More craziness from the poetry world, but some encouraging news, too: You may remember Anders Carlson-Wee’s poem “How To,” which appeared in a summer issue of the Nation. Carlson-Wee, a white man, speaks in the voice of a homeless African American. The magazine later apologized for the poem, and so did Carlson-Wee, because it was “offensive.” You see, if you are a white writer today, you can only write about white people. This may or may not apply to Asian writers, and may or may not apply to writers of a certain age or physical ability. No one knows about height. I’m checking with the commissars and hope to hear back soon.
Yesterday, Poetry issued a statement from a poet who published a poem in the November issue of the magazine. The poet, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, was accused of being a fascist by the critic Dave Coates because Rivas uses the metaphor of a black sun (a supposed Nazi symbol) and because Rivas complained at some point that Marxist ideology has ruined poetry. Mussolini also said some disparaging things about socialism, ergo, whabam! (that’s the technical term): Rivas is a fascist. Rivas was short-listed earlier this year for a Forward Poetry Prize (he didn’t win), which is why Coates thinks it is so important to tell us how evil Rivas really is.
Except, of course, he doesn’t seem to know Rivas. In particular, he doesn’t seem to know that Rivas taught English to asylum seekers and refugees—a “cunning disguise for a fascist intent on ‘erasing the poor and outcast’!” as his editor at PN Review points out in an excellent defense of Rivas’s work. And Coates doesn’t seem to know much about religious imagery either. You may recall that when Christ died, the sun went black, as Rivas notes in his defense of the poem at Poetry.
In fact, his “take down” of Rivas is a nearly perfect example of how not to read a poem—of how to take images out of context, substitute selective biographical details for analysis, and construct an argument by personal or esoteric association rather than by a careful reading of the work as a whole. Hypocritically, Coates accuses Rivas of bad faith—of obscuring what he really means to better poison the masses of poetry readers (!) with his fascist dogma, who are either too dumb or too compromised by their latent racism to catch his true meaning—all the while exercising almost no good faith towards Rivas at all.
The good news is that neither Poetry nor Rivas has issued an apology. Good for them. There’s no need for one.
In other news: Margaret Atwood has announced that she’s writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Ugh: “‘Dear Readers,’ wrote Atwood in a press release announcing the book on Wednesday. ‘Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.’” Ah, yes, “the world we’ve been living in …”
Writers on Los Angeles: “English-language writers condescended to Southern California for so long that it became a national reflex, a semi-voluntary tic. W. H. Auden called Los Angeles ‘the Great Wrong Place.’ Truman Capote said it was redundant to die there. Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker, wrote in 1941 that Californians ‘live in a world of rumors, dreams and superstitions, because newspapers out there don’t print much news.’ Pauline Kael described why, in the movies, everyone loves to see L.A. crumble. (‘Who needs a reason to destroy L.A.? The city stands convicted in everyone’s eyes.’) Don DeLillo, in White Noise, said the state deserves whatever doom is visited upon it because it invented ‘the concept of lifestyle.’ I could go on like this for some time. I’ll stop with Norman Mailer’s observation, from 1960, that the radio in L.A. is so bad that ‘no one of character would make love by it.’ David Kipen, in the new anthology he has edited, Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018, isn’t on a rescue mission exactly. He prints plenty of contumely — mostly snobbish disapproval from Eastern visitors — about his hometown. But his book deepens and expands and flyspecks our view of Los Angeles.”
A history of the African Middle Ages: “The Golden Rhinoceros is bursting with new worlds from Africa’s medieval past — a time when merchants began connecting a patchwork of ancient kingdoms, stretching from modern-day Morocco to South Africa, into wider networks of power, wealth, religion, goods and ideas. Fauvelle has created a collage of the continent from 34 different sources, each relating to trade and eloquently discussed in brief chapters. They are dots of light which, when combined, illuminate whole swathes of the dark continent, ranging from the coming of Islam in the western Sahara in the 7th century, to the 4,000 gold mines pockmarked across 14th-century Zimbabwe.”
Sunil Iyengar reviews David Yezzi’s Black Sea.
Essay of the Day:
In Victory Journal, Devin Gordon writes about the place-kicking brothers Roberto and Ricky Aguayo:
“For a placekicker, perfection is not the goal. It’s the job. “Bore everyone to death,” Roberto says. ‘That’s one thing Coach Fisher’—Jimbo Fisher, the head coach at FSU until he left for Texas A&M this winter—‘told us. At first it was kind of weird. Why would you want to be bored? But you want to bore the coaches, you bore the fans, you bore everyone with, “Oh, he’s gonna make it.” You know, no excitement. Once it’s boring, that means you’re doing it right.’
‘No other athlete in any other sport aspires to be anonymous. No kid grows up dreaming of doing something so well that they vanish. For a kicker, though, or for a punter, or a holder, or a long snapper, it’s usually a bad sign when everyone is shouting your name. ‘We want to be forgettable,’ Tyler says. ‘You want to be one of those guys that just goes out there and does what he needs to do, and nobody really remembers you.’
“By the time he left Florida State, Roberto Aguayo was the most boring kicker in the history of college football. His NCAA record for career accuracy—88.5 percent—still stands. But when you’re that boring, that robotically excellent, you can cross a rare threshold and become a kind of superhero. You acquire a nickname, invariably humanoid, like Greg ‘Legatron’ Zuerlein of the Rams or, in the 2000s, Martin ‘Automatica’ Gramatica. (Martin’s little brother, Bill, also kicked in the NFL for a couple seasons, making them almost by default the target for the Aguayo boys.) A kicker who never misses, even under pressure, even in a Super Bowl, from almost anywhere past the 50-yard line—those guys are super rare, and limitlessly valuable. Only a handful have existed, Adam Vinatieri being the GOAT, and they’re all Hall of Famers, or will be soon, and they’re all rich.
“By trading up to take Roberto Aguayo in the second round, the Buccaneers were basically declaring him the next Adam Vinatieri before he ever put on a helmet. He would have to be in order to justify the price that Tampa paid. Being a solid NFL starter would not be good enough. Aguayo wasn’t drafted to win games. He was drafted to win a Super Bowl.”
Photos: Pontoon bridges
Poem: Toby Martinez de las Rivas, From “Titan / All Is Still”
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