Former Nation Poetry Editor Weighs In on 'How-To' Controversy

At the New York Times, Grace Schulman, who served as poetry editor of The Nation from 1971 to 2006, contributes an Op-Ed about the controversy surrounding the magazine's current editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, and their decision to publish Anders Carlson-Wee's poem, "How-To." The editors' choice has caused significant backlash, provoking an apology from both editors and the poet, Carlson-Wee. Schulman responds, writing, "During the 35 years that I edited poetry for The Nation magazine, we published the likes of W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, May Swenson, Denise Levertov, James Merrill and Derek Walcott. They wrote on subjects as varied as lesbian passion and nuclear threats. Some poems, and some critical views, enraged our readers and drove them to drop their subscriptions." From there: 

But never did we apologize for a poem we published. We saw it as part of our job to provoke our readers — a mission we took especially seriously in serving the magazine’s absolute devotion to a free press.

We followed a path blazed by Henry James, who in 1865 wrote a damning review of Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” calling the great poem “arrant prose.” Mistaken, yes, but it was James’s view at the time. And it was never retracted.

Apparently the magazine has abandoned this storied tradition.

Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.

Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.”

I was deeply disturbed by this episode, which touches on a value that is precious to me and to a free society: the freedom to write and to publish views that may be offensive to some readers.

In my years at The Nation, I was inspired by the practical workings of a free press. We lived by Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” And no one was a greater defender of press freedom and of writers’ right to be wrong than Victor Navasky, who succeeded Blair Clark as editor in chief in 1978.

Read on at the New York Times.