I have seen the hive minds of three broken
generations swarm the orchards and pick
sour cherries, leaving the pits for a fourth.
I saw them starving for tenure and caste,
hysterical at conferences, sick
with arcane cant and the narcissism
of small differences, naked in their sad
ambition, nickering for bitter treats,
bickering. And in short, I was aghast.NOTES
The immediate “prompt” for today’s poem was Guernica’s retraction yesterday of a personal essay by the translator and critic Joanna Chen, “From the Edges of a Broken World” (the link points to the Wayback Machine’s archived version). Guernica originally published Chen’s essay last week, but—hewing to what has become a common trajectory; see here, here, and here—removed it from the website after most of Guernica’s editors resigned to protest the essay’s publication. You can read about the episode here as well as at this link to a right-of-center blog (apparently no leftist or liberal/left-of-center source has seen fit to comment). Not only did Guernica cave to a posse of Church Ladies, the magazine beclowned itself, in its subsequent notice to readers, with an egregiously pompous use of the word “fulsome.” I’m disappointed but not surprised that important US poets—academics employed by this country’s MFA programs, who do much to influence the direction of emerging American poetry and define its range (its Overton window, so to speak); judges of the contests that are a major route to publication, especially for poets with first books; holders of some of the highest posts and honors that our aggressively materialist society has to offer a poet; several poets whose award-winning collections I edited—were so eager to join the online mob demanding the erasure of Joanna Chen’s thoughtful essay. I do my best to find what’s good in contemporary American poetry, to learn from it and apply it to my own practice. In my experience, however, the US poetry establishment, lately fond of congratulating itself on being an expansive and revolutionary site of “resistance,” is more often a repressive political monoculture, a provincial and reactionary nomenklatura. Hasn’t it been this way forever? Yes, to a greater or lesser extent, with recent undeniable progress in the correction of past insularity and inequity. All the same, something about this moment feels new, and not in a good way. I still find vitality and excitement at the margins of official US poetry culture, but I have never felt more alienated from its central institutions and leading figures.
The link to the essay appears broken? This all seems to me a fragmentation of attention to what a journal is willing to stand by. How could they publish then retract if they weren’t first committed? Not just cowardice, but inattention. Can you imagine the New Yorker retracting Hannah Arendt? In this age, I can.
I read the original essay by Joanna Chen through the link. It could not have been written more carefully and thoughtfully. She takes the reader with her every step of the way, with unwavering compassion for this broken world.
The self censorship on the left reminds me that many of these people are indeed “snowflakes”, distraught because they weren’t provided with “safe space”. And so it goes….