The list of poets who have pretended to be someone else to tweak the conventions of art and/or society is long and includes writers like Fernando Pessoa and Marian Evans (a.k.a. George Eliot). The list of poets who have pretended to be someone else so as to slightly increase their odds of being published in the literary journal Prairie Schooner is considerably shorter.

Yet that is what Yi-Fen Chou — or rather, Michael Derrick Hudson — did to fool not only the editors of that publication but also Sherman Alexie, the editor of this year’s volume of the “Best American Poetry” series. Mr. Hudson’s poem, “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,” appears alongside the work of dozens of poets publishing under their actual names, many of them, unlike Mr. Hudson, members of minority groups. Mr. Hudson, as he explains in his biographical note in the volume, doesn’t write different poems in the voice of a persona he calls Yi-Fen Chou (as Pessoa might); rather, he submits the same poem first as Michael Hudson, and then if that doesn’t work, resubmits it as Yi-Fen Chou. The idea is that this gives him a leg up in the frustrating business of poetry publishing.

There are many things to be said about this dubious stratagem (though perhaps the most interesting revelation thus far has been Sherman Alexie’s largely admirable list of selection criteria). One thing that has tended to go by the wayside, however, is the merit of the poem. In addition to being a chore to type, is “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” any good?

Image Sherman Alexie, editor of “The Best American Poetry,” who published a pseudonymous work by Michael Derrick Hudson. Credit... Stuart Isett for The New York Times

The answer is that it isn’t bad but that it’s far from one of the best American poems of the year. The poem weighs in at around 20 lines, and its action might be summarized as follows: Guy looks at a bee through the lens of a camera and reflects on the perfection of the bee’s relationship with flowers (which seems so natural as to need no embroidery), which in turn makes him wonder about his own compulsion to add necessarily incomplete narratives to the almost random facts and memories that seem to constitute his own existence. It’s a poem about consciousness, in other words, as so many poems these days tend to be. And it’s written in an aggressively prose-like free verse (“Do you know the old engineer’s/joke: that, theoretically, bees can’t fly?”) with intentionally lackadaisical line breaks (“But they look so/perfect together”) that are also entirely typical.