A controversy continued to boil in the poetry community this week over the revelation that one of the poets included in this year’s Best American Poetry anthology was a using a Chinese pseudonym – even though he is a white man named Michael Derrick Hudson.
Now, the New York Times reports that the pseudonym in question – Yi-Fen Chou – is the name of one of Hudson’s former high school classmates from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
While the real-life Chou refused to speak to the paper directly, her sister said that the woman was furious at the appropriation of her name for this purpose. She is asking Hudson to stop using the name. Chou’s sister, Ellen Chou, added that in her own opinion, Hudson’s move showed “careless disregard for Chinese people and for Asians”.
Hudson is a genealogist at the Allen County library in Fort Wayne. His work has been published under his own name in several prestigious American literary journals, such as Poetry and the North American Review.
A screenshot of his biographical note in the anthology began circulating on Monday, in which Hudson admits to using the pseudonym whenever a poem of his has been rejected “several times”. He believed that using the pseudonym increased the chances of his being accepted.
This admission set off a host of criticism and jokes on social media. The reactions are a mixture of serious dismay and ironic frustration. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, for example, produced a “White Pen Name Generator”. Meanwhile, Asian American poet Franny Choi wrote an affecting poem in response to the controversy, exploring the difficult politics of Asian American names.
Sherman Alexie, this year’s editor of the Best American Poetry anthology, wrote a lengthy response to the criticism at his publisher’s blog. In it, he said that when he first chose the poem for the anthology he did not know who Chou was.
“Of course, I was angry at the subterfuge and at myself for being fooled by this guy,” Alexie wrote. “I silently cursed him and wondered how I would deal with this colonial theft.” But he kept the poem in, saying that although he objected to the use of the pseudonym, “nepotism is as common as oxygen”.
