Listless (II)

Okay, I'll confess: I've been following some of the responses on the Poetics list to my sign-off. Yes, I did unsubscribe; but since a few folks have been cc-ing me with their posts to the list, my curiosity's gotten the better of me.

Actually, I find looking at the list via the web archive much less unpleasant than having things land in my inbox. Perhaps that's why the rhetoric on the list is so upsetting; it's easier to distance oneself from something that's on a website than something that lands in one's own personal mailbox. It goes from mere language to an attack.

I find it interesting that two of the people who spoke up most generously in my defense, Nick Piombino and Stephen Vincent, are both folks who have a major blog presence as well; there were also interesting responses from CAConrad and Richard Newman. I was rather (pleasantly) surprised to find what sounded like a regretful note from Andrew Loewen, whose poetry I had previously cited as an example of the list's anti-Asian rhetoric.

There were, of course, the predictable responses from the peanut gallery. (I think of these men as something like the two old guys on The Muppet Show who hurl abuse down from the balcony.) I was variously labeled "too sensitive," "melodramatic," and "up-to-no-good" (this last from a guy who thinks that no one should ever talk about race), not to mention taunted with refrains of "chinaman."