Open letters have become ransom notes

In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary genre exhibit striking similarities to the ransom note.

During June’s riots following George Floyd’s murder, a beloved independent bookstore in Denver called The Tattered Cover posted online that the shop would be politically impartial, the better to remain a neutral space for customers. Cue local outrage. Cue the store’s immediate volte-face: fulsome support for Black Lives Matter.

The reversal proved unsatisfactory. Signed by miffed patrons and authors, an open letter to the owners listed ten demands. Among them, the shop must hire more ‘individuals from marginalised backgrounds’, especially at management level, which would presumably entail sacking existing staff; re-configure its stock of books to ‘adequately reflect’ US demographics; donate 10 per cent of its paid promotional space to minority writers; never call the police when disruptive customers are black; and install a ‘voting-empowered board’ of ‘relevant community members’ to control programming. So much for being an ‘independent’. As my brother emailed: ‘Maybe they should burn down their own bookstore in solidarity.’

Meanwhile, the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation expressed formal camaraderie with ‘the black community’ and denounced ‘systemic racism’. An open letter decried this statement as ‘worse than the bare minimum’. Signed by hundreds of beneficiaries — poets whom the Foundation had awarded grants and whose publication it had facilitated — the letter listed five demands. These included: replace the president with someone ‘affirming for people of colour, disabled people, trans people, queer people, and immigrants’; drastically diversify staff (thus firing current employees); and redistribute ‘every cent’ of the Foundation’s ‘massive wealth hoarding’, directing the bulk towards literary work that is ‘explicitly anti-racist’. Contemporary poetry can be a slog at the best of times.