The Political Hat

     What is a politically correct whipped whelp of a straight White male poet who concomitantly wants to write, but believes that there should be no poems from White males, and that writing from another perspecitve is “colonizing” and “appropriating another person’s experience”?

     According to Elisa Gabbert over at “Electric Literature“, the answer is to Shut Up!

“Instead we should tell men to submit less. Pitch less. Especially white men. You are already over-represented.”

     Oh, straight White males can continue writing, just as long as they keep it in the closet.

     The reasoning is the tired an unoriginal regurgitation about how society is a construct of straight White males who can only write about straight White males and thus from an oppressive viewpoint.

“The white male experience was not more important in the past than it is now. In Western culture, the white male experience has been overexposed, at the expense of other experiences, for centuries. The only difference is that the culture – at least the subculture that’s important to you – no longer accepts the white male perspective as default.”

     This, of course, assumes that straight White males, or anyone else for that matter, are capable of broader world views that are not constrained by hierarchical intersectionality of racial or sexual classifications.   It is an argument that everything that “þe olde DWMs (dead white males)” wrote about is oppressive and a reflection of that oppressive worldview, rather than an exploration of broader truths.

     If you can not read Keats, Kipling, or Coleridge without seeing the greater art and beauty that they have created, then you have no business lecturing anyone about poetry.

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