TW: Racist tropes, white privilege
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So was doing my morning read on poetry news and came across this.
I’ve not read the book myself, and now it looks like I won’t be able to. Will have to see if I can hunt it down after writing this.
A well respected (at the time I guess) teacher released an anthology of poems about her students, which won her an MBE and the Orwell price but has now been picked apart, with the poet bullied and ‘cancelled.’
Some have said the book is FILLED with racist tropes. However, many of her students who know her personally have come to her defence!
So what do we think? I’d really like an open and respectful discussion on this. I will be monitoring the comments closely and as a global community I encourage everyone to be mindful of what they say. Otherwise we will have to close the thread.
From reading the article, Picador should have a magnifying glass on them, too!
I find cancel culture a bit anxiety inducing to be honest. I mean, I'm not a celebrity or youtuber. I have less than 100 followers on tiktok and less than 500 on Instagram. And to be honest, not many people see my content and that's fine. I mostly use them to track my 'adventures' and reading history or whatever.
However, I've seen influencers, youtubers, actual celebrities, lose entire careers because of tweets posted when they were in their teens. To be clear: I obviously don't condone any form of prejudice or offense. But a person can learn a lot between one ignorant tweet as a teen to their career as an actual adult. I hope that makes sense.
I mean, if someone exhibits habitual prejudice/offensive behaviour then, yes, absolutely, they should suffer the consequences.
To put it into finer context, I've seen people on tiktok 'calling out' celebrities just for not publicly addressing an issue. Is that the same as being prejudice/homophobia/racism/sexism? Personally, I don't think so. I've also seen tiktok condemn an author for not being diverse enough in her books. However, as a white person, I don't always feel comfortable writing about other cultures. I understand there's such a thing as research but even then, as a white person, I fear I'm going to be seen as trying too hard.
On a similar note, in a lot of my fiction, I write a lot of queer female characters. That isn't to say that I have anything against any other genders or queer relationships but I'm more comfortable writing from a female perspective but would I be criticised for not writing about trans people and other LGBTQ+ relationships?
No one reads my fiction but this is what I think about.
And I think @Shen Friebe and I had a bit of a discussion about poetry on @Adam Gary 's 'What Happened to Poetry?' thread (though I could be wrong because I've slept since then!) and I basically said that I feel like there's a lot of pressure on poets to address issues. I mostly write about my depression and my family. Just because I'm not writing about feminisim, that doesn't make me not a feminist.
I hope this post makes sense at least.