed out that "there are plenty of cases in which initials or a pseudonym have worked in the opposite direction -- most often for women like Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Joanne Rowling (J.K. Rowling), who thought they would be taken more seriously or better reach their target demographic if they didn’t appear to be female."
(In addition, Jason Pargin, the editor of Cracked writes (brilliant) novels under the pseudonym David Wong without any discernible backlash.)
But Hudson’s critics said the literary bait-and-switch was fraudulent, racist and fundamentally different from Charlotte Bronte publishing “Jane Eyre” under the name Currer Bell.
....The award-winning Native American author, who has been involved in the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign, said that “Yi-Fen Chou” benefited from a form of minority writer nepotism, just as many white, male writers have long benefited from white, male writer nepotism.
Kaplan sampled Eve Ewing's Twitter feed: "...including a poem whose origins were racist, as Ewing put it, defeats Alexie’s stated goal of making the Best American collection more diverse."
Unlike the Times, which kept time to the liberal beat throughout, the Post at least hung out a few moderately challenging and thoughtful questions at the very end:
But it also raises hard questions for editors, writers and readers: How important is an author to the meaning of a poem? When seeking out diversity, are we looking at names or at content? Is selecting the 75 “best American poems” a fool’s errand? (There seems to be consensus on that last one.)
