WHITE POET LIES ABOUT BEING ASIAN, GETS PUBLISHED

A poet from Fort Wayne, Indiana, named Michael Derrick Hudson, was having trouble getting his poetry published. It was rejected 40 times. So, he changed his name to “Yi-Fen Chou”, and has since done very well for himself in the brutal world of published poetry. Hudson is a genealogist at the Allen County Public Library. His poem — “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” — was selected for the 2015 edition of “Best American Poetry”. Sherman Alexie, the editor who selected the poem for the annual anthology, said he only learned that Yi-Fen Chou was a pseudonym used by a white man after he’d already picked the poem and Hudson promptly wrote to reveal himself. Hudson explained that changing his name as an author helped his poetry career. “There is a very short answer for my use of a nom de plume: after a poem of mine has been rejected a multitude of times under my real name, I put Yi-Fen’s name on it and send it out again. As a strategy for ‘placing’ poems this has been quite successful for me.”
Some online commenters have called for the removal of the poem from the book. Phil Yu, who runs the blog “AngryAsianMan.com,” wrote online, “Folks, if there is such a thing as employing yellowface in poetry, this has to be it.” Editor Alexie says that to now reject the poem would imply that he chose poems based only on identity. But, he says, “In the end, I chose each poem in the anthology because I love it. And to deny my love for any of them is to deny my love for all of them.”
* “Best American Poetry”. There’s your first scam right there.
* This guy lying about his race affects literally fours of people.
* The clues were there. His name, Yi-Fen Chou, is an anagram of “I con yu, hef”.
* About that AngryAsianMan guy – how do we know he’s, you know, a, uh, man? Or even angry?
* The “brutal world of published poetry”? Let’s not oversell this thing.
* It’s like if you want to sell a novel – better get a Russian name.
*

Here is the actual poem, “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve”:

Huh! That bumblebee looks ridiculous staggering its way
across those blue flowers, the ones I can never
remember the name of. Do you know the old engineer’s
joke: that, theoretically, bees can’t fly? But they look so
perfect together, like Absolute Purpose incarnate: one bee
plus one blue flower equals about a billion
years of symbiosis. Which leads me to wonder what it is
I’m doing here, peering through a lens at the thigh-pouches
stuffed with pollen and the baffling intricacies
of stamen and pistil. Am I supposed to say something, add
a soundtrack and voiceover? My life’s spent
running an inept tour for my own sad swindle of a vacation
until every goddamned thing’s reduced to botched captions
and dabs of misinformation in fractured,
not-quite-right English: Here sir, that’s the very place Jesus
wept. The Colosseum sprouts and blooms with leftover seeds
pooped by ancient tigers. Poseidon diddled
Philomel in the warm slap of this ankle-deep surf to the dying
stings of a thousand jellyfish. There, probably,
atop yonder scraggly hillock, Adam should’ve said no to Eve.
* Rhymes, people, Rhymes!!!
* I’m calling this one: the poem sucks.
* He could sign it Robert Frost and it would still suck.