FROM THE VAULTS #6: SENSE & SENSITIVITY

BEING A PERSONAL LOOK AT SOME OF THE FINER POINTS OF THE SOME KIDS/ KATE CLANCHY NONTROVERSY 2021/22

I just found this on my old laptop. I can’t think now where it was destined for or why I bothered, but the main thrust of the argument still stands, so here it is…

I don't agree with Kate Clanchy. Although I think she makes some valid points. Actually, scrap that. I think she uses some valid points in a rather cynical and manipulative way. I think she performs a slinky little misdirection, as in 'Look at these over-zealous fuckwits! They don't even understand irony!' while entirely refusing to engage with the more substantive criticism of her work, which is not emanating from sensitivity readers at all, but from scholars, critics, authors and educators. Obviously social-media metrics are a dangerously shallow criteria for ascribing literary worth. But social-media metrics were not responsible for the criticism of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. In a fairly recent article for UnHerd, Clanchy presents herself as the victim of a rabid and sub-literate wokeness, her work picked over and filleted by obnoxious Instagram narcissists. It's a mildly horrifying tale. It is designed to horrify. We're supposed to wonder if we might be next. We're supposed to leap to her defence, protecting a thing we love from these barbarians at the gate. To side with Clanchy is to stand tall for depth, nuance, and difficulty, all things that matter enormously to literature. She wants us to see her fate as emblematic of a disturbing trend within publishing: the cultural ascendency of the sensitivity reader.

But she isn't emblematic. Clanchy is not some kind of martyr in these phoney-baloney culture wars. As the article itself points out, she was not at any time placed in a position where she had to accept the readers' dispiriting changes. She could afford not to care what those people thought; she had the security, access and opportunity for that. She ignored their suggestions and walked away; the title in question was picked up unexpurgated by another imprint. I don't doubt it's unpleasant to have your work mauled by ironically insensitive “experts”, but there are greater indignities than that perpetrated in publishing every single day. The persons who tend to be on the receiving end of those indignities write from subject positions more akin to Clanchy's students than to Clanchy herself.

I also think it's worth pointing out that the readers let loose on Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me were not any kind of pre-emptive strike against rational thought and free speech. Rather, they represent the emergency manoeuvres of a compromised and embarrassed publisher who didn't do their due diligence to begin with. They were a rushed and not especially measured response to a situation Clanchy and her publisher created, a band-aid hastily and retroactively applied. There is no substitute for a granular and engaged edit. It would be disturbing indeed if these kinds of tick-box panels came to replace that rigorous and necessary process, but clearly something is needed, or else how did Some Kids achieve the status and acclaim that it did; how did it pass through so many pairs of hands without somebody at least querying those problematic passages? That the criticism comes as such a shock to Clanchy supports the idea that no one involved in seeing the book through to publication; none of its initial reviewers, none of the judging panels for the book's various prizes raised any issues around the representation of Clanchy's students. That says a lot about who occupies these positions in U.K publishing. That says a lot about the kinds of unconscious attitudes transmitted and embedded through language. It says that those in authoritative positions within U.K publishing are not those who live in sensitised communion with such language. That clearly needs to change, and sensitivity readers are no substitute; they represent a failure to address a deeper, more abiding inequality. That said, an intentional and attentive reading of any text needs to be engaged in by someone; someone needs to have those questioning, curious and probing conversations with authors. We need that, desperately.

So yes, Clanchy's readers were ding-dongs. From bitter past experience (more of that anon) I think a lot of them probably are. But the role is relatively new, it still needs to be strengthened and refined; fulfilled by people who read widely and passionately, people from across a broad spectrum of the literature-loving world. A few years back I found myself in the position of performing this role, albeit in a minor and certainly unlooked for way, sifting submissions for a university journal of creative writing. On the whole the process was fun. Our job was to read all the submissions, make a few notes on each text, argue for inclusion or exclusion with varying degrees of passion, and generally whittle down the slush pile. Mostly we agreed, or we disagreed over points of style and clarity. We were all nice people, broadly on the side of right (left). Further, we knew what we were about, we were clever and we read with vigilance and insight. While we weren't on the look-out for potential offence, we considered ourselves – with not a little self-satisfied confidence – to be aware and awake enough to recognise even the subtler forms of prejudice and bigotry when we saw them. We believed this of ourselves and of each other. I believed it of my colleagues. Until The Gypsy Incident.

Even now I find it difficult to put into words my reaction to this story, and I don't particularly want to dwell on the piece except to say that it dealt with the protagonist's holiday romance and formative sexual experience with an Irish Traveller girl, and that it was grotesque. The story misrepresented just about every single aspect of Traveller culture it is possible to misrepresent. It fetishised the girl into a seething semi-feral mass of sub-literate carnality. It reduced her as a woman and it reduced her culture to a few shop-soiled tropes. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Cher song, 'Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves' offered a more nuanced portrayal of Traveller life and identity than this story. I felt furious, and obscurely insulted and used. I took comfort in the fact that the wrongness of this piece would be just as blindingly obvious to the other volunteers as it was to me, and that this racist, misogynist twaddle stood not a snowball's chance in hell of getting into the journal. Imagine my shock when my fellow readers not only failed to flag up the piece's awfulness, but in some cases argued for its inclusion. I felt betrayed, disappointed, let down; by the end of our meeting I think I was shouting. It was crazy-making, like I was running up and down screaming “Soylent Green is People!” to a row of narcotised and nonplussed faces. In the end, everyone acquiesced with what they clearly thought were my hysterical demands, but the damage had been done: I couldn't look at them the same way again. To have accepted this story as “okay” meant that the toxic representations it traded in had been consumed by all of these nice liberal lefties as fact. Or else it meant they didn't care that those ideas were wrong, because the journal wasn't for Traveller girls, so why give a shit about how they were represented? I couldn't decide which was worse.

It took me a while to calm down and stop feeling so uniquely victimised. When I pulled my head from out my arse I realised two things: what I had just experienced was one millionth of a fragment of what my black and brown friends experience every single day within elite literary space. It's the pain of inhabiting a culture set up specifically to exclude you; it's the pain of an implied white audience, an implied middle-class audience. Which is also an implied gadje audience. Who knew? I also found myself wondering about my own blind-spots. Like my colleagues, I'd been arrogant enough to assume that I had none. But if they could miss something so obvious to me, what, in my turn, was I missing? The answer to this is not embattled defensiveness, nor is it some hand-wringing extrovert performance of liberal guilt. The answer is listening; it's attention, care, a radical tenderness toward the o/Other(ed) and a proper respect for the power of words. All of this is work. Hard work. A life's work, infinite, expanding, and by necessity never complete. It demands a vulnerable openness that is its own reward. It isn't easy, and progress is slow, so what is wrong with making these kinds of work part of the editorial process? Why shouldn't dedicated people perform these tasks? Clanchy's article talks about how craven and inattentive modern publishers (specifically her former publisher) have become with regards to their authors. I can't imagine a better antidote to this than offering writers that sustained and probing engagement with their text. Care is critical as well as appreciative, in its best form it furthers and expands our art as well as our political sensitivities. It seems an obvious point but reducing human beings to tropes – to racialised and classed thumb-nail sketches – isn't just morally and politically suspect, it's also lazy writing, it's boring writing. If publishers and editors believe in their writers, then expecting and demanding better of them is not an act of hostility, it's a vote of confidence, it's an honour.

All of that said, sensitivity reading in its current incarnation leaves a lot to be desired. I think in part because the scrutiny of the text is not matched by – or is substituted for – a similar scrutiny of real-world interactions and their power dynamics. To explain what I mean I'll share my own experience with the sensitivity readers: in 2019 my poem 'in the presence of enemies' was accepted by Poetry Magazine. It was accepted so quickly and so enthusiastically that it made my head spin. I was overjoyed. Being in Poetry felt legitimating and powerful. I had the sense of finally making headway with my writing, of gaining in craft and carving out space. It also represented a payday I truly needed. Poetry Magazine pay well. For someone like me, that's not just nice, that's necessary.

The poem accepted, and slated to appear in the next issue, I received the proofs and the usual queries about typos, punctuation and my idiosyncratic turns of phrase (did you really mean to say that?). I answered questions and okayed corrections where necessary. Then I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Eventually an email arrived from the magazine's assistant editor to say that certain lines in my poem had been flagged as problematic by their sensitivity readers. The fuck are sensitivity readers? I asked myself. Googling 'What the fuck are sensitivity readers?' I began to bristle. Problematic? Offensive? Probably. But name me one exciting piece of art that isn't! I'm with Gene Genet when it comes to poetry: use menace, use prayer. Engage with troubling language, especially if that language is a reflection of the vernacular you write from, or the epithets that have been applied to you. How do we wrestle with the violence words contain if we shy away from violent words? Did they not understand this? What the fuck were they talking about? As it turns out they weren't talking about what I assumed they were talking about. The specific lines they had flagged as problematic were: '‘merica. incessant and beseeching mouth./ inevitable, absolute, obese with teeth' (anti-American and fat-phobic) and ' inside a city, disfigured into labyrinth, cradling our/broken phones. there’s a crack in the blind glass' (ableist). And my initial reaction was, cards on the table, quite Clanchy-like. Yes, the line was anti-American. The whole poem was anti-American, because the poem is anti-imperialist and America is the white hot centre of our neo-liberal vortex. But the poem is not anti-American people. It is anti-Trump, it is anti a rapacious and destructive capitalism that seduces as it consumes, literalised in the image of a disembodied and monstrous mouth. And 'obese' is a medical import to suggest a grotesque exaggeration of toothsomeness, a gameshow smile so outlandish in its proportions as to have become morbid and scary. I had anorexia, I nearly fucking died, so my poetry is not and never will be “fat-phobic”, for fuck's sake you absolute pricks! As for 'blind', the all-seeing eye in the sequence – which sometimes stands for God, sometimes for state surveillance – in this passage represented by and concentrate in the image of phone, is literally sightless. What else would you call that? Words have determinant meanings. God! I was so angry. But as I started to correspond first with the assistant editor, and then with Poetry's editor at the time, Don Share, I began to feel differently.

Which is not to say that I was won over to anyone else's point of view, but some of the conversations we started having about how a poem might exist to honour both its literary and civic selves were really rewarding and interesting in their own right. Words do have determinant meanings, but they also have long histories; they accrete associations, they are full of freight. I'd never been very interested in Poet as some kind of privileged category, responsible to and solely dominant in the poem. Words are part of the world; I am striving to account for the complex network of sensitivities through which language operates and in which we live. How can a poem achieve this? How do we bring that freight into focus without simply replicating the way much lyric poetry omnivorously deploys words regardless of their human context and consideration? Whether I agreed about those particular lines or not was almost beside the point: the conversation was worth having. I profited by it, and the poem profited too.

I changed the contentious lines. The version of 'presence' that still appears on the Poetry Foundation website replaces 'obese' with 'replete' and 'blind' with 'oblivious'. As a result of having to make these changes the architecture of the poem changed too, and I had to think more carefully and critically about what I wanted to say. 'Replete' is a big change, but it does better work: sonically it preserves the poem's aural shape, while conjuring something carnally and morally threatening as opposed to coldly, medically unhealthy. 'Oblivious' too is better. It carries a sense of willed inattention, a refusal to look, a feckless lack of concern for the world it (and by 'it' I mean neo-liberal culture) has created. I might not have been stoked about the reasons for these changes, but in revisiting the poem I made it better, more precise, more nuanced. That's never not positive.

There are some who might think that my decision to make those changes is capitulation to the forces of political correctness gone mad. To those people I would say catch yourself on: the original poem cannot be unwritten. The option always existed for me to publish an unchanged version elsewhere (I'm lucky), and indeed, a pre-edited version of 'presence' does make it into Raptures and Captures. I still don't know which I consider the ultimate – if such a thing even exists – version of the poem, but I'm at peace with not knowing. I might at some point revisit it. I like it, but there are other moments in the poem where the language sits uneasily with me. Does the work those words and phrases do justify their inclusion? Again, thinking these things through is a life's work. I see no reason to be afraid of it. It's also worth pointing out that other journals exist. There are maybe five other places that would have published the piece as was, but I wanted the status claim and the real cash money that came with being in Poetry Magazine. A writer's life is full of such daily compromises. And they could have rejected the piece altogether, but they didn't. The process was at least trying to be more collaborative than that.

So I'm fine with sensitivity readers? Well, no. And here's the thing: this back and forth went on for such a long time that my poem did not appear in the issue it was slated to appear in, but in the following issue instead. That might not matter to everyone, but it mattered to me. I had been counting on that money. I had really been counting on that money. This was the period where my employer just straight up “forgot” to pay me. For fucking ages. And where their “emergency” procedures for sorting this out and releasing my back-pay were taking forever. I was borrowing money to get into work to do a job that couldn't be arsed to pay me for the labour it extracted. It was a bleak, bleak time. So while sensitivity readers were filleting my poem for the hypothetical offence my words might cause theoretical readers, I – an actual marginalised person who definitely does exist – was being jammed up and caused harm by their hair-splitting. So my feelings were, and still are, ambivalent.

And if I felt conflicted in 2019, that's nothing to how I'd come to feel in 2021, when Poetry Magazine published their guest-edited issue on 'Incarcerated Voices' and chose to include the work of convicted and self-confessed paedophile, Kirk Nesset. I've written about this a lot, and I won't rehash it all now, except to say – before anyone starts – that predominantly and disproportionately, to the point of epidemic, prisoners in the U.S (where Poetry Magazine is based) are young black men. The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Including China, with a population of over 1.3 billion. Over a third of American prisoners are black. Roughly thirteen percent of the population of the U.S is black. The criminal justice system in America is created and contoured by a culture that sees African Americans as inherently prone to criminality, and therefore the proper subjects of punitive control and imprisonment by the state. And so I kept thinking about those people: victims of a rigged system, victims of unjust justice, victims of abuse, victims of carceral violence. People who must have been delighted and proud to have their work featured in that issue of Poetry Magazine, and how shitty it must have felt for them to find themselves conceptually grouped with a child sex offender. What must the magazine think of you to denigrate your experience in this way? And sexual abuse is not like other crimes: it's not a bad choice or your worst day; it's not a single life-destroying event. It is systemic and deliberate; patterned and planned. It can only take place within the context of a grossly unequal relationship: between abuser and abused, perpetrator and victim. It is about power. Most abuse rings are made up of white men. And of course: power and privilege facilitate and conceal abuse. Kirk Nesset is a former tenured Professor of English Literature at Allegheny College and the recipient of numerous literary awards. His publication in Poetry Magazine struck me as a million billion kinds of wrong. But when Poetry was challenged about their decision they doubled down: “People in prison have been sentenced and are serving/have served those sentences; it is not our role to further judge or punish them as a result of their criminal convictions. As editors, our role is to read poems and facilitate conversations around contemporary poetry.” Jesus wept. Smug much? I'm all for rehabilitation. I'm all for second chances. But Poetry Magazine is not responsible for doling out or adjudicating on those things either. They are responsible to the entire community of writers whose work they publish, some of whom – just statistically – will have been the victims of sexual abuse. And my point in bringing this up again was that you can't – or rather in an ideal world, you shouldn't – apply a “sensitivity” to the text that you are not prepared to bring to your practices and decisions as editor and publisher. If the onus is always on the – often marginal, often vulnerable – creative to carry the burden of responsibility for sensitivity work, then that simply serves to reinscribe an enormously unfair balance of power, while doing nothing to address the glaring systemic inequalities that operate in and across art and literature. I get the feeling with a lot of this semantic tinkering that being aghast at a hangnail is preventing the industry from looking at the great big gaping hole in its heart. Also, in case in anyone was interested, the Nesset poem was proper shite.

So where does this leave us? What's my point? Nowhere, really. Nothing. Except to say that these are the kinds of knotty, difficult conversations we need to be having about sensitivity reading, and the debate deserves better, less self-serving spokespersons than Kate Clanchy.