Sturgeon's Law

So, an interesting story from late last week. I had submitted a poem to a benefit anthology for low-wage workers put out by the Southwest Center for Economic Integrity. They called on Thursday or so and said they really liked the poem, but they wanted me to remove a small segment. The poem itself is a short vignette about getting hurt working in a video store, and the part they wanted removed suggests an attraction by the narrator for a 17-old-girl.

Now, a few things here: I'm sure you all know that something occuring in a poem doesn't indicate the writer endorses it or even that it's true, and I hope most people will agree that a guy in his early twenties feeling attracted to a 17-year-old is not exactly the apocalypse, and it's actually fairly important to the poem, being the immediate reason the narrator gets distracted and hurts himself. Nonetheless, I let them remove it. Here are some reasons:

• The anthology is a good cause.
• For their purposes, it is at least arguable that removing that segment improves the poem, as it casts low-wage workers in a better light and hews closer to the theme of "It sure does suck to work for minimum wage."
  
• I can restore the segment for journal publication and my own manuscript.
• They're paying me $100. Yes, I'm a whore, but that's 20 times what I've ever been paid for a poem before.

I'm sure there are situations where I would kick and scream and call it censorship, but in this case it didn't really seem like that big a deal to me, just a little cause for amusement over what a prudish society we're in.