The Controversy over Controversy

Seth Abramson admirably attempts to sum up basically everything in a new blog post. He takes on three “controversies” at once: the hubbub around Tony Hoagland’s “The Change,” Juliana Spahr’s recent essay on the decline of social activism in poetry communities, and VIDA’s count. And he ties it all together. Here’s our reductive simplification of his argument: 1.) Hoagland’s poem is bad, but not racist, because the book it appears in is self-reflexive about its narrator’s own personal flaws and prejudices—however, the online discussion about the poem does not take this into account and is often marred by an unwillingness to speak openly on the issue; 2.) This unwillingness to speak openly is a product of what Abramson calls “The New Patronage,” by which he means the imperative to be a polite and harmless cheerleader in the poetry community, to avoid damaging one's career or opportunities to publish; 3.) Spahr gets it all wrong—she argues that social activism is in decline because of the institutionalization of writing via MFAs, but actually it’s the cronyism of her generation, which she is nostalgic for, that allowed for “The New Patronage” in the first place; and 4.) the debate around the VIDA count is marred by the same lack of courage surrounding the Hoagland poem, which renders all “controversies” illusory. Phew! It’s a long blog post, as you can imagine. What is Abramson’s position in all of this? Well:

I write this, instead, as someone a) who has read all of What Narcissism Means to Me, which many of Hoagland's critics have not; b) who spent seven years working with individuals suffering from a variety of mental heath issues, which many of Hoagland's critics have not (meaning that whether Hoagland is writing, in What Narcissism Means to Me, from personal experience, or using a persona, I feel somewhat well—or at least better—positioned to read the work through a more contemplative lens); and c) who believes that it is the structure of the literary arts community, and not any institution within that community that offers aspiring poets free money to write (like over a hundred full-residency MFA programs do), that has killed social activism (if indeed it is dead) among American writers.