The Politics of Poetry

 

Pauline Johnson in recital

Scouting publishers to whom to submit a poetry manuscript, I note that almost all, in their submission guidelines, include a phrase similar to the following:

“[we] also encourage poets from the LGBT community, Indigenous and racialized poets, as well as poets with disabilities.”

This almost looks like boilerplate.

Properly, this is against the law. And it is immoral. This is discrimination on prohibited grounds of unalterable characteristics. Unfortunately, as Jordan Peterson has said recently, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has become a bitter joke. Governments and courts in Canada treat it with contempt.

The official justification for this discrimination is that these groups are “historically underrepresented communities,” to quote from one other example of boilerplate.

If these groups are historically underrepresented, they are obviously being overrepresented now. Everyone wants their manuscripts. 

Producing a rather boring sameness for readers. So much for diversity.

Is it even true that they have been “historically” underrepresented? 

As to “racialized” poets, that is, poets with skin colours other than pink, until the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, and indeed until some years after that, there would have been rather few “racialized” folk who spoke English fluently. Were they really underrepresented in the English literature and publishing of the 19th and 20th centuries in proportion to their actual numbers? That is not obvious. That case must be made. Rabindranath Tagore, writing in English, took the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The US had the Harlem Renaissance. 

There is an automatic reader interest in the exotic. Contrary to what leftists insist, people do not want to read about their own boring lives, but about lives different from their own. Witness Star Wars, or Gulliver’s Travels. As a result, anything purportedly written by someone from another culture has always had an advantage in getting published. In the 19th century, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam made quite a splash even in translation.

As to indigenous poets, again, there has always been an advantage, that of exoticism. There is reason to believe they have been historically overrepresented, not underrepresented, in proportion to their population. Pauline Johnson made a splash in her day by reciting in supposedly Indian costume, and claiming to be an Indian princess. I have found imitators, less well remembered, on Internet Archive. Archie Belaney called himself “Grey Owl” and pretended to be aboriginal in order to have a literary career.

And were the LGBT community ever underrepresented? We cannot really know, because few would have been out of the closet back when sodomy was a crime; but gays themselves regularly claim that almost every prominent author of the past was actually gay. That’s impressive, given that they were only 1-3% of the population.

Perhaps the issue is that specifically gay concerns were not aired. That may be so; but necessarily, specifically gay concerns are only of much interest to about 1-3% of the population. So there’s that. 

Were those with disabilities underrepresented until recently?

Like, say, Milton, who was blind? Cervantes, who had lost the use of one arm? 

Does depression count? Almost every decent poet suffers from depression, according to surveys done at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At a minimum, those suffering from mental illness are certainly overrepresented among successful poets; and always have been. After all, Aristotle comments on this over two thousand years ago.

Another group that used to be favoured in the same way in publishers’ calls for submissions, but from whom favour has recently been withdrawn, is white women. It certainly used to be claimed that they were historically underrepresented. 

This too was probably wrong. Female poets were common in the 19th century. Like homosexuals, women had the advantage over men, in the old days, of not having to support a family. As a result, they were more often able to turn their attention to less lucrative pursuits, like poetry.

So what’s behind this fiction that these groups are underrepresented? Indeed, that historically overrepresented groups are underrepresented?

Is it ignorance, or conscious prejudice? Does everyone else hate straight white men just as everyone used to hate the Jews? Indeed, used to hate the Jews as “overrepresented.” 

The one group that actually is historically underrepresented in poetry is Canadians. That is, in the sense that Canada, as a young country, has not had enough of its geography and culture consecrated by poetry. As a result, we all live drabber and uglier lives than we should.

If we publish poets who focus only on LGBT issues, or black issues, or Asian issues, or issues faced by aboriginals, or the disabled, we are, at the same time, withholding poetry from the majority of Canadians.

It is a philistine move.

It also explains why poetry is far less popular than it used to be in Canada. It has deliberately stopped speaking to Canadians.