by David Lehman
Accusers and the Accused, Crossing Paths at Columbia
False reports of rape are rare.
The accused rapist, an architecture student from Germany, said
“My mother raised me as a feminist.”
He supports equal rights for women.
Three women have accused him of “intimate partner violence.”
One accuser takes a bed with her wherever she goes
Which doubles as her senior thesis
And, in October, students at more than 100 colleges
Carried a mattress or pillow to dramatize the crisis
Of sexual assault on campus.
The president said “law and the principles of academic freedom
And at the same time protecting the rights of all.”
The man in the watch cap sits on the steps of Low Library.
He said it didn’t happen.
Most of his friends dropped him
Last year when Ms. Sulkowicz—
Or when the Spectator published his name.
Campus hearings have a lower burden of proof
Than criminal trials and he said he was not allowed.
But she did not press criminal charges.
None of them would ever get over it.
Though I did little more than rearrange choice parts of the article, making a few changes in wording and adding the final line, the editor in charge of “New Verse News” informed me that the paper’s “top editors along with the lawyers” decided against running the poem “given the sensitivities involved.” The subject was too hot to handle in a poem. The decision surprised me, because my poem did not strike me as either particularly provocative or deliberately offensive. Maybe, I mused, the editors thought the poem was boring. But a wise friend countered that if it had been boring, the paper would have unhesitatingly posted it. No, I am afraid that the key words were “lawyers” and “sensitivities.” The lesson, so far as I can see, is that what is acceptable in a fact-checked newspaper article becomes dangerous, or potentially dangerous, in a poem—even if the poem is absolutely faithful to the facts as reported. A poem is not a straightforward article; its meaning is not self-evident; it can be ambiguous, and if it is, it is dangerous, the more so at a time when the “sensitivities” of special-interest groups play a decisive part in limiting free speech on campus and everywhere else. From the newspaper’s point of view, there was only a downside in posting my poem. They had wanted something harmless, or funny, or “poetic,” not anything that could stir up emotions about such timely campus subjects as rape and sexual assault, “yes means yes” contracts preceding the consummation of an affair, the rights of the accused in rape cases, the effects on the accusers, the artwork as a substitute for a conventional “senior thesis,” the way language reflects these tensions, the resort to platitudes by the university leadership.
I do not want to inflate the importance of my poem’s fate. In journalism these things happen all the time. But a larger problem bedevils us: the problem of censorship and self-censorship. In 2014 hackers purportedly on hire from North Korea made a cyber raid on the electronic coffers of Sony Pictures. The hack attack was sparked by the studio’s intention to release a broad comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco as a pair of journalists who are recruited to assassinate the leader of North Korea. It resulted in much egg on the face and a big hole in Sony’s pocketbook. But the violation of Sony’s cyberspace also delivered an unsubtle threat. Theater chains in the United States refused to book The Interview, not because it was a lousy film but out of fear that some madman might bring an AK-47 to the mall and mow down customers. Sony withdrew the picture; President Obama rebuked Sony and promised to retaliate for the act of “cyber vandalism,” and the leader of North Korea labeled our president a “monkey.” For a while George Clooney couldn’t get anywhere with a petition urging solidarity with the makers of the movie, and though the film was released in the end, if only in a limited way, what bothered fans of the First Amendment was how quickly and instinctively we and our institutions cave in to the demands of dictators, even those of the tinpot variety.
The willingness to button up our lips does nothing to deter such shocking assaults on free expression as the homicidal attack on the editors, staff, and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015. The satirical weekly that held nothing sacred, not even Charles de Gaulle, exists within a French tradition of caustic satire, brazen caricature, and principled impertinence. It has waged a war of wits with the forces of militant Islam. Back in November 2011, the magazine had had the unmitigated gall of mocking sharia [in French charia], religious rule based on ancient Muslim principles unmodified by anything resembling a Reformation, an Enlightenment, or an Ecumenical Council. The cartoon on the cover of the issue entitled Charia Hebdo threatened “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing!”5 Five years earlier, the weekly reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammad that had aroused the ire of cutthroat jihadists. Surprisingly many publications in America and abroad did not have the guts to do so. The editors of Charlie Hebdo, including the legendary figures known as “Charb” (Stephane Charbonnier) and “Cabu” (Jean Cabut), were among the twelve individuals killed in the attack of January 7. For the right to say what they thought they paid with their lives.
On the very night that the Paris massacre dominated the news waves, with Parisians in the streets holding up signs saying “Je Suis Charlie,” I heard a New York Times columnist go on CNN and tell newscaster Don Lemon that “We in journalism should try to avoid giving offense.” It struck me as a very odd thing for him to say. Isn’t giving offense, provoking discussion, stirring the pot, airing your views, part of the deal? A former press secretary to President Obama drew a distinction to the effect that while the press has the right to insult a religious leader, it may show bad judgment to wave a red flag in the eye of a stampeding bull. This is too halfhearted a defense of the freedom of speech and press, both of them under constant assault. In contrast, consider what “Charb” said, paraphrasing a line sometimes attributed to Emiliano Zapata, hero of the Mexican Revolution: “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”
* * *
Sherman Alexie is writing the best poetry of his life. That is my opinion, but I am not alone in holding it. Sherman’s work was chosen for the last four editions of The Best American Poetry: by Kevin Young (2011), Mark Doty (2012), Denise Duhamel (2013), and Terrance Hayes (2014), in addition to his inclusion in The Best of the Best retrospective volume that Robert Pinsky edited in 2013. Alexie mixes colloquial diction and formal virtuosity; he uses forms—a narrative sequence of numbered sentences, a prose sonnet, a ghazal—to restrain and paradoxically to accentuate the power of raw emotion that his poems deliver.
Sherman’s reputation goes far beyond the precincts of verse. He is celebrated for his fiction—The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His prose has won him PEN prizes and a National Book Award. Smoke Signals, the movie he wrote, won accolades at the 1995 Sundance Festival. Just recently Time magazine rated The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian as the “all-time” top young adult book above Harry Potter, Charlotte’s Web, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Judy Blume.6
But poetry has a special place in Alexie’s prolific portfolio. It can be said of Sherman that poetry saved his life. An alcoholic trying to recover control, he went off the wagon on March 11, 1991. He binged; he behaved badly. But it was the last time he has had a drink. The next day he went to the mailbox and found a letter from Dick Lourie of Hanging Loose Press accepting a manuscript of Alexie’s poems for publication. “There was a sign,” Sherman says.
Sherman undertook the task of editing this volume with great zest and he devoted himself tirelessly to scanning online journals, more of which are represented this year than ever before. In fact, more poems were chosen from the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, skillfully edited by Alex Dimitrov, than from any other source. More magazines ar
e represented altogether; fewer poems come from wide-circulation journals or expected places. The spirit of democracy on display is nevertheless not inconsistent with the search for literary excellence.
There are those who expect our “hyphenated” poets to write obsessively or even exclusively about their identity and to demonstrate a degree of social responsibility to the group they represent. But Sherman’s poetry rebuffs this patronizing expectation. A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member, Sherman grew up on a reservation and he has, as a result, a fertile source of subject matter. But his aim is to write good poems, not to represent a tribe, and he brings to his writing the exemplary qualities of intelligence and humor. Jessica Chapel of The Atlantic remarked that Alexie’s characters wonder “what it means to be an Indian, what they are told it means to be an Indian, and how to present themselves as Indians both to whites and other Indians.” Then the reporter asked the author: “Is this struggle or uncertainty endemic to the American Indian experience?”
“It’s endemic to everybody’s experience,” Alexie replied. “I think we’re all struggling with our identity. Literature is all about the search for identity, regardless of the ethnicity. Southern, New Yorker, black, white, Asian, immigrant—everyone’s trying to find a sense of belonging. In The Toughest Indian, the journalist’s primary struggle is not ethnic identity, but his sexuality. I don’t think he knows any of his identities. One of the points I was trying to make in that story is that being Indian is just part of who we are. I suppose the big difference in Indian literature is that Indians are indigenous to this country, so all non-Indian literature could be seen as immigrant literature. The search for immigrant identity is much different than the search for indigenous identity, so I suppose if you’re indigenous to a place and you’re still searching for your identity, that’s pretty ironic.”7
* * *
Mark Strand, who died on November 29, 2014, was the guest editor of the 1991 volume in this series. At the time we worked together, he had completed The Continuous Life and was writing Dark Harbor, two of his best books. I was finishing Signs of the Times, my book on deconstruction and Paul de Man, cheered by Mark’s support—he loathed French critical theory and its effect on higher education. We would have long phone conversations twice a week or more to go over the poems that had come in and to talk about the shape of The Best American Poetry 1991 as it evolved. We picked a Hopper for the cover; Mark was writing a book on him. As we went into production he wrote a beautiful introductory essay that I had no trouble placing with The New York Times Book Review, which ran it on its front page. The series was still young enough that it seemed to demand all the attention we could give it, and we gave readings at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and at various New York locales. And then there were always bookstores to visit (the Strand!) or a Neil Welliver opening to attend as our friendship grew.
Mark was a connoisseur of poems—as of so many things, from wine and food to clothes and paintings. His work would give off a casual, even effortless feel, as if the poet (who had initially studied to be a painter) were possessed of a certain kind of natural grace camouflaging all the craft and hard work. In Dark Harbor, he presents himself as a lucky man who knows the good life, striding on the pavement in his new dark blue double-breasted suit, lean and lanky, fresh after lunch at Lutèce with his longtime editor. The picture is accurate. He was a poet of unusual glamour (light is “the mascara of Eden”) and of romance. Yet the prevailing feeling in the depth of his best work is melancholy. If mortality is our first and last problem, the need to say farewell is continuous. Death is the mother of beauty; poetry is a valediction forbidding mourning. A man and a woman—in one of Strand’s late prose poems (“Provisional Eternity”)—lie in bed. The man keeps saying “Just one more time.” The woman wonders why he keeps saying that. “Because I never want it to end,” he says. And what is it that he doesn’t want to end? “This never wanting it to end.” Farewell, friend.
* * *
1. James Parker, “The Last Rock-Star Poet,” The Atlantic, December 2014, pp. 50–52.
2. Douglas Belkin, “For College Students, History’s a Mystery,” The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2014, p. A6.
3. The American Scholar, Spring 2013, p. 38; p. 43.
4. Ariel Kaminer, “Accusers and the Accused, Crossing Paths at Columbia,” The New York Times, December 22, 2014, p. 1.
5. “100 coups de fouet, si vous n’êtes pas morts de rire!”
6. Time, January 19, 2015, p. 62.
7. The Atlantic, June 2000.
Sherman Alexie was born in 1966 and grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first collection of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. His first novel, Reservation Blues, received an American Book Award in 1996. In collaboration with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian filmmaker, Alexie adapted a story from that book, “This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” into the screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals, which won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a semiautobiographical novel, appeared from Little, Brown Books for Children and won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. His most recent books are the poetry collection Face from Hanging Loose Press, and War Dances, stories and poems from Grove Press, which was awarded the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Blasphemy, a collection of new and selected stories, appeared in 2012 from Grove Press. He is lucky enough to be a full-time writer and lives with his family in Seattle.
INTRODUCTION
* * *
by Sherman Alexie
In lieu of a conventional introduction, we present these statements by Sherman Alexie and conclude with a poem of his that appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal in 2010:
“Poetry = Anger x Imagination.”
“You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don’t realize it.”
“I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You’re an addict—so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That’s what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing—it would never account for twenty years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.”
“They’ve been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it’s in the hands of the corporate culture. If you’re an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago—that’s not true. I think the same percentage has always read.”
[In reply to “What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?”]: “The collected Harold Bloom!”
“I suppose, as an Indian living in the U.S., I’m used to crossing real and imaginary boundaries, and have, in fact, enjoyed a richer and crazier and more magical life precisely because I have fearlessly and fearfully crossed all sorts of those barriers. I guess I approach my poetry the same way I have approached every other thing in my life. I just don’t like being told what to do. I write whatever feels and sounds right to me. At the beginning of my career, I wrote free verse with some formal influences, but I have lately been writing more formal verse with free verse influences. I don’t feel the need to spend all my time living on either the free verse or the formal reservation. I want it all; hunger is my crime.”
“My earliest interest in formalism came from individual poems rather than certain poets. Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress,’ Roethke’s ‘My Papa’s Waltz,’ Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool,’ and Langston Hughes’s ‘A Dream Deferred’ are poems that come to mind as early formal poems I admired. Speaking both seriously and facetiously, I think I’ve spent my whole career rewriting ‘My Papa’s Waltz’
with an Indian twist. Lately, as I’ve been writing much more formally—with end rhyme, a tenuous dance with meter, and explicit form—I’ve discovered that in writing toward that end rhyme, that accented or unaccented syllable, or that stanza break, I am constantly surprising myself with new ideas, new vocabulary, and new ways of looking at the world. The conscious use of form seems to have freed my subconscious.”
“When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author. Be effusive with your praise. Writing is a lonely business. Do your best to make it a little less lonely.”
“I write poems naturally. I’m writing them all the time. I think it’s more of a reflex talent than fiction is for me. Seems like I have to work harder to write fiction. That said, poems are much more demanding, you have fewer words, you can make fewer mistakes. You know, if you write a ten-line poem, you really can’t make any mistakes. If you do, the poem is terrible. But when you write a novel, you have all that space to mess up in and people are more forgiving. So I think poetry audiences are far more demanding than fiction audiences are.”
“Though I have a reputation for being a Luddite, I actually love the new digital technology and its artistic possibilities. So I have certainly been writing very short stories because they look great on my iPad screen! It’s a callback to my early days of writing. I began my career on a manual typewriter and found that the physical act of pulling a sheet from the typewriter dictated the end of a poem. So I mostly wrote very short poems as a result. But when I moved to a word processor, my poems grew in length. And then I began to write stories and the beginnings of novels. The shape of the machine influences the shape of my work.”
“Non-Indian writers usually say ‘Great Spirit,’ ‘Mother Earth,’ ‘Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged.’ Mixed-blood writers usually say ‘Creator,’ ‘Mother Earth,’ ‘Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged.’ Indian writers usually say ‘God,’ ‘Mother Earth,’ ‘Human Being, Dog, and Bird.’ ”
