A similar fiasco, albeit smaller in scale, began playing out this past weekend, when snippets from the 2015 edition of “The Best American Poetry†surfaced on the Internet. Edited by Sherman Alexie, this year’s selections include a poem titled “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,†by someone named Yi-Fen Chou. A biographical note identifies Chou as the nom de plume of a middle-aged white poet from Indiana named Michael Derrick Hudson. Whenever one of his poems is rejected “a multitude of times under my real name,†Hudson writes in his author bio, he uses his Chinese-sounding pseudonym and sends it out again. He claims that “The Bees†was passed over forty times as the work of Michael Derrick Hudson, but needed only nine submissions under Yi-Fen Chou’s name before it was accepted, by Prairie Schooner. There was no artistic reason for the subterfuge, he confesses. He is not James O’Keefe with a rhyming dictionary, launching some hidden-camera sting on the liberal poetry establishment. Instead, there’s a half-hearted allusion to the work of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who assumed imaginary identities, or “heteronyms.†Hudson thought about doing the same thing, he writes, but “nothing ever came of it.â€
Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=88575.0