Poetry, "Safe Spaces," and Cancel Culture

Earlier this week, my friend and arts organizer Bryony Dixon published an article in Quillette about her ouster this year from Nanaimo Fringe Festival at the behest of trans rights activists. It's an important read to get a feel for how much creative expression and discourse we are losing in the public sphere due to deplatforming and cancel culture tactics deployed by gender identitarians in the name of ensuring "safe spaces"—those magical womb-like zones where no tender, unaffirmed soul will ever brush up against the complexities of reality.

We are witnessing a purge of people (largely women) who understand biological reality and have the audacity to publicly comment on it. Since most of our public and civic institutions are now captured by gender ideology, the purge can proceed with little internal resistance.

Like Bryony, I also live in Nanaimo. I have twice this year been targeted with similar deplatforming attempts when organizing poetry events at Nanaimo Harbourfront Library. I don't work at the library. I am a community member and a poet who organizes a variety of poetry happenings around town to animate the community through poetry. Most of my events are an open format where anyone can come and share their own work or listen to others. Often a theme is involved.

My Poetry of Resilience event in May of this year featured fifteen local poets and musicians listed on the poster, plus an open mic at the end.

Because of my unrelated gender-critical posts on twitter (now X), that event was targeted by local trans rights activists who phoned the library in advance of the event, saying the library would not be a “safe space” if I were in it that day (or any day, as it turns out). The library manager phoned me the day before the event to find out whether anyone would be at risk at our Poetry of Resilience event. This is how absurd this whole trans rights censorship agenda has become.

I had to assure the library manager I had no covert political agenda in staging this Poetry of Resilience event. (Although really, what is art if not political? And do we really want our art to strive for this nebulous goal of “safety” as its highest imperative? I couldn't guarantee the poems and songs would be devoid of political content. I am not pre-screening or censoring the artists who participate. Do we even need to have these conversations in a democratic society? Are we still in a democratic society?)

The Poetry of Resilience event went ahead. It would have been awkward for the library to cancel fifteen scheduled performers, or ban me as the host/emcee, just one day before the event. Presumably the library calculated that the public relations fallout from cancellation would exceed the fallout from just hiding us all upstairs and praying the two hours would pass quickly and without incident.

We were moved out of sight, to an upstairs room that is hard to find, instead of holding our event out in the open on the main floor of the library as booked. Library staff turned their backs and shunned me as I walked past them multiple times setting up. Some people couldn't find the event, and no staff directed them upstairs to the hidden room, so they left. One musician dropped out in solidarity with the trans activists and their deplatforming campaign.

The event was quite successful, nevertheless. People desperately want to come together now around creative energy and positive themes such as resilience. More than sixty people showed up. The upstairs room we were stuffed into was overflowing.

Then this October, I organized a Poetry of Empathy event at Nanaimo Harbourfront Library featuring a poetry open mic on the theme of empathy, followed by longer poetry readings from visiting poet Sean Arthur Joyce and myself. I spent more than two weeks in September trying to confirm the booking for this event with library staff. No one would reply to my emails, even though I had initially received a verbal confirmation from a new librarian who did not know of the past attempt to cancel me there.

I finally received an email from the new branch manager of Harbourfront Library (not the one I spoke to in May) telling me they would not book this poetry of empathy event because: “We have assessed your program proposal and have concluded that it doesn’t fit our current programming priorities under the Library’s mandate of serving our diverse community by fostering safe, inclusive, and welcoming spaces.”

Yes, that's right—a Poetry of Empathy event is now unsafe.

I had a rather passionate phone conversation with the branch manager about the importance of libraries not buckling to cancel culture, and that libraries and librarians have historically been front-line defenders of freedom of expression and freedom to read.

The event did get scheduled after this phone call. But once again, we were stuffed upstairs in the room people can't find rather than out in the open on the main floor atrium, which I was trying to book, and which is always the preferred space for readings in that library.

(I should add that I have organized many poetry events over the years at Nanaimo Harbourfront Library. I also coordinated an annual Poem Gallery in the library’s large display window fronting onto Diana Krall Plaza for a number of years. So I have a long history of positive working relations and event organizing with this library.)

After the Poetry of Empathy event was scheduled and I began postering around town for it, the gender militia saw they had not been successful in barring me from the public library. The Nanaimo Pride Society sent a message to some local media (I don't know how many) saying, among other things, “Kim Goldberg is organizing a poetry hate rally at Harbourfront Library Oct. 5th.”

That is the level of delusional thinking at work in this illiberal drive to silence all heterodox voices—a Poetry of Empathy event at a public library is branded a “poetry hate rally” by Nanaimo Pride Society.

About half of the posters (which all had my photo on them) were torn down prior to the event, even though all adjacent posters were left intact. So, where social cancellation failed, the tactic then switched to material cancellation of any physical artifact with my image.

I have successfully pushed back twice now against cancellation campaigns of local trans rights activists seeking to dictate who can and cannot stage events at Nanaimo Harbourfront Library. But will I always be successful? The library is a largely captured institution. The librarians now seem to view me and my poetry events as a problem, like a litter box that needs to be emptied, rather than something to be encouraged and supported.

When the voices of poets, artists, musicians, and fringe performers are erased from our social landscape because they have run afoul of the Red Guards of Kindness, we don't necessarily notice their absence. We never know about the performances we didn’t see, or the lyrics and poems we didn’t hear. But we are collectively poorer for the loss.