Call it a sign of the times.
Late last month, The Nation apologized for publishing on July 5 a poem entitled “How-To.” Editors later decided that the poem contained “disparaging and ableist language that has given offense and caused harm to members of several communities.”
Written by Anders Carlson-Wee, “How-To” is a fourteen-line, single-stanza poem wherein the speaker seems to draw on African-American vernacular in ruminating on homelessness. Carlson-Wee is white.
“We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” The Nation’s poetry editors wrote on July 24, in a statement now affixed to the top of the poem.
Critical feedback from outraged readers steered the editors away from their original interpretation of the poem.
“When we read the poem we took it as a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization,” they explained. “We can no longer read the poem in that way.”
Now, the magazine’s longtime poetry editor is criticizing that decision in the pages of the New York Times. Grace Schulman’s 35-year tenure as poetry editor of The Nation started during the Nixon administration in 1971 and ended in 2006. For her part, Schulman was “deeply disturbed” by the new editors’ apology.
“During the 35 years that I edited poetry for The Nation magazine, we published the likes of W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, May Swenson, Denise Levertov, James Merrill and Derek Walcott,” Schulman wrote in the Times this week. “They wrote on subjects as varied as lesbian passion and nuclear threats. Some poems, and some critical views, enraged our readers and drove them to drop their subscriptions. But never did we apologize for a poem we published. We saw it as part of our job to provoke our readers — a mission we took especially seriously in serving the magazine’s absolute devotion to a free press.”
Echoing Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, Schulman argued the proper course of action would have been for the magazine to publish critical responses to the poem, rather than apologizing for it ever having been published. And that should have been the obvious course of action, given that confronting tough emotions and sparking provocative conversations are kind of why people read and write poetry anyway.
But Schulman made an even more important point. “The broader issue here, though, is the backward and increasingly prevalent idea that the artist is somehow morally responsible for his character’s behavior or voice,” she noted. “Writers have always presented characters with unwholesome views; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens and Shakespeare come immediately to mind. One wonders if editors would have the courage to publish Robert Lowell’s ‘Words for Hart Crane’ or Ezra Pound’s ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ today.”
Will art survive this era of political correctness? People are now both more easily offended and more likely to register their offense (with more platforms on which to do it). That’s a recipe for self-censorship from artists, especially when publications like The Nation lack the spine to defend them. Conversations once inspired by art will end before they ever begin.
In The Times, Schulman quoted Thomas Jefferson’s contention that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Rather than seeing bad arguments as opportunities for education and conversation, people are more inclined to see them as opportunities for silencing, disassociation, deplatforming, and intimidation.
The clash between Schulman and the Nation’s new editors is reflective of the most important fissure on the Left, in which the side opposed to freedom of expression increasingly seems to have the upper hand.
