On apologies and poetry, Grace Schulman in NYT:

'But never did we apologize for a poem we published. We saw it as part of our job to provoke our readers — a mission we took especially seriously in serving the magazine’s absolute devotion to a free press.

We followed a path blazed by Henry James, who in 1865 wrote a damning review of Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” calling the great poem “arrant prose.” Mistaken, yes, but it was James’s view at the time. And it was never retracted.

Apparently the magazine has abandoned this storied tradition.

Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.

Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.”

I was deeply disturbed by this episode, which touches on a value that is precious to me and to a free society: the freedom to write and to publish views that may be offensive to some readers.

In my years at The Nation, I was inspired by the practical workings of a free press. We lived by Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” And no one was a greater defender of press freedom and of writers’ right to be wrong than Victor Navasky, who succeeded Blair Clark as editor in chief in 1978.'

Read the article here.

Yes, the freedom of press, publishing articles, poems and aphorisms that may be offensive to readers. The question is whether all offensive articles need to be published, and above all, how far do we want to go with this stay-in-your-lane rhetoric.

Can we accept a gentile impersonating a Jew with a heavily Yiddish accent? If we cannot accept this we may as well get rid of most literature. Purity is always the enemy, whether the desire for purity comes from the right or from the left is not that important.