The uproar over the Poetry Foundation’s rote statement of support for nation-wide anti-racist protests recently forced the resignation of Henry Bienen from the board. Last month’s open letter to the Foundation by a roster of poets asks for “much more robust local programming, …large contributions to organizations such as Assata’s Daughters, Brave Space Alliance, and Project South, …more and deeper partnerships with spaces that support artists from marginalized communities.” As one of the few literary nonprofits not struggling for cash, it’s vital to question how much of its money has served the greater Chicago community. Now Don Share has resigned as the editor of Poetry magazine.
The latest conflict involves the thirty-page poem “Scholl’s Ferry Rd.” by Michael Dickman. Published in the magazine’s most recent issue, it was subsequently removed from Poetry’s website by the editor. The situation parallels the response to Anders Carlson-Wee’s poem in The Nation two years ago.
“Scholl’s Ferry Rd.” is an elegy to Dickman’s childhood and to his grandmother, a woman generous, sensual, vain—and racist—whom the poet nevertheless loved. In one section readers cite as offensive, the grandmother refers to Black women as “Negresses,” a term the speaker then uses himself. When a Black woman retrieves her dropped purse, the grandmother identifies the helpful stranger as “Hawaiian.” In a second section, the grandmother urges her daughter to drive into a group of Japanese businessmen. Massaging open wounds by repeating ugly words, actions, and attitudes causes gratuitous pain, especially now, has been the angry response.
One can question whether “Scholl’s Ferry Rd.” is any good. One friend thinks it’s a terrible poem, unworthy of publication anywhere, let alone in Poetry’s well-distributed pages. He points out a sloppy misplaced modifier in the line When we were kids we waited like puppies for her to arrive lined up on the couch, as well as the faulty image: who’s ever seen a litter of puppies line up? I didn’t think the verse was awful—some of its methods held my attention—but thirty mostly blank pages still smack of assertive, irresponsible manspreading. Like the guy sprawled across three subway seats, the poem insists on its own worth by taking up valuable real estate.
Whether or not I read the poem’s white space as “white space,” I’m struck by how it’s meant to weight the words that manage to make it to the page. Slow down, the blanks signal, take your time to take this in, it’s capital-I Important. This is an example of rhetorical gimmickry replacing the work of the imagination—stage direction rather than language doing its job. I stand with poets scornful of a journal devoting limited page space to an indulgence.
But I question whether all painful words and acts deserve erasure. In Linda Gregerson’s “The Selvage”—also published in Poetry—the speaker refuses to repeat the term a prospective Obama voter uses to describe the candidate:
Everett who’re we voting for? The
black guy says Everett. The black guy
she says except that wasn’t the language
they used they used the word
we’ve all agreed to banish from even our
innermost thoughts…
But the reader knows the word has not been banished, and hears the word, and lets that knowledge sear the mind. Obama’s win doesn’t make a whit of difference—the word lives. This is poetry’s art: to create in a reader the tensions of body and mind the writer experienced, and let the reader feel it—rage, sorrow, shame, and all.