"The Nation Magazine Betrays a Poet — and Itself/I was the magazine’s poetry editor for 35 years. Never once did we apologize for publishing a poem."

Writes Grace Shulman (in the NYT).

We followed a path blazed by Henry James, who in 1865 wrote a damning review of Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” calling the great poem “arrant prose.” Mistaken, yes, but it was James’s view at the time. And it was never retracted....

Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.

Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.”...

As Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, put it, the magazine’s apology for Mr. Carlson-Wee’s work was “craven” and “looks like a letter from re-education camp.”...

It would not be proper for me to comment on the aesthetic merits of Mr. Carlson-Wee’s piece. That’s the job of the magazine’s current poetry editors. But going forward, I’d recommend they follow Henry James’s example. Just as he never apologized for his negative review of Whitman, they had zero reason to regret their decision.

You can read the poem and The Nation's apology here. Give The Nation some credit: It left the poem up. It just has this heavy-handed "Editor's note" introducing it. I'll reprint the whole thing:

Editor’s note: On July 24, 2018, The Nation and its poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, made this statement about the poem below, which contains disparaging and ableist language that has given offense and caused harm to members of several communities:

As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received. We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem “How-To.” We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem. We recognize that we must now earn your trust back. Some of our readers have asked what we were thinking. When we read the poem we took it as a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization. We can no longer read the poem in that way.

We are currently revising our process for solicited and unsolicited submissions. But more importantly, we are listening, and we are working. We are grateful for the insightful critiques we have heard, but we know that the onus of change is on us, and we take that responsibility seriously. In the end, this decision means that we need to step back and look at not only our editing process, but at ourselves as editors.

Now, you might want to read the poem too. I've read it twice, so... not enough. Not enough to have a solid opinion, but let me try. The voice is that of a black person, talking to other black people, explaining how to to collect money from the white people who pass by. The poem is called "How-To." The key insight is that you get money by causing white people to think about who they are and to be motivated to give you money because they were made to think that the person who gives you money is the person they want to be. So you succeed if you essentially cease to be and transform yourself into the image of whatever it is that jogs them into feeling they need to be the person who helps you. That key insight follows a how-to list of ways to be that inauthentic person who gets white people to give you money.

Is the main problem that the white poet had the nerve to appropriate a black voice or is it that he portrayed black people as pathetic and conniving? Or is it that he portrayed white people helping black people as a matter of white narcissism?

"Some of our readers have asked what we were thinking," the editor's note says. It doesn't say "Some of our readers who are persons of color have asked..." I'm thinking the "some of our readers" who asked are like some of their readers generally: white people. As the black voice in the poem says: "It’s about who they believe/they is. You hardly even there."

"In the end, this decision means that we need to step back and look at not only our editing process, but at ourselves as editors." See? That reinforces the poet's insight. It's about "ourselves as editors" —  It’s about who they believe/they is.

Grace Shulman, in her NYT op-ed, is also looking at the editors looking at themselves as editors. She's offering the idea that who they are is: The people who never retract a poem or a criticism of a poem, the people who let Henry James write that Walt Whitman was writing "arrant prose" and not poetry at all.

It's all a debate about who we white people are.

I write all that provisionally, aware that I have not looked up all the names of the various editors to see if everyone or mostly everyone is white.

Just one more thing. I have to laugh at "We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem." Not because I laugh at pain. It's just so absurd to think that "many communities" are reading a poem! The Nation has a circulation of about 100,000. I don't know the demographics, but I'm just going to guess it's white people. And I bet only a tiny proportion of those who flip through the magazine stop and read the poem. I think poems in the magazines that have poems are mostly there to be noticed on the level of there's a poem... I'm reading a magazine that has a poem... what a high-quality person I seem to be....