It wasn’t until 2025 that the trouble reached my door. But it began long before that, in June 2020, after the death of George Floyd. The Poetry Foundation, a richly endowed arts organization, was condemned by a group of thirty poets after it published a note of “solidarity with the Black community” that the poets viewed as “non-substantive.” In their letter, the poets—former recipients of its fellowships, including Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, and Kaveh Akbar—demanded sweeping changes. The leadership, as they saw it, was ineffective, insensitive to the hour, and had to resign. The signatories demanded that funds be distributed to a particular class of poets (black, Hispanic) and to specific organizations, such as Assata’s Daughters (“a queer Black woman-led and youth-focused organization rooted in Black Radical Tradition,” according to its website). The letter received more than 1,800 signatures. Four days after its publication, the Poetry Foundation’s president and board chair resigned.
“Trouble reached my door.”
The same month, Poetry’s editor, Don Share, resigned over the publication of a poem by Michael Dickman that someone on Twitter said was racist, leading to a broader outcry. Share offered an apology and removed the poem from Poetry’s website before he left.
What was happening at Poetry was happening at literary platforms across the United States. Magazines and prizes began putting statements on their websites about their opposition to systemic racism and commitment to improving access. Some introduced free reading periods for BIPOC writers. It became necessary (even at Poetry, a magazine famously founded with an “Open Door” policy) to state your pronouns to submit.
Things simmered down for two years. But in 2023, with the war in Gaza, writers were back at each other’s throats. The Poetry Foundation was not spared. This time it was over the retraction of a review that was critical of Zionism. Over 2,000 poets signed a letter to boycott the Foundation. What was offensive to the signees (and to the many pro-Palestinian editors who resigned in protest at other places like Guernica and Palette) was not censorship. It was what they believed to be the organization’s complicity. Its neutral stance, to their minds, meant that it sided with Zionists.
I observed all this from a distance, until July 2025, when I received an email informing me of my selection as a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow. It was thrilling. I had doubted that I would be selected, since I am a Nigerian who lives in Nigeria and the National Book Critics Circle is based in the United States. But it happened that I was one of the eleven fellows. Shortly after the names and faces of the new fellows were made public, just before the program commenced, I received an email from the board members asking when I would be available for a Zoom call.
On the call, I was told of an email they had received about a tweet I made in 2023. In the tweet, I said that “The Bible does not support homosexuality. I stand with the Bible.” I went on to explain in the thread that I did not for that reason support the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act signed into law in 2014 by former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, because the state has no right to legislate on matters reserved solely for God’s desk.
I acknowledged the fact that I had sent the tweet and explained that it reflected my Christian beliefs. As a critic, I added, I have reviewed and written about queer writers, literature being literature and not religion. Under the same tweet, someone asked me why, being a Christian, I had praised Arinze Ifeakandu’s story “God’s Children Are Little Broken Things,” a lush tale about two young gay men and Catholicism. I answered that it was beautifully written.
We went back and forth on the Zoom call. I was given to know that my presence in the program was likely to pose a threat to other fellows, because I hold orthodox Christian views on sexuality. “I believe we are in the program to discuss literature and not sexuality,” I replied, “and if these are critics, should they not be able to hold difficult conversations?” When it became clear just how unwelcome my presence would be, I offered to leave in the interest of the other fellows. I was only one man. There were ten other people in the program.
“I would also not be able to say that I was in the program.”
On a second call, I was told that the National Book Critics Circle had bylaws designed to protect the interests of LGBTQ+ writers, and that conforming with them meant I had two options. One, I could have the fellowship in a hybrid format. I would only interact with one board member (Adam Dalva, the president), without any contact with the other fellows. I would also not be able to say that I was in the program, because public acknowledgment of me could trigger the queer fellows. And the board members I spoke with—Isabella Corletto and the novelist Rishi Reddi, in addition to Dalva—didn’t want that to happen.
Or I could leave the program.
I chose the latter. My name was quietly removed from the website where the main announcement was made (it still appears in a newsletter here). And, as we say here in Nigeria, just like that I was out of a program they reassured me I had deserved (“You were one of the few applicants that we were clear about from the start of the process”).
I have no doubts at all that the board members thought they were doing good, as do other organizations that have taken decidedly political stances in recent years. And some of the developments cannot be faulted in terms of their aim. I have profited from free submission periods for black writers, though I am often uneasy about the term “marginalized” (which never includes white writers).
But something about the current drift of things is concerning. In 1946, George Orwell articulated some of the reasons in his essay “The Prevention of Literature.” “But what is sinister,” Orwell says, “is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most . . . The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.”
It is sinister, especially, when looked at through poetry. Orwell believed that even under a climate of censorship, poets can thrive: “The destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order.” The poet is last on the list because tyrants do not have the sense to get what he is saying (or to care).
The dynamics have changed. Today, poets don’t only consider it their job to scream at “tyrants”; they not only make demands like thugs; more than that, they act like the Stasi, going around with tiny torchlights looking for racism and sexism in works of art.
Responding to a poem I shared with him, an American poet told me it was musically sound, but also added (parenthetically), “you’d have a hard time publishing a poem in the US with the word ‘whore’ in it. ‘Sex worker’ is what you have to say now, which of course is absurd and immediately ruins the poem.” (The “whore” is myself.) I have hawked the poem around and no one has taken it. Certain words can so trigger people now that choosing a word for how it rings next to another word has become a political act.
“‘Sex worker’ is what you have to say now.”
As Geoffrey Hill said of Shakespeare, the true poet knows what is justly and unjustly demanded of him, and finds his way around it. Every such challenge tasks his inventiveness; if he succeeds, his triumph is greater because of it. But if the eccentricity of a phrase, in the context of a poem, if the use of a word like “Negress” without the quotes in Dickman’s poem, is deemed too offensive to be read—what is to become of John Stuart Mill’s much-cherished “eccentricity of action,” which is fundamental to a liberal society? How are we to live if we cannot risk offense in a poem?
Poetry cannot escape politics. We may not be of the world, but we are in it, and its links are inescapable. But the relation between poetry and power is not the current, facile one; it goes deep. It is not achieved by being able to tell where another writer stands on thorny issues. It is not achieved even through activism, though that may be another mode for a poet as a person, not necessarily as a poet. Instead, it is through the difficult way of craft that one can say anything lasting and penetrating about the state.
A practical modesty often goes with that belief. Poets who hold it allow themselves a level of diffidence when they come to engage with politics. Whenever I need to be reminded of my place, I turn to Yeats’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem”—
I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
In the current climate where poet is activist (or vice-versa), the poems also start to look a lot like cant. A recent poem by Cornelius Eady in Poetry, written to celebrate the mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani, has no evident use beyond its occasion. And yet a poem spoiled by sentiment is only a bad poem, however (dis)agreeable the sentiment may be.
“I turn to Yeats.”
Poetry is the expression of an eloquent, enlightened, and enlightening subjectivity. Every subjectivity is bedevilled with prejudices, good and bad. Sometimes it happens that the unhealthy prejudices are sophisticated and have tenacious roots (one thinks of T. S. Eliot’s antisemitism), sometimes they are cheap and irritating (Ezra Pound’s). Neither is a legitimate reason to excommunicate a poet or his work.
An ability to hold divergent emotions, to respond in a way that reflects that you have apprehended all the shades of the matter—this is what poetry makes possible. Anthony Hecht, who wrote one of the most disturbing poems in commemoration of the Holocaust (“More Light! More Light!”), who was haunted all his life by that grave atrocity, and was sensitive to and indelibly marked by antisemitism, could still have the grace to love and profit from Eliot—and from Pound. He did not separate the art from the artist; that is impossible. He took the art as it is, because good art does not become any less valuable because it contains (what are to us) troubling sentiments.
The narrowing of poetry continues. In January, the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Festival was canceled after Randa Abdel-Fattah, author of Discipline, was disinvited. Her removal followed a letter by South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskus, objecting to her inclusion given the rise in antisemitic sentiments. Many consider Abdel-Fattah’s position on Israel to be extreme. (For instance, she believes that “Zionists have no claim or right to cultural safety.”) Over 100 writers, Zadie Smith and Percival Everett among them, withdrew from the festival in solidarity with Abdel-Fattah and in opposition to censorship.
“Writers have no problem censoring other writers.”
Censorship of any kind is indefensible. Nevertheless, politicians will feel justified engaging in it when they know that writers have no problem censoring other writers. Malinauskus, in his letter, made the point that in 2024 Abdel-Fattah canvassed for the removal of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman over an article he wrote. When her hypocrisy was called out, the novelist pulled a Foucault: “What is missing in this is the question of power. We write letters on Google Docs to boards. The people who want to cancel us have premiers intervening.”
The activist-writer can invoke the sanctity of literature when it is time for them to face responsibility for their egregious political positions. They can talk, like Abdel-Fattah does, about “the political pressure that’s being brought to bear on the arts community and the need for institutions and for boards to push back, to hold true to the values that they espouse.” But pressure is coming from without because the same “values” have been upended by these same activist-writers, who ruthlessly apply pressure from within. They have happily censored—and will happily cancel—any writer deemed to have crossed a perceived political line. Unacknowledged legislators, their cause is righteous, and everyone else’s is unjust.
In all of this, it is literature that suffers.
Toward the end of my first call with the NBCC board, I was asked if I had anything else to say. I had said all I could say and was exasperated. “I will read you a poem,” I said, as I rose to pull a book from my shelf: Yeats’s“Easter 1916” and Other Poems. I flipped the pages and paused on “A Prayer on Going Into My House.”
“I wonder what this means,” I said after reading it.
“You could write about it,” said Adam Dalva, smiling. “I love Yeats.”
Poetry, the voice of a man lifting from the page, had defined a small moment of grace between me and those who were, in that moment, my oppressors. That is the work we are called to do as poets, as writers, as thinkers. We are tasked with creating spaces for clarity and grace.
But grace, as I learned, is fast becoming a strange word.