By now, I’m guessing you’ve all seen it: the white American poet who yellowfaced in his attempts to get published. That’s right, a white man used an Asian pen name to increase his odds of having his poetry published. He’s quite open about his reasons for doing so:
“The poem in question, ‘The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,’ was rejected under my real name forty (40) times before I sent it out as Yi-Fen Chou (I keep detailed submission records). As Yi-Fen the poem was rejected nine (9) times before Prairie Schooner took it. If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.”
My first reaction to hearing about this was blunt and none too poetic: Are you fucking kidding me?
First, let’s just consider the reality of how difficult it is for people of color to be published. Today provides a great example: Cindy Pon is posting over on John Scalzi’s Big Idea about the obstacles that exist when you’re writing stories about non-white characters. Then let’s take a quick stroll over here, where we find white men dominating writing conference panels, even the ones about women and people of color. It happens so often, it’s hard to pick a single example, so I’ll just grab the latest one: Maggie Stiefvater being asked on a panel about Writing the Other.
So when a white dude goes on record lamenting that it’s so hard to get published as a white dude, and then concocts a rationale that’s based on a small sample at best, and on a completely false sense of persecution at worst, it chaps my hide. If it’s so hard being a white dude in publishing, why do so many “best of” lists contain mostly (and sometimes only) white men? If it’s so hard, why is academia jammed to the gills with classes that teach mostly (and sometimes only) white writers? If it’s so hard, why do so many women writers use just their initials to disguise the fact that they are Tanyas and Rebeccas and Joannes?
Of course, at the heart of this guy’s pen name gimmick is an oozing white core of entitlement. He feels his poetry is so good that the only thing keeping it from getting published is some ingrained bias against white men. Otherwise, how to explain that he was rejected forty times as a white man, but published after only nine attempts as an Asian man? Surely there’s no other way to understand this befuddling experience of rejection.
Let’s look at what he says again: If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.
Bullshit. On all counts. Complete and utter bullshit.
Firstly, 49 rejections is nothing. He thinks that’s a lot of rejection? He has no clue. I know people who’ve suffered a hundred rejections in trying to get a poem published. That’s persistence.
Secondly, and above all, I am so tired of this fallacy that great literature never gets rejected. Of course it gets rejected. I’m not even going to bother listing all the great works of literature that had to confront rejection before being published. You all know the list. It’s enormous. Because even a brilliant piece of writing isn’t going to speak to everyone.
A poem being named as a “best of 2015” means only that someone in charge of making the list liked the poem. It doesn’t make it a great poem. It doesn’t put it in the canon of great literature. Nor does it prove that publishing is biased against white men.
To my great joy, Sherman Alexie, the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2015, has chimed in to discuss his inclusion of this poem in the anthology. He is completely honest about his reasoning, and about his reaction to learning that he had been “fooled.” I don’t think he was, because his job was to choose the 75 poems he liked best from the year. No matter how complex the process by which he got there, he succeeded.
Bryn Greenwood 
I would like to take the anthology, cover it in ghost pepper sauce, and insert it into entitled white boy’s orifices. All of them.
Yep.
I heard this story early this morning on NPR and just grunted at the silliness of it: I’ve never been impressed by the selection of poems in the Best Poetry anthologies, especially since a number of my poet friends—all white women—have had poems submitted for consideration and have never gotten in, even though I thought their poetry was far superior to many that made the cut. I also felt bad for Sherman Alexie: sifting through a thousand poems sounds like a three-month headache, especially with so much at stake. That he happened to pick a poem submitted under a fake name (Yi-Fen is a feminine name, so the guy was double masquerading, as an Asian woman) reflects no shame on Alexie, but surely does on Michael Yellowface Hudson.
That Hudson had to blame reverse racism as an excuse for being rejected is funny. I know of several Asian adoptees with last names like Johnson and Sullivan and no hint of their East Asian heritage. If they submitted poetry that was published under their given names, are we to say the editors were colorblind? Or did they know already the authors were Asian and therefore were being PC by favoring their poems?
What I’m curious to see now is whether anyone will touch this guy’s work, now that he’s been exposed as a fake. Whatever merit his poetry might have, it’ll still be poison to most publishers.
I hope he languishes in obscurity after this. It’s why I didn’t use his name in my post, because no sense giving him any additional press for bad behavior. I have nothing against pen names, and they are chosen for perceived benefit. My anger against him his is that he’s attempting to promote and prove that the system is rigged toward minorities, which is laughable. The system is rigged for white men, and it always has been.
I’m with ya!
Bryn, I agree with you on most of this, just not the Sherman Alexie part. While I admire his honesty, I wasn’t impressed that he was swayed by the author’s name and selected the poem based – at least partially – on the desire to be inclusive.
Selecting on author name happens a lot. Maybe not so much because the name comes from an exotic far-off place, but selection-by-author-name happens quite a bit among established, well-known poets. Whatever they scribble down between one bite of their doughnut and the next is almost sure to be accepted lest the publisher be perceived as issuing a slight. That’s not the say that well-known poets don’t have good work. Of course, they do, and some it quite awesome. But they also have stinkers, like everybody who writes. The difference is their name gets the stinkers through the door.
Anyway, thanks for the article. Enjoyed the read.