Poetry 451
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Poetry 451

How Cancel Culture has Ruined Literary Criticism

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

If there ever was a time in which the literary world needed reminding of the necessity for mutual respect in their corner of the artistic playground, that time is now. Yesterday, outrage erupted across social media when one reader shared a thread denouncing a poem in the latest issue of Poetry Magazine. Hana Shapiro, a relatively unknown person with a paltry 141 Twitter followers, who calls herself a “budding poet,” sent a tweet with photos of a poem by Michael Dickman, highlighting what she believed were lines insensitive to POC readers. That Tweet was quickly latched onto by the online poetry community and shared over a thousand times.

This is unfailingly the way these outrage scenarios play out. A person shares an opinion expressing their reaction to a work, which is just their opinion, but it gains unprecedented momentum when those wanting to amplify their own voices share their agreement, creating a snowball effect which in the moment can feel overwhelming to those being targeted. All of these voices “shouting” at the offending artist or artistic venue become a mob making demands that are very difficult to ignore, especially on social media, where the notifications of their activity flood the inboxes and cell phones of the account holders in question.

In this case, the result of the outrage effect stemming from this one tweet, from one person that only 141 people even follow, caused Poetry Magazine to issue a statement of apology for publishing the poem, and then resulted in the Editor in Chief, Don Share, to resign from his position. The announcement of Don Share’s resignation was met with cries of victory from the outrage mob, some saying “WE DID IT!” while others simply said “Finally, now hire a POC editor or enby editor.”

This is not the first time Poetry Magazine has been targeted with these forms of outrage campaigns in recent months. There have been calls for Don Share to resign by this group of “budding poets” since the publishing of another poem that was met with scandal in November of 2018. That poem was “Titan/All is Still” by Toby Martinez de las Rivas, who was accused of using the imagery of a black sun to promote white supremacist and fascist ideals subconsciously through his work. On this occasion, instead of apologizing however, Poetry decided to stand by the author, and allowed him to pen an explanation of his work to try and mitigate the outrage. As you can imagine, this only made matters worse.

More recently, after the protests erupted over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis all over the country, Poetry Foundation was put under the heatlamp of online scrutiny over their released statement in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Their statement was perceived as too little, too late, and was met with more cries from the online mob. The results of this outrage fallout were that two board members of the Poetry Foundation promptly were forced to resign from their posts, to which the reaction from the online mob was, “This is not enough. Fire Don Share.”

Since that time, a chorus of online voices have been clamoring for the resignation of Don Share, much in the same way these voices have been clamoring for the resignation of Timothy Green from the second largest poetry magazine in the country, Rattle. Timothy Green’s crimes against poetry? He’s an editor who promotes egalitarianism over identity. One should note this bout of outrage is very similar to another occurring over a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee in The Nation, “How to,” which also resulted in an issued apology from the editors. This is an ongoing campaign attempting to dismantle the establishment of the perceived gatekeepers of the poetry world elites, in order to elevate the “marginalized voices” that are supposedly suppressed by these gatekeepers.

The problem with this type of reactionary criticism that results in these flare ups of incidental outrage over art, is the opinions being elevated by the groupthink mobs often lack nuance, and present their views on the work outside the greater context of the singular work, or even the greater body of work of the respective author’s judgment being questioned. Here, in this case, Michael Dickman’s poem “Scholl’s Ferry Rd.” is attacked for perceived slights of racial insensitivity, which in the greater context of the poem, barely factor into the content of the work as a whole.

“Scholl’s Ferry Rd.” is an experimental poem encompassing 30 pages, that uses the empty blank space of the page to an interesting and startling effect. It is essentially a poem about presumably the author’s grandmother, and the dynamic of watching her mental decline, and the way watching that decline mirrors the poet’s own inner struggles with addiction. As the poem progresses, it uses sparse lines of text and language that get less and less, leaving more and more of the page empty, which is I believe meant to symbolize the decline of mental faculty or a descent in the madness of addiction, and as readers have pointed out, possibly a critique of how the white perspective can be ambivalent to casual racism.

But the references to race in the poem are two very brief mentions, within the context of a poem spanning thirty pages, which to me indicate that is not meant to be the grounding focus of the poem at all. Since within the context of the poem, the things being observed and the words being spoken become less and less rational or coherent, along with the lines leaving more and more empty space, to me the poem is more of a metaphor for senility of advancing age, possibly a metaphor for Alzheimer’s. This is of course, subjective, and we don’t know the author’s intent.

But this is the point of art, it can be interpreted many ways by its audience, and thusly one reaction doesn’t necessarily deserve more relevance than the other, regardless of one’s supposed expertise, which on the internet is always simply a matter of personal declaration. Online, everyone is an expert, and everyone is convinced of their own opinion’s distinct assumption of personal importance to their chosen topic. It’s this assumption of personal relevance of opinion, that to me has created a toxicity within the artistic cultural sphere, allowing for the flourishing of cancel culture and for groups of people marinated in their own entitlement now believing themselves worthy of issuing ultimatums and demands upon artists and artist venues.

What exactly was Dickman’s error here? He evidently made a ponderous mistake when describing events of remembrance about the grandmother character in the poem, utilizing the term “negress” within two lines of the poem to pointedly recall examples of oblivious racism from someone he loves, who may be losing their self to the disease or natural process of aging. This is considered racist by detractors of the poem because these scenes are recounted by a white male writer, during a time of increased sensitivity.

The assertion that racially sensitive language used within the framework of an artistic context is itself somehow racist by default is intellectually dishonest. It presumes as an ideal to manifest itself as a thought crime and prevents authors from attempting to recreate scenarios from the real world without causing offense, no matter the intent of the work.

It also presumes that an intended audience (poets write mainly for an audience of their peers, albeit other poets) who should themselves be educated on the principles of poetic craft, are somehow now incapable of rigorous critical thought when applied to a work that challenges societal norms or presuppositions of personal and artistic subtext within content they've engaged their attention.

These conceits are self-defeating when applied across the broader spectrum of the arts.

There is another flaw in this outrage mentality, and that is it operates without offering a presumable granting of benevolent intent upon the artist being questioned. Always, without fail, in this scenario the artist is immediately tarnished with accusations that leap to the worst possible conclusions about them and about their work. In this case, not only is Michael Dickman accused of being a racist, but he is accused of reaffirming white supremacy, and thusly Don Share, the editor who published the work, is again accused of justifying racism in his magazine, which means Don Share must also be an unrepentant racist. There’s no allowance for nuance here. There’s no open dialogue or allowance for debate in a meritocracy. Someone made a grievous mistake, and now they must be met with the harshest possible sentence, deplatformed and tossed into the dustbin of history with no remorse.

This begs the question, why would any artist open themselves up to this type of scrutiny today? Virtually anyone creating work on a sustainable scale can presumably unwittingly produce something that offends someone, as it is impossible to predict the possible interpretations of a work on the bandwidth of infinity. Michael Dickman is an award winning poet who has been almost universally critically praised, and who has appeared in the most prestigious journals, and who in the past has been lauded for his approaches to complicated subjects such as race or trauma. But, all it takes is apparently one unpredictable misstep, and this poet is cancelled in the eyes of the Poetry Police Force.

So, what is the answer here? Is there any way to subvert this trend before the world of the arts becomes a hellscape of acceptable censure and censorship by online committee, a virtual Fahrenheit 451 birthed in the guts of 1984 brainlessness?

There’s no way to reverse the consequences of actions already taken, but there may be a way to begin healing before the attitudes reach an apex or a point of no return. It’s time to instill, or re-establish a golden rule in the artistic community regarding peer criticism.

The Golden Rule of Art Critique should be this: Approach the work of your peers with the same generosity and respect that you would expect your own work to receive.

This approach allows for nuance. It grants the author or creator the presumed benefit of the doubt regarding artistic intent. It heads off outrage at the pass of emotional response, and demands introspection and thoughtful analysis before the voicing of opinion. It understands that opinion is subjective and no one opinion deserves to be the singular gospel or end line arbiter of quality. It understands that the singular opinion of an individual is not automatically granted an assumption of relevance or importance to the greater world. Most importantly, it understands that artists are human beings capable of making mistakes, capable of unintentional harm, and deserving of redemption if pursued with integrity.

The way I see it, the establishment of this Golden Rule of Art Criticism is the only thing that can save the art world from eating itself, and I hope they consider adopting this attitude before it is too late. Who knows. Maybe it already is.

For more on this topic click here.
['Jay Sizemore']
['Michael Dickman', 'Criticism', 'Scholls Ferry Rd', 'Poetry', 'Don Share']