I was on Facebook one day when I happened to see an event schedule for the super-woke nonprofit Literary Arts Bookstore we have here in Portland.
I looked through the store's calendar. Most of the events were what you would expect: a young woman presenting her trauma memoir, a BIPOC reading night, a Chinese woman’s immigration story, a female brain surgeon’s journey through the sexist medical field ...
All three of them knew exactly what they were allowed to write about. And they stayed inside those bounds.
Then I saw something strange. It was an event that featured three young white guys.
You don’t see a lot of literary readings by white guys in Portland. Or anywhere else. We’ve been at a low ebb of white guys in any kind of literary undertaking in recent years, unless they have written a book about their own toxicity or are revealing the secrets of the patriarchy.
Maybe they were gay, or trans, or of some unusual ethnicity. Maybe they claimed to be Native American, like Elizabeth Warren.
But their descriptions didn’t include any of those things. They were just three normal-looking white guys. They were poets.
But that couldn’t be right. There had to be a catch.
The good, the bad, and the certified
Reading through the listing, I saw they had a lot of credentials. That made sense. You couldn’t just have three white guys reading poetry, unless they were seriously vetted and certified.
All three of them had master’s degrees in the fine arts. One guy had a Ph.D. They had all won various poetry prizes. They had received poetry fellowships. They had held prestigious teaching positions. They were associate editors of important journals.
In short, they had jumped through every hoop, subjugated themselves in every way, to be accepted into the woke academic poetry community — which typically hates people like them.
Eyewitness to the improbable
Of course I went to the reading. I wasn’t going to miss this. And anyway, I still assumed there was some angle. Some extenuating circumstance.
I arrived and took a seat. There were a lot of people there. Were the other attendees thinking what I was thinking? How did these guys get this gig?
They were all young and good-looking. That probably helped. The first guy was from Los Angeles. His poetry was about his difficult childhood under his football-coach father. Now he had a son of his own, which he had complicated feelings about.
The next guy looked like he might be gay. But he too had a son. And a wife. And a house, apparently. He was smartly dressed and very personable. He looked like a young literature professor, back before such jobs became contentious and problematic.
The last guy was younger than the other two. He did interesting things with poetry “on the page,” blacking out words and then crafting poems out of those that remained.
He was clearly talented, but appeared oblivious to the ill-will he no doubt generated within the poetry community — taking up space as a privileged white male, while disadvantaged bodies struggled against systemic oppression.
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O.W. Root
Silos
The one thing I noticed about all three of the poets: they were “siloed” in what they wrote about. They rarely addressed anything outside their immediate familial situations. Their homes. Their sons. Their fathers. Their memories of those things.
They did not write about their neighbors. Or the unrest in the streets. Or the identity politics that rule over all of us.
They had learned to stay very close to home in their writing. No politics. No social commentary. Nothing controversial. No unruly thoughts. No sex or desire or horniness. It was all extremely contained.
All three of them knew exactly what they were allowed to write about. And they stayed inside those bounds.
One small step for man
Still, they were there. They were reading in public. The Literary Arts woman who introduced them — gay, nose-ringed, POC — even made a joke about how shocked her colleagues were by their presence.
Afterward, they signed books and mingled with the public. I stayed around for that. I felt a sense of relief from the crowd and from the poets themselves. Nobody had protested their presence. Nothing bad had happened.
It seemed like white dudes were back. Within limits. And as long as they stuck to the script. And knew their place. And didn’t, you know, act too much like men.