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Saturday, November 23, 2002 |
The New York Times has an interesting piece today about hate speech (free registration required). A good part of the article concerns recent events at Harvard, where poet Tom Paulin was invited to read poetry, then uninvited because of some horrific (and horrible) comments and poetry about Israel, then reinvited in the name of free speech. I don't think it is a free speech issue--Paulin, alas, is widely published and internationally respected and gets to shoot his mouth off pretty much as he pleases--and I'm not sorry to see the rank biases of much of academia exposed. Can you imagine Harvard inviting a poet who had said of any Palestinians, rather than of "Brooklyn born" Jewish settlers, "They should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them."
But discussion of the issue on New Poetry did bring my attention to another case from a few years back in which a
Seattle Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, offered a job to Scott Cairns and rescinded the offer because of his poem "Interval with Erato."
Click here and scroll down to read this marvelously sexy poem--it's clear why SPU was upset.
Here's Cairns (who has another job now) on the subject:
First off, I wouldn't say the poem caused the scandal; I'd say that the poem's appearance and reception revealed a scandal that has been longstanding in some elements of what we have come to call the evangelical community. Most clearly, I learned to appreciate the blessing of a tenured position in a state university. To others facing a similar response to their work, I would say forgive everyone, and make more art.
Good man.
1:25:21 PM 
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I had a very hard time writing about Hayden Carruth's "Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey" because I could not help but see the similarity of my account to Ron Silliman's account of Barbara Guest's "Defensive Raptures," which seemed to me the height of affected silliness. The difference is the poems being treated--Guest's poem, at least in the lines quoted by Silliman, is inhuman gibberish, while Carruth's, even as it says "don't tell a soul, they wouldn't / understand, they couldn't," helps us feel a moment in what seems a real life. Carruth shows a respect for the reader's understanding which makes it worthwhile, at least for other writers, to try to discover the technical means by which he accomplishes the poem; Guest's apparent contempt for any attempt at communication makes courtiers of those who attempt the same, exclaiming at her beautiful nonexistent dress.
Still, Silliman's prose was better than mine. Sorry.
12:38:28 PM
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Michael Snider.
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