… as in real actual fact checkers… might have helped here; but, really, in a context of close to zero critical capacity in regard to contemporary American poetry, plus an eagerness for ethnic balance, what do you think is going to happen?
Ol’ Yi-Fen is refreshingly honest:
“As a strategy for ‘placing’ poems, [using as Asian name in place of my all-American name] has been quite successful for me,” [Michael Derrick Hudson] said, noting that “The Bees” had been rejected 40 times under his own name but only nine times under the pseudonym before it was printed by the journal Prairie Schooner.
And then picked up for this year’s Best American Poetry collection.
Will it make Best of the Best?
UD doesn’t think so. UD notes that the poem and the poet have given the poetry world major tsuris. Yi-Fen Chou Michael Derrick Hudson looks headed for inclusion in Least-Liked American Poets 2016.
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A far more elaborate Asian-author hoax is discussed here (the discussion includes a quotation from Margaret Soltan UD SOS). It’s also mentioned here, in connection with this latest Let’s Pretend.
Yet more on the Araki Yasusada hoax here. Funny how everyone’s reminded of it.
(My 2000 article on Yasusada is here, but you need to have/buy access.)
(Plus I wrote a follow-up to that piece:
“The Bicameral Mind: Response to Bill Freind’s ‘Just Hoaxing’.” Angelaki 6.3 (2001): 221-24. MLA International Bibliography. Ames Lib. 31 Mar 2008.)
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A limerick? Must I?
Okay.
I cannot help noticing how
When I put words like Yi, Fen, and Chou
At the top of my page
I become all the rage
But everyone’s mad at me now
September 13th, 2015 at 8:02AM
Any chance for Sean O’Kane?
Is it still no Irish need apply.
Just spell it all backward
More exotic
September 13th, 2015 at 9:33AM
Sean O: Transliterate to Hsian-Hua Tseng. Might work.