A little man belonging to a small tribe of monotheistic wanderers who thought: “Because I feel so small and insignificant, what can I do to exalt myself and my tribe above all others tribes?” I often think about some Leonard Cohen lines from his song The Future when I see fundamentalist Christians waving around the good book as backing to their misguided beliefs about homosexuality or feminism:īecause that is who wrote the Bible, red-faced homophobic fundamentalist preacher man: a flawed, pint-sized human being who probably wouldn’t, orcouldn’t say boo to a ghost. Which is to say that it is probably best not to know too much about the people who create our solace-filling poem-prayers for us. Or what if Hitler or Osama had produced the wonderful paintings we attribute to Van Gogh? Would any of those be hanging in National Collections in the 21st century. I wonder if I would have learnt by heart the following Stevens poem, as monumentally wonderful as it is, had it been written by Adolf Hitler, or Osama Bin Laden? Probably not. But that doesn’t let them or me off the hook. I also suspect that most of the 20th century male poets I have spent weeks memorising were by and large racist and misogynistic, looking back as we now do through slightly more woke spectacles. I suspect that all our heroes have a good deal of clay in their feet, that even the people we would least expect to hear callous and cruel words exiting from their lips would have, at certain times in their lives, said some pretty mean and petty things. What do you do if you’ve memorised a whole number of poems by someone who was probably, occasionally, unacceptably odious in speech and behaviour? It doesn’t really come as a great surprise though if you consider his social background and the era in which he lived, but that doesn’t get him or me off the hook. He also referred to his own poetry as “like decorations at a nigger’s funeral.” And that’s just for starters. I am telling an African-American poet about my love of Wallace Stevens when she gently wonders what my thoughts are on Stevens’ racism. At the 1952 National Book Awards banquet, Stevens seeing Gwendolyn Brooks arriving at the ceremony allegedly said, “Who let the coon in?”.

Gwendolyn brooks about racism