Not too long ago, a writer wrote a children’s fantasy book. It was rejected quite a few times, but eventually a publisher took interest. The writer’s name was Joanne, and the publisher feared that boys, the target audience, would be less likely to read a fantasy novel by a woman, even if it did have a boy’s name in the title. So the author used her first and middle initials instead. No one can say whether the Harry Potter series would have succeeded the way it did with the author’s full (female) name on the cover, but we do know this: J. K. Rowling was trying, at her publisher’s urging, in some small way, to fool her intended reader.
Not that gender-obfuscation is new to literature. The most famous 19th-century literary “George”’s, Eliot and Sand, were really Mary Ann Evans and Armandine Aurore Lucille Dupin. What’s in a name, anyway?
A whole lot. Especially when the obfuscation goes from gender to race: The Best American Poetry 2015 volume has entered the news over the only aspect of poetry that piques the interest of the mainstream media. Remember the Vendler-Dove quarrel over the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry? That got press, too—and was based, like the current chatter, on our society’s raw nerve, racism.
In this case, a white male poet got a poem published, after forty rejections, under a Chinese male pseudonym, after eight rejections. (By the way, how dead to negative feedback do you have to be to eat 47 rejections and still keep clicking Submit?) Oft-rejected poets shouldn’t lose hope, because Michael Derrick Hudson, writing as Yi-Fen Chou, got that widely rejected poem into the BAP anthology this year. He revealed his true identity when informed, and the Native American male guest editor decided to keep the poem in there. Poets of color vilified both poet and guest editor—one for implying minorities were the beneficiaries of tokenism in the publishing world, and the other for refusing to punish the identity-thief.
The guest editor, by the way, happens to be one of the most fluent, likable, versatile writers of his generation, Sherman Alexie. Having several consecutive appearances in the Best American Poetry series, and being the author of one of the most admired and loved YA novels of our time, entitles Alexie to not one but two middle fingers at his haters. Yet he is such a good human being that he doesn’t think so, and he has written a whole treatise about his reaction to the reaction to his failure to react as a poet of color should have reacted. But we’ll leave that aside for a moment. I come here neither to praise Alexie’s decision nor to vilify him for it. I am more interested in Yi-Fen Chou.
Is it possible for a piece of writing to become more interesting based on its byline? For the words and references themselves to take on power based on our sense, however vague, of who has written it?
Let’s say we find, in the British Library, a desultory Elizabethan period sonnet. Cheeks, eyes, roses, suns—the usual. Let’s say the handwriting of that sonnet is authenticated by experts as matching the few samples of Shakespeare’s handwriting we have. Suddenly it’s the 155th Shakespeare Sonnet, and it’s an event in literary history. Kind of like another Harper Lee novel popping up out of nowhere.
But those examples aren’t exactly to the point: We are talking about assessing the poems of our unknown contemporaries. The specific poem attracting this negative attention utilizes a cultural reference base that is thoroughly European-classical, cast in language that has some demotic American touches. With a white American byline, everything in the poem is to be expected. Switch it out with an Asian byline, and the reader, no matter how multiculturally enlightened, is teased into wondering: Is Chou first-generation or second-generation? Is this poem the result of a deep engagement with a foreign civilization?
Alexie was no exception to this response; he himself mentions these points and says that he was “more amenable” to the poem because he thought the poet was Chinese-American. Alexie calls this “nepotism,” citing his and the imagined Chou’s shared “brownness” as the point of similarity.
But is it, really, something they share? Is “identity” so much a matter of skin color that it’s enough to create an instant reader-writer kinship between a Native American and…a Chinese-American? (The latter, among racists, are generally called “yellow” anyway.) If anything, the guest editor, in that moment of initial wonder about Chou, was responding positively to a greater degree of foreignness in Chou. And the reason for this positive response has to do with the nature of successful poetry itself—the often-discussed estrangement of the familiar.
Editors often say they are looking for what is “unconventional” or “new,” but the new doesn’t exist (just ask Ecclesiastes), and literary conventions vary from clique to clique and era to era—is free verse conventional, or is a sonnet conventional? Depends on which century you’re referring to. What readers and editors alike desire is for the familiar language—English—to be estranged into poetry. For the familiar object to be perceived anew, as a strange thing, as if for the first time…so that a red wheelbarrow you have seen a thousand times before is no longer a red wheelbarrow you have seen a thousand times before. It is, forever after, the red wheelbarrow.
And that is what the byline “Chou” did to Hudson’s competent poem. “Chou” estranged what were thoroughly unstrange cultural references and sentiments. If we take a poem as inclusive of its byline—much as the word Monet at the bottom right hand corner is part of the painting of waterlilies—then that pseudonym is the most ingenious, most poetic part of a goodish poem; from this perspective, Alexie’s positive response to it was not a matter of nepotism at all.
Consider Borges’s story about Pierre Menard, who “authored” the Quijote word for word, tearing up drafts and anguishing over which word to use next. The text was the same but it wasn’t, at the same time. The text was Cervantes’s and Menard’s, at the same time. The poetry of a poem does not inhere in the sequence of words alone, like the shine in a surface; our experience of a poem takes into account more than just the words. It depends on the publication where we’re seeing it, whether that publication rejected us last week (“they took that but rejected me??”), whether we have a headache, how many poems we’ve read that hour, how good the immediately previous poem was…and, yes, who wrote it.
I do understand that the psychology of reader perception is not the point here. (It would be, if our literary culture weren’t so eager to wax indignant.) This is actually about something much more trivial, and much more uninteresting: Who gets published where.
Does it make sense, in light of the above, for white poets to make their work “strange” by diffracting it through the prism of an alternate, minority identity? Of becoming a multiethnic, polyphonic Pessoa of personae?
I suppose if you asked an Asian-American poet (I am one), he or she might well tell you that having an “ethnic” name is a burden. That it makes your work harder to publish; that the woman poet with the Muslim name finds its easy to get a poem published if it’s written about the Oppression of Women in India, but not if it’s about the rain in her hometown of Indianapolis; that the majority of editors are white, and that your success or failure depends on your work pleasing people who are, culturally and ethnically, nothing like you…
…And so the grass-is-greener psychology of literary frustration is revealed. The frustrated white poet thinks the Asian byline has a better chance. The frustrated Asian poet thinks the white byline has a better chance.
Chance, to my mind, is the operative word. Poetry publishing is, in part, a matter of chance, precisely because of the subjective and variable nature of reader (or editor, or guest editor) response. Who gets fellowships, who gets nominated, who gets reviewed, who gets tenure—these are all matters of obscure handshakes and wink wink and emails exchanged between po-biz influence-peddlers. I grant that. But the moment of contact between poem and reader, however flawed and psychologically messy and vulnerable to background considerations and variable among individuals, is still subject to the chance resonance of a phrase, an image, a stanza, a verbal grace; and so it remains, in its own way, pure. Hudson’s use of the pseudonym Chou was an attempt to influence the outcome of that encounter in his favor—but every word of every poem is trying accomplish exactly that. Because Hudson revealed his identity, he succeeded, with Alexie, on the basis of the poem, not the byline. In fact, his poem succeeded with Alexie even after Alexie grew angry over the deception. It is very, very easy to hate a poem if you’re pissed off at its writer. So there is something to be said in exoneration of both guest editor and pseudonymous poet: Hudson was honest with Alexie, and Alexie was honest with himself.
Chance, chance, chance. How else but by chance could a forty-seven-times-rejected poem end up at the center of a tempest in a blogospherical teapot? You may wonder, reader, how I chanced to write so many words about this fundamentally trivial dustup. Confession: I am “Michael Derrick Hudson.”
That’s right, friends. An Indian-American poet has masqueraded as a white American poet masquerading as a Chinese-American poet. And guess what? Not only did I get into BAP 2015 that way, “Yi-Fen Chou” has just submitted dozens of poems under one of two pseudonyms, one white, one of an ethnicity and gender I shall not specify, to poetry journals across America, including The Kenyon Review. So next time you read a poem, any poem, consider the byline, or rather, don’t—because it could be, or not be, anyone at all.