Michael Derrick Hudson's Problematic Turn as Yi-Fen Chou

The troublesome pseudonym just got more troublsym. At The Rumpus, Brian Spears details the storm "set off by the bio in Best American Poetry 2015 of Michael Derrick Hudson, who has been publishing under the name Yi-Fen Chou," as evidenced in the image above. Spears writes not of the poem in question, but what he sees as yellowface, plain and simple. It could also be easily construed as white male entitlement. An excerpt of Spears's piece follows--read it all here.

Some on social media have suggested that this makes the editors of the magazine the poem originally appeared in look bad, as though they were willing to take a poem by an apparently Asian writer that they had previously rejected from a white writer, the implication being that the writer’s lack of whiteness was, in this case, a help rather than a hindrance to getting the work noticed. I am here to say that Hudson and his defenders are full of it.

First of all, there’s no indication outside of Hudson’s narrative that the yellowface he adopted had anything to do with the acceptance of his poem. He sent the poem out, he claims, 50 times, 40 times as Hudson, 10 times as Chou. Isn’t it more likely that his persistence had more to do with the poem finding a home than his choice of an Asian name? The more readers/editors see a poem, the better the chances that one of those people will see something they like in it. We’re not talking about scientific articles which (should) go through rigorous peer review here and can be judged by some empirical standard—there’s no yardstick by which we can measure poems and say “this poem measures 74 Frosts while this one is 89 Frosts and so we should pick the second one for publication.”

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Much of the rhetoric surrounding this conversation echoes the uglier arguments I’ve heard all my life about Affirmative Action: that less qualified people/poorer poems are getting slots that should have gone to more qualified/better poems; that editors have quotas they want to fill with poems by “certain people” so they can feel hip and liberal and assuage some of their white guilt (or if the editors are POC, they’re just publishing their friends). We’re not far from hearing “the straight white male poet is the true minority”—I assume it’s been said and I’ve just been lucky enough to miss it.

To read about Sherman Alexie's process for editing this year's BAP anthology, take a step back to this post from earlier today.