In the summer issue of last year, Poetry, the magazine founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, published a poem, ‘Scholl’s Ferry Rd.’ by Michael Dickman. It is not a very long poem, but it spreads over thirty pages, including four pages at the end with only one line apiece. Blank space is used imaginatively here to suggest the increasingly blank spaces in an old lady’s life as she succumbs to dementia.
The poem is narrated by a grandchild who partly observes her decline, and partly reports on the old lady’s jumble of memories, her irascibility at times with family members, her struggle against inevitable defeat. It is rather a good poem, but it caused a huge fuss in the American poetry world because of two passages which traumatised a number of readers, so they claimed, because of its deep-dyed racism.
The reaction of the Editor and of The Poetry Foundation, the wealthy organisation which publishes Poetry, was swift and extreme. The print copy of the issue was withdrawn from circulation and pulped, the poem was deleted from the magazine’s website, and the Editor, Don Share, resigned.
It is impossible to find ‘Scholls Ferry Rd.’ anywhere—at least, I was unable to locate it until an acquaintance loaned me a copy of the print edition which had escaped the bonfire. It must be a rarity now.
Here is the passage which caused most offense:
‘Negress’ was another word she liked to use
That’s the nice way to say it
‘Oh they are always changing what they want to be called’
On the bus she dropped her purse
I was with her
A nice Negress handed it back
She put out her hand to receive it the whole time looking out the window
never said a word
Hours later
‘What a nice Hawaiian’
This scene, set perhaps in the ’60s, is a carefully nuanced account of the racial attitudes of a white woman who has, certainly, a prejudice against black people but who wants to appear to do the right thing, say the right thing, when the woman hands her the purse. She knows or thinks she knows that ‘Negro/Negress’ is the accepted term for African-Americans, which it was at one time, yet she looks out of the bus window as the woman passes over the purse—she looks away—and later says ‘What a nice Hawaiian’, which might reflect the confused mind of the dementia sufferer, or might be a deflection from the truth of the incident—or it might be both.
What happened is part of the poem, it does not reflect the attitude of the poet, and is not intended as an incitement to racial hatred. It is historical, and a reflection of the truth of the genteel attitudes of a certain class of white woman at a certain point in history. There can be no mistake about this, and yet it caused such outrage that The Poetry Foundation pulped the issue.
According to Jay Sizemore, who wrote a very good online response to the affair—
‘How Cancel Culture has Ruined Literary Criticism’— the scandal started when one Hana Shapiro tweeted: ‘It’s pretty unacceptable that you would publish this, especially during a time when so many POC [People of Colour] are grieving/being targeted. Shouldn’t you be focusing on amplifying Black voices right now?’
This was picked up and rapidly became a ‘Twitter-storm’ repeated, I am sure, by many who had never read the poem, just as many of the faithful who bayed for Salman Rushdie’s death had never seen a copy of The Satanic Verses, let alone read it.
No matter, the protest worked, and the Editor, Don Share, wrote an abject farewell apology in which he ‘accepts sole responsibility for publishing the poem’ and ‘apologize[s] unreservedly for doing so’. The poem ‘egregiously voices offensive language that is neither specifically identified nor explicitly condemned as racist. It also centres completely on white voices, leaving room for no other presences.’ ‘…I failed to understand that the poem I thought I was reading was not the one that people would actually read’.
He writes of his ‘poor judgement’, he resigns ‘with the deepest regret that I brought hurtful language to these pages, words which had a terrible impact. I failed to live up to my own values, but much worse and more significantly, failed readers who came to our pages in good faith and the hopefulness that poetry promises.’
Such abjectness is dispiriting. Don Share capitulated at once. He was ‘wrong’, he confesses—but ‘wrong’ in the face of aggressive group-think which prefers outraged anger to careful consideration of what the poem is about. It is a form of bullying to which white liberals are particularly sensitive, which places them on the defensive because of their position as whites.
Don Share was right to publish ‘Scholls Ferry Rd.’. His initial sense of the poem’s worth was correct and should have been defended. Instead, a Twitter storm by the righteous brought him down. His farewell ‘Editor’s Note’ has echoes, if faint ones, of the Moscow show trials where ‘confession’ was a formality—the verdict, ‘guilty’, already known. Presumably, Don Share was not taken to the basement of The Poetry Foundation and shot in the back of the neck, but he confessed in a show trial by the ‘right-on’ and symbolically, at least, suffered the same fate.