I hope that my indulgent readers
can believe that my intentions for this week’s essay were good. I had identified a topic (category: “general
interest”) that might have bored you but was unlikely to antagonize you. The entire country is inundated in waves of vitriolic
controversy, everywhere amplified by screaming headlines, screaming
demonstrators, and screaming heads on television programs. We could all do with a holiday from politics,
and from those widening manifestations of it known as the Culture Wars. But I made the mistake of beginning my day by
perusing the newspaper, wherein I found an article thus titled: “The Nation Magazine Betrays a Poet—and Itself,” by Grace
Schulman, a former poetry editor at that magazine. As I am a lover of poetry, as well as a
professor of it, this caught my eye.
It might
seem unlikely that a story needing so much preliminary explanation could be of
much weight, but here goes. The Nation, historically one of the
country’s important voices of left-wing politics, though fallen on hard
ideological times, still has a small cultural following. A recent issue included a short poem by one
Anders Carlson-Wee, a name previously unknown to me, as are the names of most
obscure young American poets. The poem
is slight, but I thought pretty interesting; and I’ll tell you about it in just
a minute. But first you need to know
what happened. The Nation has two poetry editors, a number that might seem excessive
in terms of the journal’s marginal role in the contemporary literary scene. Both of these women found the poem
praise-worthy and recommended its publication.
But what is called a “Twitter storm” soon led to what is called a
“critical reappraisal”. After finding on
their phones outraged comments from self-appointed spokespersons of various
“communities” they concluded that Carlson-Wee’s poem—far from being good—was actually
bad, really bad, probably racist, certainly “ableist,” and unquestionably
appropriationist. Culturally speaking,
that is. So the poetry editors actually
published an apology in their journal for having published the poem! That sentence probably requires two exclamation points, one for each
editor. But then what would I do with
the fact that Mr. Carlson-Wee himself
twittered out an abject apology dripping with socialist self-criticism? That one merits a haud credibile.
What was
all this about? I attach, obviously for
“fair use” pedagogical purposes, the full text of Carlson-Wee’s poem as I find
it on the Internet. Though lacking the
disciplinary constraints of a conventional sonnet, it is fourteen lines long. Like, say, a Browning monologue, this poem
has an imaginary voice, a voice that a reader will likely suppose is that of an
uneducated but savvy black street person. This voice offers on the basis of
personal experience cynical advice concerning more and less effective ploys for
that species of passive panhandling characterized by down-and-outs sitting on
the sidewalk while holding a cardboard sign identifying the sitter’s particular
circumstances and/or difficulties. As a
literary critic I find the situation interesting and daring. Though not without offenses against both
lexicon and narrative plausibility, the poem has an ethos that comforts the
afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.
It certainly tries to “give voice to the marginalized” and “invert
hierarchies” and do other good stuff like that.
It actually invokes something of the complex discomfort that I (and I
suspect many others in the demographic of actual readers of the Nation and other journals of similar intellectual
ambition) not infrequently experience on the streets of New York. I think it’s a pretty good shot at socially
conscious art.
Yet both
the poetry experts at the magazine and the poet himself turned on a dime when
upbraided by censors. In a blinding
flash they grasped the profound political incorrectness of what they had
done. They had allowed a white man to
drop from his declarative sentences various forms of the verb to be, a colloquial feature of
non-standard dialect in the speech of millions of his fellow citizens. They had let stand the word crippled, a barbaric linguistic fossil
painful to the differently abled. Above all
they had not guaranteed that the poet “stay in his lane”. They had allowed, nay encouraged, an artistic
attempt beyond solipsism, one in which the artist attempted to imagine
something other than himself. In his
tweeted mea culpa the poet wrote: “I
am beginning a process of talking to people and reevaluating what it means to
make art in this world from a place of privilege….I will be donating my publication
honorarium to Downtown Congregations to End Homelessness.” It is no mean feat to grovel and virtue-signal in the same utterance, but Mr. Carlson-Wee pulls it off.
I thought
of the writing assignment required of the child Augustine. This young Roman boy was made to write a
lament in the voice of Dido—a woman, a queen, a Carthaginian! I thought of Max Eastman’s book entitled Artists in Uniform, in which he
delineated the cruel victory of Marxist dogma over a brilliant poetic
efflorescence. I though of such triumphs
of the imagination as Gulliver’s Travels
and The Memoirs of a Midget by Walter
de la Mare. And I felt that I would
weep.
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.
Anders Carlson-Wee
