Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

No apology is ever enough for the digital mob

Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a marathon crawl on the belly like a reptile, who can flop onto the floor in a pose of the greatest prostration, and who can bend over the farthest, pants down, while begging to have large pieces of furniture shoved up the backside. Athletic displays of public remorse also constitute an increasingly popular spectator sport.

The young American poet Anders Carlson–Wee was excited at first about getting ‘How-To’ published in a July issue of the Nation, a storied New Statesman-style weekly. The poetry I read in a year would fit on a cereal box — it’s not my form — but I still think, for a short 14-liner, ‘How-To’ is nicely done. You don’t need a doctorate in postmodernism to discern that the poem is sympathetic to the homeless. Its point is also apparent: to get passers-by to tithe, a homeless person has to flatter the targets’ moral vanity. The poem ends with advising panhandlers, ‘It’s about who they believe/they is. You hardly even there.’

Alas, because Carlson-Wee is not personally homeless, disabled, or black — not that it should matter, but the implied persona in the poem doesn’t specifically feign to be any of these things — the comments went for his throat. ‘This makes me super uneasy. Do foks [sic] know the Nation doesn’t publish actual disabled people?’ ‘Whether it’s blackface or a poor white dialect, I don’t think this persona is yours to assume… I find the poem pretty offensive.’ ‘THE LAST THING AMERICA NEEDS IS A 21st CENTURY WHITE WHITMAN.’ Even more inane? ‘This also reads like thinly veiled white male scorn of poets who get “handouts” in the literary world by foregrounding their identity and hardship.’

Yet rather than shrug off this highly creative interpretation of his work, our young aspirant posted a passionate apology.

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