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Who wants to read poetry written by a white guy? Apparently no one.

Michael Hudson of Indiana’s Allen County Public Library submitted “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” to 40 journals and got 40 rejections, according to The Washington Post.

It finally got published, in a University of Nebraska-Lincoln journal, in a second round of submissions – but only after Hudson had become “Yi-Fen Chou.”

And that fateful decision to adopt a Chinese-sounding pen name paid off handsomely for Hudson. His poem got picked up by the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry, edited by one of the hottest writers of the moment, Sherman Alexie of Seattle.

When Hudson came out as white, both he and Alexie (who is American Indian) came under fire on “Poetry Twitter” (yes, that’s a thing).

The Post says Hudson’s critics call his stunt a “fraudulent” bait-and-switch that is “racist and fundamentally different from Charlotte Bronte publishing ‘Jane Eyre’ under the name Currer Bell”:

“When you’re doing this from a position of entitlement, you’re appropriating an ethnic identity that’s one, imaginary, and two, doesn’t have access to the literary world,” poet and Chapman University professor Victoria Chang told The Washington Post. “And it diminishes categorically all of our accomplishments. He sort of implies that minorities are published because we’re minorities, not because of our work. That’s just insulting because it strips everything we’ve worked so hard for.”

Seriously? A poem that’s published under a Chinese name shows that Chinese people don’t “have access to the literary world”?

Phil Yu, the blogger better known as Angry Asian Man, wrote “if there is such a thing as employing yellowface in poetry, this has to be it.”

In a refreshing bit of candor that’s probably getting him blacklisted from perpetual-grievance groups everywhere, Alexie admitted his own bias toward “The Bees”:

When I first read it, I’d briefly wondered about the life story of a Chinese American poet who would be compelled to write a poem with such overt and affectionate European classical and Christian imagery, and I marveled at how interesting many of us are in our cross-cultural lives, and then I tossed the poem on the “maybe” pile that eventually became a “yes” pile.

Do you see what happened?

I did exactly what that pseudonym-user feared other editors had done to him in the past: I paid more initial attention to his poem because of my perception and misperception of the poet’s identity. Bluntly stated, I was more amenable to the poem because I thought the author was Chinese American.

To paraphrase Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” Alexie is keeping his baby:

And, hey, guess what? In paying more initial attention to Yi-Fen Chou’s poem, I was also practicing a form of nepotism. I am a brown-skinned poet who gave a better chance to another supposed brown-skinned poet because of our brownness. …

I know many of you are screaming out a simple question: “Sherman, why did you keep that poetry colonist in the anthology even after you learned of his deception?” …

But I realized that I would primarily be jettisoning the poem because of my own sense of embarrassment. I would have pulled it because I didn’t want to hear people say, “Oh, look at the big Indian writer conned by the white guy.” I would have dumped the poem because of my vanity.

And I would have gotten away with it. I am a powerful literary figure and the pseudonymuser is an unknown guy who has published maybe a dozen poems in his life. …

If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet’s Chinese pseudonym.

Not good enough for Eve Ewing, a Harvard Ph.D. student and co-chair of the Harvard Educational Review. She’s been tweeting up a storm.

https://twitter.com/eveewing/status/641089592322564096

https://twitter.com/eveewing/status/641091098895585280

Read the Post story and Alexie’s fascinating response to criticism.

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