A white man couldn't get his poem published, so he made up a Chinese pen name — and it worked
Writers are nothing if not persistent. Michael Derrick Hudson, a white man from Indiana — and a genealogist, no less — decided it would be appropriate to fake his racial background in the interest of publishing a poem he authored. After getting 40 rejections to his submission, "The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve," Hudson needed a new strategy, The Washington Post reports.
So he took to submitting his work under a Chinese-American pen name, Yi-Fen Chou. Lo and behold, it was accepted into the Fall 2014 issue of the literary journal Prairie Schooner, along with a couple of Hudson's other pieces. From there, "The Bees" wound up in a pile of recommendations for the 2015 edition of The Best American Poetry, out Tuesday. It was 1 of 75 poems fellow poet and judge Sherman Alexie selected for the anthology in a field of more than 1,000.
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"If I'd pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet's Chinese pseudonym," Alexie wrote in a blog post Monday, acknowledging that his first instinct was to pull it. "If I'd pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world."
Alexie's full explanation is here, and well worth reading for its thought-provoking points on identity politics and publishing ethics.
