What happened to literature?

Impostors in the ivory tower. Poetry in trouble.

I grew up reading, listening to, and seeing terrible Christian art. If you’re a Christian artist, much of your work won’t find a home in the New Yorker or in the Top 40, but you can find special funding opportunities, special magazines, and artist residencies, particularly to encourage the development of artists from this faith.

Some of these programs create good artists. There are some contemporary Christian writers I adore like Christian Wiman, Scott Cairns, and Mary Karr. I love them because they are excellent artists. They are not so hemmed in by fear of the unorthodox that they can only write recycled praise and worship songs. This takes bravery and skill. Writing about a faith that dominated the West for 2000 years, too easily becomes cliche.

I understand why the average literature enthusiast would laugh at some of the products of these magazines. It’s intuitive that writers must prioritize writing well above pushing an ideological agenda forward or else risk writing poetry worthy of cross-stitching onto a pillow.

But I doubt they’d acknowledge the same problem is lurking in many of the largest and finest magazines in the country.

Talking about ideological capture is really boring and whiney, so I’ll keep it quick.

Recently, it came to light that a white Canadian guy had been cosplaying as various invented minority writers to publish utter horse shit in various literary magazines. He even received a best of the net nomination.

His writing is meaningless, atrocious, and political in the worst possible ways. Yet he published… a lot.

poem written under assumed identity and nominated for Best of the Net

I frankly prefer Dadaism to this nonsense.

He capitalizes so blatantly on identity — writing a poem about a lesbian wrestler: “You wanna know how I feel after being cheated out of a victory over Pat Patriarchy at Survivor Series? I’m furious. I’m hot. Ooh, I’m so mad I could kiss a woman I don’t even like right now!”

It calls into question in the most profound way the taste and goals of the editors of these magazines. Though I’m not a fan of this guy's actions (lying is still bad, feeding the pigs is worse), the literary community's longstanding choice to promote nonsense writing, stereotyping, and delirium above craftsmanship is insane.

I don’t want to be a champion of the straight white man. Plenty of them are assholes, just like every other group of people. I don’t want to be “anti-woke” and dedicate my life to being against an enemy that doesn’t even know about my existence.

But it’s pretty insane that “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.”

This means already established white male artists are still getting published, because they already have readership, but no one else is getting let into the literati.

Magazines choosing to publish unreadable political trash is hurting poets and poetry’s place in American society. We’re the butt of every joke already.

With the liberal arts under attack and undervalued from all sides at every turn, maybe we should start focusing on what we can do well. We can create beautiful things. We can understand and interpret the work of the past. We can understand our society with incisiveness, nuance, charity, hope, and humor. We have SO SO SO much to offer.

During a national crisis of meaning, the arts can offer something to hold onto; instead, we’re offering nonsense, violence, and despair.

It’s hard to tell which came first, art failing culture or culture failing the arts, but the solution is to break the feedback loop. Make something good. Publish something earnest that gives distracted, despairing people something to hold onto. Connect them with meaning, truth, and reality. Clean their glasses and help them see the world clearly. Don’t sell me any more bullshit when the whole world is a cowpie factory.

I’ll leave you with an immaculate political poem by Seamus Heaney and link to Roosters by Elizabeth Bishop.

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighting stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.