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NY Times, August 7, 2018
The Nation Magazine Betrays a Poet — and Itself
By Grace Schulman
During the 35 years that I edited poetry for The Nation magazine, we
published the likes of W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, May Swenson, Denise
Levertov, James Merrill and Derek Walcott. They wrote on subjects as
varied as lesbian passion and nuclear threats. Some poems, and some
critical views, enraged our readers and drove them to drop their
subscriptions.
But never did we apologize for a poem we published. We saw it as part of
our job to provoke our readers — a mission we took especially seriously
in serving the magazine’s absolute devotion to a free press.
We followed a path blazed by Henry James, who in 1865 wrote a damning
review of Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” calling the great poem “arrant
prose.” Mistaken, yes, but it was James’s view at the time. And it was
never retracted.
Apparently the magazine has abandoned this storied tradition.
Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The
poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.
Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the
poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for
publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing
to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused
to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology
longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am
sorry for the pain I caused.”
I was deeply disturbed by this episode, which touches on a value that is
precious to me and to a free society: the freedom to write and to
publish views that may be offensive to some readers.
In my years at The Nation, I was inspired by the practical workings of a
free press. We lived by Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “error of
opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” And no
one was a greater defender of press freedom and of writers’ right to be
wrong than Victor Navasky, who succeeded Blair Clark as editor in chief
in 1978.
One defense in the late 1980s risked losing Discovery/The Nation, an
annual contest in which the poets who won the prize read their work at
the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and simultaneously had it published in
the magazine. The Y’s board, which sponsored the contest, suggested
dropping The Nation’s participation after it published an article by
Gore Vidal that some people deemed anti-Semitic.
I remember Mr. Vidal’s piece. I detested it and his views. But I’d
learned by then the crucial importance of a free press to a democracy.
I asked for Mr. Navasky’s help in saving the contest. And no, he would
never have rebuked the offensive article and apologized.
Instead, he wrote a letter to the board of the Y explaining The Nation’s
way. He said, in effect, that when we invite a writer to contribute to
the magazine, our aim is to help that person articulate his or her own
view as clearly as possible. As I recall, the copy editors went to town
on factual and grammatical errors, but left what Jefferson called errors
of opinion.
Mr. Navasky’s defense of Mr. Vidal’s piece did not at all reflect
indifference to the poetry contest. On the contrary, he cared for it,
speedily sent over the magazines that contained the winners’ poems and
often came to the readings. But his position on free speech was
uncompromising.
How far we have come from those idealistic, courageous days. As Katha
Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, put it, the magazine’s apology for
Mr. Carlson-Wee’s work was “craven” and “looks like a letter from
re-education camp.” She also rightly suggested that the proper thing to
do would have been to publish a page of responses. That would have been
in keeping with the expectations of a free press.
The broader issue here, though, is the backward and increasingly
prevalent idea that the artist is somehow morally responsible for his
character’s behavior or voice. Writers have always presented characters
with unwholesome views; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens and
Shakespeare come immediately to mind. One wonders if editors would have
the courage to publish Robert Lowell’s “Words for Hart Crane” or Ezra
Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” today.
It would not be proper for me to comment on the aesthetic merits of Mr.
Carlson-Wee’s piece. That’s the job of the magazine’s current poetry
editors. But going forward, I’d recommend they follow Henry James’s
example. Just as he never apologized for his negative review of Whitman,
they had zero reason to regret their decision.
Grace Schulman was poetry editor at The Nation from 1971-2006. She is
the author of seven books of poetry and the recipient of the Frost Medal
for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Her memoir,
“Strange Paradise,” comes out this month.
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