An Open Letter to Literary Magazines

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An Open Letter to Literary Magazines

Few literary venues, we are talking even
on the dark-web rungs of reputability,
provide homes for transgressive writing.
An all-too-HR agenda to niqab reality
in the mediocritizing name of fostering
trigger-minimal (and so growth-minimal) 
“safe spaces” has metastasized beyond 
office watercoolers and Christmas parties,
into comedy clubs and literary magazines
and even into one of the primary furnaces
of self-improvement—the very place where
citizens go (well, used to go) precisely to be
unsettled: the university classroom! 

The conviction that humans have a right
not to be unsettled, which has spread
from campuses through social media
to the world at large (innocent countries
too), is now championed (read: lucrative)
enough that professors—forced to allow
students to opt-out of triggering readings
(such as ones telling of the Holocaust or
of whatever the power-havers, flouting
the subjective nature of triggers, deem
a true trigger)—can be fired for teaching
the Chinese word for “um” (since, yes, 
it sounds perilously close to the n-word).

No wonder, in light of such an assault
on the freedom to express our humanity, 
that the term “transgressive literature”—
even on rare instances when lit mags
insist they want it, “want it to kick us
in the gut”—has been coopted by what is,
in flagrant truth, an anti-transgressive
program. “Transgressive literature” 
is now, in a twisted perversion, code
for written signals and pledges—done,
no doubt, in a boundary-pushing way 
(there remains that tendril of a link
to transgression)—of fidelity to orthodoxy. 

Transgressive literary works are, in short,
militant HR-memos. Such memos, reliably
titled—and with no hint of irony—“How
To Be Inclusive and Not Offend,” “How
To Promote Diversity,” or so on, push
HR’s due-process-less cancellation plan
to its extreme, demanding that readers—
lest they be unwoke—join in on shaming,
censoring, silencing anyone even alleged
to be associated with anyone even quoting
the expressions of someone—and, yes, 
that someone can be a literary character—
who merely seems guilty of “wrong think.”

Under the banner-pretense of protecting
vulnerable groups from brutal violence,
lit mags seem on the cusp of compelling
submitters to swear that none of their art,
not just their submission, is—what is
that crooked watchword?—“problematic”: 
has a trans character that gets murdered,
or animal abuse, or cuisine nonnative 
to the author, or misogyny, or statistics 
that (however uncontroversial) those
on the margins—well, at least as reported
by their privileged protectors (no longer
always lily white)—would find unsettling. 

How nice it would be—if only to thicken
skins and nurture a space diverse beneath
skins, where we feel empowered to voice
the deepest nuances of our humanity
in the nude (and so, yes, even without
the ever-expanding and ever-thickening
filters of social media)—to see the best,
the most literary, of the most unsettling
examples of truly transgressive writing:
outsider, subversive, unspeakable—think:
Bataille. Is not the right wing, embolismed
by children’s books of crossdressing kids,
supposed to be the wing that bans art?

*This poem has yet to be published (for obvious reasons).

Painting by Manet (The Suicide)