Sherman Alexie Wrote an Amazing Essay About Editing The Best American Poetry 2015, But You Have to Read Jia Tolentino’s Response Too

• By Tulane Public Relations via Wikimedia Commons
• Writing, editing, making readers smile: Is there anything Sherman Alexie CAN’T do?

Seattle writer Sherman Alexie did anyone who cares about books a huge favor this week. Over at The Best American Poetry anthology’s blog, Alexie described in excruciating detail his process in editing this year’s volume of the anthology. All too often, big anthologies like BAP read a lot like, “75 of the Editor’s Closest Friends!” Literature is cliquey, let’s be real, and it takes a lot of deliberate choices on the part of the anthology editor to break a book like BAP out of its old boys’ club mold.

Alexie is that editor, and you should go read his post now if you’re at all curious about how your prestigious anthology sausage gets made. This kind of transparency in publishing is rare, and we should all train our eyeballs on it now! Chief among the bits of information Alexie imparts is this rigorous list of self-imposed rules he used in assembling the anthology:

Rule #1: I will not choose any poem written by a close friend.

Rule #2: I will be extremely wary of choosing any poem written by somebody I know, even if I have only met that person once twenty years ago and haven’t talked to that person since.

Rule #3: I will also be hyper-judgmental of any poem written by a poet I already admire. I will not be a fan boy.

Rule #4: I will not choose any poem based on a poet’s career. Each poem will stand or fall on its own merits. There will be no Honorary Oscars.

Rule #5: I will pay close attention to the poets and poems that have been underrepresented in the past. So that means I will carefully look for great poems by women and people of color. And for great poems by younger, less established poets. And for great poems by older poets who haven’t been previously lauded. And for great poems that use rhyme, meter, and traditional forms.

Rule #6: As part of the mission to represent the totality of American poetry, I will read as many Internet poems as I can find, whether published at popular sites or in obscure emagazines that have nine followers…

Rule #11: I know that these rules will inevitable result in contradictions, conflicts, hypocrisy, and stress rashes.

What glorious scruples! What beautiful logic! Of course, what comes next is… odd. It turns out that a white dude poet submitted a piece to BAP using a Chinese pseudonym, because his poem had been rejected 40 times under his real name, which he somehow attributed to its not being written by a person of color? Let’s be clear: This is bullshit logic. Typically, publication odds are ever in your favor, ye olde straighte whyte dudes. But occasionally—as we’ve seen in the sci-fi community—those of us who are privileged feel threatened by the existence of “social justice warriors” working to level the playing field. Because we don’t see it as a leveling so much as a reduction of our cozy, warm privilege. So again, let’s be clear: That is bullshit logic. But in the case of Michael Derrick Hudson, this perception led to his decision to dub himself “Yi-Fen Chou,” rather than deal with the ACTUALLY QUITE TYPICAL experience of having your work rejected (I MEAN COME ON, DUDE’S A POET, THIS IS, LIKE, A THING YOU NEED TO ACCEPT HAPPENS EARLY ON).

Alexie ended up selecting Hudson’s poem for BAP, then found out the dude’s identity as a person of color was an invention, considered retracting it, and then didn’t retract it because, quoth Alexie, “In paying more initial attention to Yi-Fen Chou’s poem, I was also practicing a form of nepotism. I am a brown-skinned poet who gave a better chance to another supposed brown-skinned poet because of our brownness.”

Much internet yelling has ensued, but the best commentary out there comes from Jezebel’s Jia Tolentino, who writes:

Identity politics, with the great rivers of well-meaning smarm and short-sightedness that run through it, is exhausting enough when leveraged for basic equality; when leveraged for a white man’s ability to get published, the whole thing feels unredeemable. But we can’t give up on the fact that the source of a thing matters. Rachel Dolezal is just not the owner you want for your weave salon; Jonathan Chait is just not the best voice to argue that political correctness has gotten out of hand. Ryder Ripps’s “Art Whore” project was banal with him behind it; with a sex worker as the artist, then we could talk. But, of course, a sex worker wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the amount of attention. And here we are, back at the boring old start.

Yeah. Read Alexie’s post, because really, it’s good stuff. Then read hers. Then maybe go outside and enjoy some fresh air until you feel better enough to go back to reading the internet again.