Pen name sparks firestorm: poetic injustice?
No ink is bad ink, the saying goes. When it comes to publishing, scandals only help sales, even in the rarified world of modern poetry.
The latest flak to get literary knickers in a twist was the revelation that a middle-aged white guy from Fort Wayne, Indiana, by the name of Michael Derrick Hudson, got a poem published - and selected for The Best American Poetry 2015 anthology - under a Chinese pen name - Yi-Fen Chou.
Hudson admitted he called himself Yi-Fen Chou because the poem had been rejected 40 times under his own name (and nine times under Yi-Fen Chou before finally being accepted). The 20-line poem, which is only slightly longer than its title - The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve - first appeared in the Fall 2014 edition of the Prairie Schooner, a literary quarterly out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, along with three other poems by "Yi-Fen Chou".
