Hey There FRIENDS,
I’m back as promised to talk about writing & poetry scandals & what I, a marginal and talentless writer, think about the whole shitshow.
I’m doing this mainly for my friends who are NOT writers, or who may have been writers at one time but are out of the loop (as I was until a couple years ago…)
So where to start? How about w/ the latest poetry scandal to blow up the internet — White Man writes poem about “the homeless hustle” in Black Voice. Poem appears in esteemed litmag The Nation. Social Justice Warriors, not surprisingly, are outraged by the poem & demand its removal from the mag & apologies all around. Poet DOES apologize, drawing the ire of the LitBro faction, for whom freedom of speech is an entitlement that has no boundaries. Also the EDITORS of The Nation post an apology w/ the poem, though they do not take the poem down. This deepens the ire of both writerly factions — SJWs and LitBros—and things get ugly on Twitter/FB/The New York Times.
I may have used some terms you don’t know yet. As I was describing this to T. Moonchiled Egler he stopped me & said Is there really such a thing as Social Justice Warriors? : ))
Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) are mostly young, 20s/30s liberal/progressive/libertarian who are really striving for a world free of any sort of systemic injustice. They mean business too—they will not only call you out if your actions are offensive to any marginalized group, but they even want to change how we speak about ourselves & others.
I actually first encountered SJWs in some of the support groups I went to when I started transitioning. I thought Who are these young people telling me how I should talk about my life experience?? I was constantly being told We don’t say ‘born in the wrong body’ we say ‘Assigned female at birth… ‘ or We don’t use graphic terms to describe our traumas because we don’t want to re-traumatize anyone, instead say ‘the assault’ or ‘the incident’…
It was very limiting for me, and I usually didn’t say much for fear of saying the wrong thing & upsetting someone. It was hard to be natural or spontaneous in their presence. But I appreciated their efforts to normalize “gender dysphoria” and the medical treatment of it through HRT. I appreciated that they cared about sensitivity to others. They seemed a lot kinder than my own peers, but a little more fragile.
A lot of what the SJWs stand for I agree with wholeheartedly. I have worked toward social justice much of my adult life (and I don’t mean writing poems about it. Writing is not social work.) But it’s pretty obvious why SJWs are loathed by so many — they are passionately, militantly immersed in taking down the old guard. It comes across as pretty authoritarian, and their attempts to be ‘inclusive’ of the marginalized actually end up resembling the exclusivity they abhor.
But I believe the SJWs are on the right side of history. The change they are striving for is the change we need. Could they tone it down a few octaves a be more effective warriors? yes. They won’t be able to change the world by censoring truths, policing pain or glorifying victimhood.
But they will turn 30, or 40, and as grown up humans will have developed more effective means of influencing the world. Through politics or parenting or teaching or counseling. But probably not through poetry.
The LitBros (aka PoBros, Broets, Edgelords) are mostly white men 35–45, though some are younger, and a few are … women. They are educated and usually far better writers than the SJWs. They are outraged by the outrage! They are offended by the offense! They should be able to write & say whatever the fuck they want, in any voice they choose. They don’t understand why that’s an issue for anyone, why it would offend anyone, why anyone would try to stop them exercising their 1st amendment rights.
And I can appreciate this too. I, personally, am not afraid to be offended. I’ve been offended so many times in my life, in fact I was perpetually offended between the ages of 18—28 by just about every fucking thing in the world. Those first years of being “ a grown woman” after being an LGBT-KGB tomboy… let’s just say that what the world expected me to put up with was pretty offensive. And often, abusive. It took a long time to learn how to differentiate between “offensive” and “abusive” (and I think this all boils down to us still trying to figure that out)
The latest poetry scandal does not qualify as “abusive”, But I’ve seen some writing by litbros that would definitely qualify as harassment, if not abuse. The litbro pack value intellectual freedom over anyone’s comfort level and navigate expertly in a world full of landmines. They hide behind the 1st Amendment to hurl hate or violence or judgment the way Xtians hide behind the Bible.
The LitBros complain that they’re being marginalized now that everyone else’s voice matters. They make snide comments about VIDA counts. They feel that they’re being shut out of publications that specifically request work from other-than-cishet-white-male. Funny, yesterday I grabbed an old Gargoyle zine off the shelf & flipped through randomly, and one of the first things to catch my eye was the line “No one wants my poems because I am a white man…” (yeah, only Gargoyle, dude). If white guys are extinct to publishers then why are the SJWs always rising up en masse against their published poems?
Poetry Scandals were mythical things that only existed in eras that I didn’t exist in. Or so I thought. In 2012 I was unaware of any online poetry scene—I was still submitting to journals that published poems w/ words like ‘hoarfrost’ & ‘twee’ — when I came acrost Patricia Lockwood’s poem The Rape Joke on Twitter. This poem generated a lot of raw dialogue on “rape culture” v. “victim culture” and I thought, How exciting, poetry is alive in the 2010s.
Shortly after, I did discover lots of poetry happening online and was immediately witness to several poetry scandals happening at once. One scandal revolved around a Broet who’d rehashed a female SJWs story of sexual abuse in his own (version of an Allen Ginsberg) poem. The other involved a white man using an “Asian” name to get published, only to be outed as white when his poem was chosen by Sherman Alexie to appear in Best American Poetry that year.
The outcries of personal and cultural appropriation were deafening for weeks. It was exhausting for me to keep up with, and try to understand. But I was thrilled that poems—POEMS, written by PEOPLE—were causing all this commotion. It seemed like a valuable discussion was happening. True, there was some censorship going on as well—the Ginsberg poem was taken down, and then the whole publication came down. But to me, this was poetry moving & shaking the world, which I hadn’t known it to do since… Ginsberg & friends made their pilgrimage to San Francisco.
There have been more online poetry scandals since then—seems like there’s one big one every year. In 2016 it was the woman who wrote a Trump-supporter voice poem that did not resonate w/ feminists or democratic socialists, I forget what happened in ’17, but here we have this blackvoice poem by a young white guy in 2018, and the story has gone viral—
So what does VT have to say about it?
Am I offended that a white guy would use blackvoice to write about homelessness?
No, but I don’t think it’s the wisest artistic choice in 2018. We’re in this era where we’re all being asked to stay in our own lanes Identity-wise. Respect my boundaries. Don’t appropriate my culture. Don’t borrow from my experience. You can’t label me, only I can label me. I think this is because we have the internet, which has created more room for us to define & express who we are to a much broader audience. It’s almost impossible to leave anyone out in the margins anymore—the mentally ill, the homeless, the poor, the sick must have their own voices.
Do I think it was a good idea for the editors to publish this piece in the current climate?
No. But look at all the productive discussion we’re having! Sheesh. I’m tired of this discussion! We’ve had it so many times already. If the editors are surprised that this poem received backlash, they either overestimated the intelligence of their audience or underestimated the dismay it would cause the SJW-community.
Do i think the writer needed to apologize?
No. But it’s cool that he chose to, and his apology seemed sincere. I feel bad for the guy—I know how exciting it is to have a poem published & then to have everyone go what is this shit?? feels pretty rough.
Do I think the editors should’ve apologized?
No. Editors should defend their choice to publish what they do. I really see this as an editing error not a writer error. A good fix would be to publish a counterpoint in the next issue. (Homeless black poet doing richspeak?) It’s a thin red line for publishers these days— we’ve seen what an angry mob of SJWs can do.
******memory break-in****Sarasota peeps, does anyone remember James the homeless poet downtown? He would trade his poetry for cigarettes in 5 points park****memory out…
Do I think the poem was good, great, interesting, or written purposely to cause chaos?
No. The poem was … boring… the characters were stock (black/homeless, girl/pregnant, Xtian/phony)… the shock value was low voltage
Do the SJWs have a point here?
I think they have every right to question why the poem was chosen, but demanding apologies and removal of this piece is pretty extreme. Some of their extreme tactics —demanding publications be shut down for printing offensive pieces, or labeling an inane phrase like “eye-opening” as ableist — are just juvenile. I do hope we can get past the authoritarian policing of speech around the concept of Identity. But I also understand this verbal scrutiny as part of an evolutionary process.
Do the LitBros have a point here?
Yes. Freedom of speech is important, tantamount to our society. The pressing question now is—Does the 1st Amendment protect hate speech? How dangerous has hate speech become to our society? What qualifies as hate speech—writing a poem about raping a specific person? Using someone else’s voice or biography to create art? Is it okay for a white man to be a homeless black man when so many people don’t understand why “Black Lives Matter” needs to be a thing?
All the lines in the sand have been redrawn, and it’s been hard to find them. I think if the Litbros spent as much time writing & submitting work as they do trolling the SJWs online, they would have little to complain about publishing-wise. Don’t they know SJWs were planted by Putin’s army?
I think the SJWs should go into social work or politics & leave poetry alone.
And please don’t align me w/ either of these extremist factions!! I’m just a medium.
So, NON WRITER friends —what do you think of what’s happening in poetry world? It seems no area of our culture is without its moral dichotomy. What controversies are brewing your way?
Are we evolved yet or will this take another 150 years?
[I considered providing links to all the poems mentioned here, but decided not to. If you’re interested, I can tell you how to find them]
