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But - I don't know if it's mentioned in this article or not - he only chose to adopt a different identity after the poem was rejected 40 times under his real name. To me that says that his poem was not really good enough to get published on its own. It was rejected 9 times under the new name. I do hate using that as "evidence" because it's not really the best data - you wouldn't send the same poem to the same journal under a second name if it was rejected under the first. At worst you'd be accused of plagiarism. But Alexie did say that the poet's name was one reason he gave it more consideration. So to me, it does seem like it's about the assumed identity at least as much as the poem.