http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/…/delusions-of-whiteness-i…
Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde
by Cathy Park Hong
Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion
Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde
by Cathy Park Hong
Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion
CATHY PARK HONG
(b. 1976)
"Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde" - Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion
To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition. From its early 20th century inception to some of its current strains, American avant-garde poetry has been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets from past African American literary movements—whose prodigious writings have vitalized the margins, challenged institutions, and introduced radical languages and forms that avant-gardists have usurped without proper acknowledgment. Even today, its most vocal practitioners cling to moldering Eurocentric practices. Even today, avant-garde’s most vocal, self-aggrandizing stars continue to be white and even today these stars like Kenneth Goldsmith spout the expired snake oil that poetry should be “against expression” and “post-identity.” James Baldwin wrote that “to be black was to confront, and to be forced to alter conditions forged in history . . . it is clearly at least equally difficult to surmount the delusion of whiteness.” The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are. But perhaps that is why historically the minority poets’ entrance into the avant-garde’s arcane little clubs has so often been occluded. We can never laugh it off, take it all in as one sick joke, and truly escape the taint of subjectivity and history. But even in their best efforts in erasure, in complete transcription, in total paratactic scrambling, there is always a subject—and beyond that, the specter of the author’s visage—and that specter is never, no matter how vigorous the erasure, raceless.
Avant-garde poetry’s attitudes towards race have been no different than that of mainstream institutions. Of course, I am aware that I am erecting an artificial electric fence between two camps that many argue no longer even exists. Poetry’s current aesthetic styles bear a closer resemblance to an oscillating Venn diagram and there are plenty of indie presses and magazines that have outright and rightly rejected these ossified two poles, not to mention that to argue what is and is not truly avant-garde now, based on say, Peter Burger’s definition of the avant-garde, would be a mind-numbing, self-defeating, and masturbatory exegesis. But for this forum, I will assume that such a cold war relationship exists (though it’s been a détente for quite a while) and that the poets and schools whom I identify as avant-garde will be those who have been institutionalized as such, and I’ll include upstarts who have trumpeted themselves as the vanguard’s second coming, such as the Conceptual poets. But to return to my initial point, poets of color have always been expected to sit quietly in the backbenches of both mainstream and avant-garde poetry. We’ve been trotted out in the most mindless forms of tokenism for anthologies and conferences, because to have all white faces would be downright embarrassing. For instance, Donald Allen’s classic 1959 and even updated 1982 anthology New American Poetry, which Marjorie Perloff has proclaimed “the anthology of avant-garde poetry,” includes a grand tally of one minority poet: Leroi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka. Tokenism at its most elegant.
But I want to pause from this expected bean counting since examples are too endless. I would also argue that the institutions of both mainstream and avant-garde poetry accept poets of color based on how they address race. Mainstream poetry is rather pernicious in awarding quietist minority poets who assuage quasi-white liberal guilt rather than challenge it. They prefer their poets to praise rather than excoriate, to write sanitized, easily understood personal lyrics on family and ancestry rather than make sweeping institutional critiques. But the avant-gardists prefer their poets of color to be quietest as well, paying attention to poems where race—through subject and form—is incidental, preferably invisible, or at the very least, buried. Even if racial identity recurs as a motif throughout the works of poets like John Yau, critics and curators of experimental poetry are quick to downplay it or ignore it altogether. I recall that in graduate school my peers would give me backhanded compliments by saying my poetry was of interest because it “wasn’t just about race.” Such an attitude is found in Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s anthology, “Against Expression,” when they included excerpts from M. NourbeSe Philip’s brilliant “Zong!,” which explores the late 18th century British court case where 150 slaves were thrown overboard so the slave ship’s captain could collect the insurance money. The book is a constraint-based tour-de-force that only uses words found in the original one-page legal document. Here is how Dworkin and Goldsmith characterize Zong: “the ethical inadequacies of that legal document . . . do not prevent their détournement in the service of experimental writing.” God forbid that maudlin and heavy-handed subjects like slavery and mass slaughter overwhelm the form! Thankfully, such “ethical inadequacies” have been disciplined enough to be “in the service” of experimental writing.
Without such formal restrictions, Philip’s Zong would be in danger of being dismissed as “identity politics,” a term that has turned into quite the bogeyman of a moniker, gathering an assortment of unsavory associations within the last few decades. To be an identity politics poet is to be anti-intellectual, without literary merit, no complexity, sentimental, manufactured, feminine, niche-focused, woefully out-of-date and therefore woefully unhip, politically light, and deadliest of all, used as bait by market forces’ calculated branding of boutique liberalism. Compare that to Marxist—and often male—poets whose difficult and rigorous poetry may formally critique neoliberalism but is never “just about class” in the way that identity politics poetry is always “just about race,” with little to no aesthetic value. Such bias abounds in experimental poetry circles, not just among blustering chauvinists like Goldsmith and, most damagingly of all, Marjorie Perloff, but by experimental poets of color who can be their own harshest critics. Here I must speak anecdotally, as it’s persistently turned up in conversation among friends and students, but some of us (and here I use the first person plural loosely) dread the possibility of being tarred as an “identity politics” poet, and perhaps to such a degree that it’s turned into our own detriment: we may overly exercise a form of self-restraint, scraping our writing of explicitly toxic racial matter, so we won’t be exiled to that ghetto.
Marjorie Perloff, preeminent critic and academic gatekeeper of avant-garde poetry, has on numerous occasions shared her distaste for identity politics literature. Here is an excerpt she wrote for the MLA newsletter:
Under the rubrics of African American, other minorities, and post-colonial, a lot of important and exciting novels and poems are surely studied. But what about what is not studied? Suppose a student wants to study James Joyce or Gertrude Stein? Virginia Woolf or T.E. Lawrence or George Orwell? William Faulkner or Frank O’Hara? The literature of World Wars I and II? The Great Depression? The impact of technology on poetry and fiction? Modernism? Existentialism? What of the student who has a passionate interest in her or his literary world—a world that encompasses the digital as well as print culture but does not necessarily differentiate between the writings of one subculture or one theoretical orientation and another? Where do such prospective students turn?
I found this excerpt in the scholar Dorothy Wang’s excellent book, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Wang notices that in this excerpt, Perloff immediately sets up a kind of “us vs. them” opposition, which is of course a favored rhetorical tool used by avant-garde schools in the past from Futurists and Dadaists to Language School poets. Avant-garde manifestos have always assumed a tone of masculine and expansionist militancy, enforcing an aggressive divide-and-conquer framework to grab the reader’s attention. Of course, this “us vs. them” rhetoric can be used to an exhilarating effect when there is a revolutionary legitimacy to that opposition, when “we” are the rabble-rousing outliers and “they” are the hegemonic majority. But Perloff sets up an opposition that’s far more disconcerting: oddly, the hegemony has become the nameless hordes of “African Americans, other minorities, and post-colonials” while “us,” those victimized students who are searching for endangered “true” literature (read as "white") are the outliers (since when has Ulysses taken a nose-dive from the canon’s summit down to the rare-and-hard-to-find-books list?). From her Boston Review essay “Poetry on the Brink” where she lambasts Rita Dove, to countless other instances, Perloff has persistently set up these racially encoded oppositions and the sentiment is always the same: these indistinguishable minority writers with their soft, mediocre poetry and fiction are taking over our literature. How is this advocate of experimental poetry any different from the icon of literary conservatism, Harold Bloom, who once declared that writers like Sherman Alexie are “enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us?” Although Perloff has made these misguided observations for years, no one has taken her to task for it until recently, as if poets in the experimental community, afraid to fall from her good graces, look away as one looks away during Thanksgiving dinner when an aunt might complain how “those people” are driving down the property value of “our neighborhood.”
*
The classic function of the avant-garde has been, according to Renato Poggioli, “not so much . . . an aesthetic fact as a sociological one,” interrogating the very role of art as an institution in a bourgeois society and seeking to collapse artistic praxis with daily life. Echoing this, Charles Bernstein has said, “I care most about poetry that disrupts business as usual, including literary business. I care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated.” The spirit of the avant-garde has been revolt, making it all the more baffling that avant-garde poets and their scholars have—except for occasional inclusions—largely ignored major groundbreaking movements like the Black Arts Movement or the Harlem Renaissance. BAM, with its revolutionary zeal inspired by the Black Power movement, sought to upend Western cultural institutions, energize black communities, and develop languages and forms that rejected western-influenced craftsmanship. In her illuminating must-reed Renegade Poetics, the scholar and poet Evie Shockley writes, “Black Arts proposed to establish a new set of cultural reference points and standards that centered on ‘the needs and aspirations’ of African Americans.” Amiri Baraka blended black nationalism with Dadaist linguistic disruption in his poetry and his raconteur misfit persona shared a similar showman’s DNA with the likes of Filippo Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton. Even BAM’s much-criticized separatist agenda, to write exclusively for a black audience, is not so far off from the avant-garde’s dictum not to assimilate into the majority, but stand apart. If we are to acknowledge that there are formal choices that define avant-garde poetry such as polyvocality, hybridity, collage, stream-of-conscious writing, and improvisation, these techniques were not only used but were actually first inaugurated by African American writers or they were America's early practitioners. Jean Toomer’s Cane, written in 1923, is an uncategorizable cross-genre book that is wide-ranging in its experimentations with fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, and surrealist wordplay. Before academic words like hybridity and heteroglossia became en vogue, Harlem Renaissance socialist poet Claude McKay—whose work inspired key figures like Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor from the Negritude movement—experimented with Jamaican dialect and code-switching in his collection Constab Ballads. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s visionary work is a pioneering example of conceptual writing. Known for her 1982 posthumously published cross-genre memoir Dictee, she was also a multi-disciplinary artist, dematerializing text through her video montages and performances, inspiring future digital artists with her hyper-textual methods. Many of these poets’ reputations have long been battened under the banner of ethnic studies but are rarely regarded as core figures in experimental poetry. So while Dictee is considered as seminal as Tender Buttons among Asian American circles, it’s still treated like a fringe classic in the avant-garde canon.
From legendary haunts like Cabaret Voltaire to San Remo and Cedar Tavern, avant-garde schools have fetishized community to mythologize their own genesis. But when I hear certain poets extolling the values of their community today, my reaction is not so different from how I feel a self-conscious, prickling discomfort that there is a boundary drawn between us. Attend a reading at St. Marks Poetry Project or the launch of an online magazine in a Lower East Side gallery and notice that community is still a packed room of white hipsters. Simone White, poet and curator of St. Marks Poetry Project, writes in Harriet: “Let me say again: I am used to being the only black person in the room. . . but the fact is, being used to being the only black person in the room isn’t the same thing as thinking that this is a tolerable or reasonable condition . . . more and more, I’m sure that I have to refuse intellectual “community” whose joy is in some way predicated on enjoyment of what is, at best, obliviousness to these harms, or worse, actual celebrations of all-white clubs. It is total bullshit to enjoy being in a social or creative community that is segregated the way poetry is segregated.”
So what is a poet of color to do, one who subscribes to Harryette Mullen’s definition of innovation as “explorative and interrogative, an open-ended investigation into the possibilities of language?” Shall we continue our headcount of reading venues and anthologies? Shall we politely speak up and beg for more representation, say a few more panels on forgotten subaltern poetry for the next wax museum conference? Shall we again rehearse these mechanical motions under the false diplomacy of inclusivity? A more generous slice please! A little more room! Just a few more faces I can recognize as my own! For too long, white poets have claimed ownership and territorialized “the new” as their own and for too long experimental minority poets have been cast aside as being derivative of their white contemporaries. If tastemakers of poetry like Marjorie Perloff have this fear of a black planet, let us become “enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming” them and wrest control of the wheels of innovation. The most radical writings today are coming from poets of color—writers like writers like Black Took Collective, Rodrigo Toscano, Bhanu Kapil, Tan Lin, M. NourbeSe Philips, Douglas Kearney, Farid Matuk, Monica De La Torre, David Lau, Divya Victor, LaTasha Nevada Diggs, and so many more. The voices have returned (they’ve never gone anywhere) as a matter of survival, and also as minstrelized, digitalized, theatricalized artifice, speaking in a mélange of offshoots, with multiple entryways and exits through the soaring use of aberrant vernaculars. The form is code-switching: code-switching between languages, between Englishes, between genres, between races, between bodies. As Derek Walcott said, “there is no nation but the imagination,” and poets like Kapil create the geopolitical imaginary, building worlds to critique world-building. Conceptual writing is, for all its declarations, pathetically outdated and formulaic in its analog need to bark back incessantly at the original. As Deleuze said, “Why must we be the crocodile imitating the tree trunk? Why can’t we be the pink panther? The pink panther imitates nothing; it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is imperceptible itself, asignifying, making its rupture, its own line of flight.” Excessive and expressionist, poets like Ronaldo Wilson, Dawn Lundy Martin and Diggs have created cyborg enunciations out of shredded text, music and lived experiences; they are building a new, dissonant futurism, treating poetry as rank growth as it punctures the dying medium of print via performance, video, or audio recordings, finding inspiration from hip hop that has oddly, so far, been ignored by Poetry. Nicholas Bourriaud, the critic who coined the term “relational aesthetics,” said the artwork is the interaction between artist and viewers, as a way to “inhabit the world in a better way.” The encounter with poetry needs to change constantly via the internet, via activism and performance, so that poetry can continue to be a site of agitation, where the audience is not a receptacle of conditioned responses but is unsettled and provoked into participatory response. But will these poets ever be accepted as the new avant-garde? The avant-garde has become petrified, enamored by its own past, and therefore forever insular and forever looking backwards. Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.
http://bostonreview.net/poetry/david-marriott-forum-response-race-avant-garde
Poetry
Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
by David Marriott
March 10, 2015
BOSTON REVIEW
Editors' Note: This essay is one of a group of essays on Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde. Read the rest.
What is “avant-garde poetry”? is a question long on answers, if short on consensus. On the one hand, the notion of the avant-garde is invariably seen as a historical category. The history of modernism and the authority of certain authors converge here in a kind of hermeneutic presumption, as if the meanings and values of both constituted readymades. The avant-garde poet emerges as a figure (invariably male, invariably white) that history and culture no longer need to put in question. But on the other hand, those European and American avant-gardes posed a question about the relation between the reading and practice of poetry that goes beyond the category of the avant-garde itself. If certain forms of poetry can now be so easily decoded or read as avant-garde, then clearly the culture industry and the historical avant-garde are now analogous. But somehow if a discrepancy between poetry and the culture industry in part defines what it means to write experimental poetry, then perhaps the very notion of the ‘avant-garde’ is no longer relevant. It is as if the category of the ‘avant-garde’ now inheres in such an anachronistic sense of form and value that it escapes reflection, and so is no longer adequate to the very notion. How can this gap be overcome?
The aestheticization of the term avant-garde is a refusal to think what the alienation of human being in the modern era was made of.
When one turns to black avant-garde writers and poets, these impasses (at the level of definition) are inadequate. In the history of black avant-garde poetics, the aestheticization of the term avant-garde was invariably seen as a shibboleth: that is, a refusal to think what the alienation of human being in the modern era was made of. Aimé Césaire was very aware of the dangers of conflating poetic form with hermeneutic readymades – as, for example, in modernist racist discourse, which both historicized and aestheticized race as sentiment and meaning (traces of which can be seen in all white modernist authors). But the double sense of form on which Césaire insists indicates that avant-garde poetry and radical politics are not the same, and that we must explore the productivity of their relation without reducing either to presupposed concepts or categories. The problem is that in the scholarship of modernism and the reading practices which have now become commonplace, black experimental form has itself become a readymade in the marketplace of modernist content, which is precisely why contemporary black avant-garde poetry is only read (often very badly) insofar as it resembles the old modernist boudoir, or imitates the avant-garde’s wishful resembling of its own lost discrepancy.
Amiri Baraka, theorist of black musical and political form, revolutionized how we should understand their relation by suggesting – after years of close study of black music – that chiasmus rather than dialectic was the exact form of black avant-garde poetry. This was avant-garde criticism with a capital A, but only in an existential and analogical sense. In fact, Césaire was much more radical and expressed his insights into revolutionary black poetry via a language of the unconscious in which syntax rather than lexis, non-sense rather than sense takes precedent. His belief was that in order to be modern (and in a way which is never simply, or historically, avant-garde) the black poet had to become a scientist of the marvelous in which radical unintelligibility is not so much the exception as the rule. Césaire’s immense productivity consists in creating a poetry of events that does not have form or content as its end, but is rather the pursuit of their irremedial alienation. Instead of claiming, as the various European avant-gardes did while reading Marx, say, or Freud, that he was producing a new dialectics (of culture, or meaning), Césaire claimed that poetic production was productive because it consumed knowledge. Or rather–that it was the ‘poetic’ itself that was productive, often against the express conscious and political wishes of the poet. As Césaire explains in his famous letter to Maurice Thorez:
I'm not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But I don't intend either to become lost in a disembodied universalism. . . . I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.
I can think of no better statement of why black avant-garde poetry should not be reduced to the usual modernist dilemma of aesthetics versus politics, or why its attentiveness to richly diverse modes of being should not be seen for what it is, i.e., a politics of the word defined by an incessant fidelity to creative negation. If this is a fidelity which can too easily be appropriated by the forces of cultural industrial control, that is because the value of its creation coincides with the terrible universal insecurity that is both its origin and truth, but one that also defines how each particular gives on to the world a newly embodied universal which provides for and bears along its own richness of meaning. As a result, Césaire remains for me the incomparable world-historical producer of black poetic form and one who continues to haunt.
https://bostonreview.net/blog/poetry-forum-race-avant-garde
Blog | Poetry
Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
by Stefania Heim
Boston Review
March 10, 2015
Boston Review
Harryette Mullen wrote in 1996, “The assumption remains, however unexamined, that ‘avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’ and that ‘black’ poetry, however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative.’” Mullen’s own opus was being torn down the middle, with particular writings received as speaking for black female experience and others as examples of formal innovation. She concludes by articulating the stakes of such shallow and myopic divisions: “I hope that my work continues to challenge that deadly distinction between ‘blackness’ and ‘humanity’ – or ‘universality’ – that is still imposed on black human beings.”
In collaboration with scholar Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2013), Boston Review has convened a group of poets and scholars to consider the current status of Mullen’s decades-old description. We asked these writers—all publishing in or alongside various contemporary experimental traditions—whether there is now space for and openness to the exploration of aesthetics and race; we asked about tokenism and our allegedly “post-race” era; we asked them to compare public engagement with these ideas in so-called mainstream and avant-garde poetry circles.
These issues are in the air. In April of last year, Simone White wrote on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog:
I had been thinking for a long time about what people mean when they say that U.S. poetry that is not interested in reproducing the familiar (call it what you want: experimental, innovative) is a white practice, a white thing, dominated by white poets and white institutions … I’d been thinking about it as a woman poet who writes poems that could never belong to any tradition but a black tradition.
Cathy Park Hong wrote in Lana Turner of the avant garde’s “delusions of whiteness,” and Daniel Borzutzky, also writing at Harriet, expressed surprise at the overwhelming response to Hong’s essay (“given the similar and equally cogent arguments that have been previously articulated”), linking that receptiveness to “public rage and resistance to the police murders of unarmed black men.” At the University of Montana, Prageeta Sharma and Joanna Klink launched the conference “Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing,” which is now in its second year.
There are many reasons why poets deploy broken forms, leaps, disjunctions, irregular syntax, obfuscated meaning, improvisation, metonymy, and polymorphous subjectivities. But as some of the respondents to this forum underscore, an innovative surface does not make something politically, ethically, or even artistically radical: “certain radicalisms are brands,” writes Erica Hunt. On the other hand, as Mónica de la Torre points out here, identities can be claimed and deployed with similar shallowness. Attempting to understand the relationships of experimental poetic strategies to either institutional structures or individual, embodied lives we cannot simply follow the forms; form is not separable or distinct. The (necessarily temporary) answers have everything to do with history; with how lives are situated; with the relationship between private and public forms; with how experience gets written and to what end. This complicated set of forces is in dynamic play in the work of writers of any color. All of the writers gathered here generously give us a good deal of their own lives and aesthetics in imagining a way forward. It is our hope that readers will meet them here just as openly and searchingly. —Stefania Heim
Dorothy Wang, "From Jim-Crow to 'Color-Blind' Poetics"
David Marriott, Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
Lyn Hejinian, "En Face"
Prageeta Sharma, "Model Minority, Dreaming, and Cheap Signaling"
David Lloyd, "A White Song"
Mónica de la Torre, Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
Erica Hunt, Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
http://bostonreview.net/poetry/dorothy-wang-race-poetic-avant-garde-response
Poetry
From Jim-Crow to "Color-Blind" Poetics
Race and the So-Called Avant-Garde
by Dorothy Wang
March 10, 2015
The Boston Review
Editors' Note: This essay is one of a group of essays on Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde. Read the rest.
In the six months since we began to develop this Boston Review forum on race and the poetic avant-garde, an open discussion of the racial politics of the experimental poetry world has, finally—slowly and painfully—begun to happen. But even as late as 2013, when I was completing my book, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2013), speaking about what Harryette Mullen dubbed almost two decades ago as “aesthetic apartheid” in her essay "Poetry and Identity" seemed difficult, indeed precarious, personally and, more so, professionally. We were supposedly living in a post-race era and everyone knew that class, not race, was the real problem. Smart academics had told us so. Multiculturalism and “identity politics” had already triumphed—to the detriment of poetry—and to bring up the issue of race seemed to come across as churlish, entitled. To utter the “r” word would make one’s criticism or poetry “about outsiderness too outside the outlining norms,” in Prageeta Sharma’s words. “It made you look ungrateful.”
To speak about race and so-called avant-garde writing is not to beg for token inclusion at the liberal or hipster multicultural food court.
If one acted like an “angry minority”—especially if one dared to call out powerful gatekeepers in academia, the poetry world, and the world of arts and letters—one risked not being published in journals and anthologies, not being invited to conferences, and not securing tenure-track jobs or other forms of professional and economic recognition. It was all right to say in a general way that certain minority poets had been overlooked in the archives or in the canon but to name actual critics, poetry professors, awards judges, book and journal editors, players in professional organizations, and anthologists who had brought their own unexamined racial assumptions to their discussions of poetry and poetics and to their decisions about who would be included and rewarded for writing “real” poetry, was verboten. Those conversations were only whispered privately among poets of color.
Except for a few lone voices in the past few decades (Mullen, Amiri Baraka, and John Yau immediately come to mind)—voices that were either ignored or shot down—very few poets and virtually no critics dared to speak explicitly about the exclusions, tokenism, and double standards used to judge poems by writers of color in the “avant” world. Poems by minority poets are almost always judged on the basis of their thematic (sociological, ethnographic) content in the “traditional” or “mainstream” poetry world and rarely on their formal or aesthetic structures, properties, modes—in other words, what makes poetry poetry and not a memoir or treatise.
But the flipside of the same coin is true in the world of “innovative” poetry and poetics, where the “absence” of obvious racial identity is to be applauded—for not exhibiting the hallmarks of “bad” poetry” (read: “identity poetry” [read: "minority poetry”])— and this criterion, too, is content-based, albeit in negative form. A poem without any overt ethnic or racial markers is assumed to be racially “unmarked.” Little or no attention is paid to how poetic subjectivity, which overlaps with but is not limited to racial subjectivity, might inhere in a poem’s language and formal structures—in what is unsaid or unspoken at the level of “content” but manifested through aesthetic (poetic) means.
Minority poets are supposed to be happy to be included at all—as mascots or tokens—and had, and have, little choice but to yearn for “the towardness . . . as though it were inclusion” (Sharma's words). This is the best liberal multiculturalism can offer.
While I am heartened by the fact that in 2015 minority poets such as Cathy Park Hong are explicitly addressing the whiteness of the avant-garde, two troubling facts persist: 1) the relative public silence from white poets and poetry critics on this issue, and 2) the absence of a larger conversation that needs to be had by poets and critics of all races and ethnicities about the assumptions—racialized and other—that underlie and structure fundamental categories of poetry and poetics, such as the notion of the “universal” poetic speaker, the idea of “difficulty” and abstraction in poetry, literary tropes, the link between formal structures and social and historical contexts—to name just a few.
• • •
To speak about aesthetic apartheid is not to be concerned with the individual motives (well-meaningness) of individual actors, as Lyn Hejinian points out in her essay in this forum, or to accuse individuals of bring “racist.” It is, instead, to say that ideologies, institutional structures, and ingrained patterns of thought, especially if unexamined, come to have a life of their own. Did one individual or even a group of individuals create the situation in which, in David Lloyd’s words in his contribution to this forum, “whiteness is . . . the formal subject that lays claim to a universally representative position: that of the human as identical to itself”? No, but it was an accretion of the power of this idea over time and its reinforcement by countless individuals and structures of power that led to its unmarked status as normative and self-evident—an idea that undergirds our seemingly innocuous discussions of, say, the “I” in particular poems. This pronoun can be read as signifying a universal poetic speaker in poems by those who are thought of as racially “unmarked,” but universality never obtains for the “I” in a poem by an Asian American female poet.
The “sheer, formal abstractness of identity constitutes whiteness,” as Lloyd puts it, so that the dirty word “identity politics” does not pertain to white identity (a term that sounds foreign to us, a catachresis of sorts) or white poetry. Robert Creeley or Ron Silliman do not write “identity poetry,” while Langston Hughes and Marilyn Chin obviously do. “Abstract,” “difficult,” “rigorous” poetry—”real” poetry—is racially “unmarked” poetry.
These presuppositions also influence our writing of literary historical narratives so that in our discussions of the Beat movement, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufmann, and Amiri Baraka have either been erased or relegated to the margins. The same is true with Erica Hunt, Lorenzo Thomas, Ted Pearson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Henderson, and Harryette Mullen in our retrospective snapshot of Language Poetry. And it is as much the case with Conceptual Writing as it is with High Modernism. The linkages between Yone Noguchi and Ezra Pound, between Jose Garcia Villa and Edith Sitwell, between Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn (between Baraka and Jack Spicer, between Baraka and Frank O’Hara, and on and on) are forgotten or treated as incidental curiosities.
To speak about race and so-called avant-garde writing is not to beg for token inclusion at the liberal or hipster multicultural food court (hipsters being white liberals with edgier clothes). It is also not to demand the Procrustean choice between race or class—as if these two things were ever separable in the American context—in discussions of poetry. To those poetry critics who claim that “it is easier . . . to speak frankly today about race or gender than to disclose publicly the source of one’s income or net worth,” as Daniel Tiffany did in a recent Boston Review forum on class, I would reply that, just as endless discussions about “family values” do not mean that anyone is actually addressing the needs of actual families or children, so discussions of race almost never address the lived reality of race and racism nor confront unflinchingly and truthfully, without sentimental breast-beating, the constitutive role of race in centuries of American history—up to and including the present moment. Poetry is not de-linked from society. And criticism, as Edward Said reminds us, “is always situated.”
The poets and poet-critics in this forum open the door to a much needed and wider discussion about not just minority poetry but all of American (and English-language) poetry. It is time to examine the assumptions, suppositions, and concepts that constitute the foundations of our republic of poetry—and the ideologies and power structures that keep them in place.
ttp://bostonreview.net/…/erica-hunt-forum-response-race-av…
Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
Erica Hunt
March 10, 2015
Editors' Note: This essay is one of a group of essays on Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde. Read the rest.
Take your pulse, Reader: calculate the population breakdown in your Facebook feeds, of your Twitter account followers. Does your network look like you? Inventory your bookshelves: are they more diverse than your social networks?
It is a “fact” that most Americans self-segregate by race. We break down easily into tribes. Our social world inclines towards a comforting sameness and, by extension, our poetry readings, art exhibits, and classrooms tend to be homogenous. According to a recent poll, a startling 75 percent of white Americans have only white friends with whom they will consult on an important matter. For black Americans, this number is 65 percent, for Latinos, only 46 percent.[1]
Certain radicalisms are “brands” that don’t even begin to address the layers of difficulty, contradiction, tension, undertow, and residue.
It is no surprise that conventional aesthetics reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, and class within their historical narratives of artistic production and influence. So why is it surprising that the avant-garde—especially in its institutionalized form articulated through museums, universities, and the dwindling number of independent art presenter/literary centers—replicates this, however “good” its intentions?
The world is in the text and the text is in the world: every artistic practice is imprinted with its particular tensions of audience, time, and place. One of the realities that enable the current attention to experimental writing is the presumption of art’s tensionless and settled surface. So while attention to experimental practices may be welcome it tends to render that art into teachable, digestible bits; convenient (but ultimately skeletonized) assemblages: the Anthology, sprinkled with “minority” poets as singularities of literary (often white) “genius.” The preference for the teachable and the categorizable simplifies what is difficult about art that plays with surface andopacity, lifts the edge of the curtain and dances blind with what is minimally registered behind. The choice between surface and opacity is sublimated in the turn toward the teachable (Charles) Olson or (Melvin) Tolson, the teachable (Robert) Duncan or (Bob) Kaufman, (Maria Irene) Fornes or (Adrienne) Kennedy or (Adrian) Piper without directly grappling with each of these writers’ denser alternatives.
Often the mind-lock of custom overwhelms us. We’re seduced, many of us against our will, into settling for the surface, into celebrity culture. Even the so-called subculture winds up embracing a “winner take all” distortion that frames how art gets made. Truth be told, art is made in context, dependent on an infrastructure that connects writers, publications, readings, parties, projects into “avant-gardes” of radical presence and collaboration.
Writers churn in cycles of artistic fashion. In the long run, no artist benefits from the view that art is made by atomized individuals locked into cells, territories, homelands, and reservations, and yet this view infects curatorial choices in brittle ligaments of received ideas of aesthetic lineage. If we truly think the imagination is part of the solution—a way to escape bitter marginalization, compromise, and casual brutality, then we must confront the social difficulties as fully as we do the formal, existential, textual difficulties of writing.
For instance, the set of difficulties I confront here in this essay is the slipperiness of any way forward; any truth of mine contains its opposite, its mirror twin, its sibling and its exhausted binary. Each dialectic becomes the stage for yet a new set of contraries, fragmentations, and partialities. I am/was a New York poet. I am/was an (Antillean) “Afro-surrealist” poet. I am/was an activist poet. I am/was a “language” poet. I am/was a radical poet. I am/was a “jazz” poet. I am/was an essayist poet.
Throughout, the chief claim I make as “I” in a series of I’s, is always “Black woman poet,” whose inclinations are infused with a corresponding refusal to let curiosity or inclination be scripted. I have had to invent the person for whom poetry is possible. For me, writing and reading have always been inseparable from the radical project of freedom: imagining, engaging, and rehearsing in the space of freedom’s stuttering and insistent gait toward radical potential; taking inspiration from other artists who have planted the north star freedom as a psychic, material, and existential open-ended value in an aesthetic domain. There is no simple doorway into the practice of this kind of radical poetry. The stakes are high; one risks illegibility, sometimes to the very audiences that one most wants to address. But I think that more writers have to face risk, be willing to stare down the lies that are intended to domesticate a wilder more social art practice.
For me, a poem must demonstrate transformative agency and energy to lick the instant death of words (and the suffocation of the perceiving self). Poems that matter to me are works of imagination that suggest movement beyond the confinements of the permitted and the previously authorized in order to pre-figure a future that “expands the range of the thinkable” (in Anthony Reed's words). I am suspicious of “easy” answers and ready-made solutions. Our saturated fluency in consumer culture, whether we actively resist or not, predisposes us to commodified forms of resistance—easily digested presentations of identity, “oppositionality,” and avant-garde practice. Certain radicalisms are “brands” that don’t even begin to address the layers of difficulty, contradiction, tension, undertow and residue.
It is not so interesting to engage in these discussions about brand identities if they lead to a false totalization of experience, manipulated and manipulating, even when the intention is “radical.” Real experiment consists of nuanced forays into intersectionality and multiplicities of identities, social positions, and strategies: who we are and what role we take up or are conscripted into becoming and in what context.
I say: whittle away at the monuments to any fixed identities and the scripts that summon a practiced performance of precise deformations of un-freedom, stale and un-generative throw-away lines, the roads that lead to tunnels of false consciousness, the cul-de-sacs that eliminate the knots and difficulties and therefore miss the “promising” seed possibilities. Look for the undigested bits, the indigestible “I” that voices without speaking or speaks in other in a multiplicity of voices.
In our current moment, with the space of poetry imperiled on all sides—by a hemorrhaging humanities, a demonstrably shrinking cultural commons daily threatened with extinction, an oblivious, predominantly white discourse running out of excuses for its homogeneity—the spoils are spoiling, spilling, spinning, dwindling. But paradoxically the present is also the stage for an accumulating body of scholarship documenting how our contemporary art forms emerge from hybrid, fluid, and global cultural practices, problem solving, and crises.
The poetic and aesthetic strategies that grow out of our current paradox vary tremendously. This multiplicity, along with the critical mass of practitioners, artists, poets, philosophers, and cultural theorists of color, revise historical context, break up the hierarchies of influence and individual genius in re-contextualize art history, literary production, and movements. We re-frame the subject, probe Cartesian/DuBoisian/Fanonian questions of the self, and inject these concerns into the cultural blood stream. I do believe that there are now more artists of color who are fierce in their pursuit of radical potential. Many have created poetic lineage and aesthetics: an improvisation that is flash and “fugitivity” (as Fred Moten aptly names it) to mark paths that lead away from social and literary death.
Hurray for troubled waters, shifting pronouns, and blurred lines between lines, between genres and disciplines. In the muck, green shoots.
This excitement provokes unexpected kindred, encourages crossing alphabetical, historic, generic borders, cultural lines and language practices, reaching back from Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Aime Cesaire and extending to Kit Robinson, Harryette Mullen, M. Nourbese Phillips, John Yau, Charles Bernstein, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, Dawn Lundy Martin, Caroline Bergvall, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Edwin Torres, Claudia Rankine, and many others whose work points towards radical potentials and other others whose work I have not been introduced to but am burning to know.
[1] Public Research on Religion in Public Life Poll. American Social Values Survey 2013. Race and American Social Networks. Even among those who reported greater diversity in their social networks, the percentages of difference are remarkably low:for white Americans, 91 percent of their close friends were white; for black Americans 83 percent of close friends were black and for Latinos, 64 percent of close friends were Latino.
Poetry
Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
by David Marriott
March 10, 2015
BOSTON REVIEW
Editors' Note: This essay is one of a group of essays on Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde. Read the rest.
What is “avant-garde poetry”? is a question long on answers, if short on consensus. On the one hand, the notion of the avant-garde is invariably seen as a historical category. The history of modernism and the authority of certain authors converge here in a kind of hermeneutic presumption, as if the meanings and values of both constituted readymades. The avant-garde poet emerges as a figure (invariably male, invariably white) that history and culture no longer need to put in question. But on the other hand, those European and American avant-gardes posed a question about the relation between the reading and practice of poetry that goes beyond the category of the avant-garde itself. If certain forms of poetry can now be so easily decoded or read as avant-garde, then clearly the culture industry and the historical avant-garde are now analogous. But somehow if a discrepancy between poetry and the culture industry in part defines what it means to write experimental poetry, then perhaps the very notion of the ‘avant-garde’ is no longer relevant. It is as if the category of the ‘avant-garde’ now inheres in such an anachronistic sense of form and value that it escapes reflection, and so is no longer adequate to the very notion. How can this gap be overcome?
The aestheticization of the term avant-garde is a refusal to think what the alienation of human being in the modern era was made of.
When one turns to black avant-garde writers and poets, these impasses (at the level of definition) are inadequate. In the history of black avant-garde poetics, the aestheticization of the term avant-garde was invariably seen as a shibboleth: that is, a refusal to think what the alienation of human being in the modern era was made of. Aimé Césaire was very aware of the dangers of conflating poetic form with hermeneutic readymades – as, for example, in modernist racist discourse, which both historicized and aestheticized race as sentiment and meaning (traces of which can be seen in all white modernist authors). But the double sense of form on which Césaire insists indicates that avant-garde poetry and radical politics are not the same, and that we must explore the productivity of their relation without reducing either to presupposed concepts or categories. The problem is that in the scholarship of modernism and the reading practices which have now become commonplace, black experimental form has itself become a readymade in the marketplace of modernist content, which is precisely why contemporary black avant-garde poetry is only read (often very badly) insofar as it resembles the old modernist boudoir, or imitates the avant-garde’s wishful resembling of its own lost discrepancy.
Amiri Baraka, theorist of black musical and political form, revolutionized how we should understand their relation by suggesting – after years of close study of black music – that chiasmus rather than dialectic was the exact form of black avant-garde poetry. This was avant-garde criticism with a capital A, but only in an existential and analogical sense. In fact, Césaire was much more radical and expressed his insights into revolutionary black poetry via a language of the unconscious in which syntax rather than lexis, non-sense rather than sense takes precedent. His belief was that in order to be modern (and in a way which is never simply, or historically, avant-garde) the black poet had to become a scientist of the marvelous in which radical unintelligibility is not so much the exception as the rule. Césaire’s immense productivity consists in creating a poetry of events that does not have form or content as its end, but is rather the pursuit of their irremedial alienation. Instead of claiming, as the various European avant-gardes did while reading Marx, say, or Freud, that he was producing a new dialectics (of culture, or meaning), Césaire claimed that poetic production was productive because it consumed knowledge. Or rather–that it was the ‘poetic’ itself that was productive, often against the express conscious and political wishes of the poet. As Césaire explains in his famous letter to Maurice Thorez:
I'm not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But I don't intend either to become lost in a disembodied universalism. . . . I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.
I can think of no better statement of why black avant-garde poetry should not be reduced to the usual modernist dilemma of aesthetics versus politics, or why its attentiveness to richly diverse modes of being should not be seen for what it is, i.e., a politics of the word defined by an incessant fidelity to creative negation. If this is a fidelity which can too easily be appropriated by the forces of cultural industrial control, that is because the value of its creation coincides with the terrible universal insecurity that is both its origin and truth, but one that also defines how each particular gives on to the world a newly embodied universal which provides for and bears along its own richness of meaning. As a result, Césaire remains for me the incomparable world-historical producer of black poetic form and one who continues to haunt.
https://bostonreview.net/blog/poetry-forum-race-avant-garde
Blog | Poetry
Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
by Stefania Heim
Boston Review
March 10, 2015
Boston Review
Jean-Michel Basquiat. Image: thierry ehrmann
Harryette Mullen wrote in 1996, “The assumption remains, however unexamined, that ‘avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’ and that ‘black’ poetry, however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative.’” Mullen’s own opus was being torn down the middle, with particular writings received as speaking for black female experience and others as examples of formal innovation. She concludes by articulating the stakes of such shallow and myopic divisions: “I hope that my work continues to challenge that deadly distinction between ‘blackness’ and ‘humanity’ – or ‘universality’ – that is still imposed on black human beings.”
In collaboration with scholar Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2013), Boston Review has convened a group of poets and scholars to consider the current status of Mullen’s decades-old description. We asked these writers—all publishing in or alongside various contemporary experimental traditions—whether there is now space for and openness to the exploration of aesthetics and race; we asked about tokenism and our allegedly “post-race” era; we asked them to compare public engagement with these ideas in so-called mainstream and avant-garde poetry circles.
These issues are in the air. In April of last year, Simone White wrote on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog:
I had been thinking for a long time about what people mean when they say that U.S. poetry that is not interested in reproducing the familiar (call it what you want: experimental, innovative) is a white practice, a white thing, dominated by white poets and white institutions … I’d been thinking about it as a woman poet who writes poems that could never belong to any tradition but a black tradition.
Cathy Park Hong wrote in Lana Turner of the avant garde’s “delusions of whiteness,” and Daniel Borzutzky, also writing at Harriet, expressed surprise at the overwhelming response to Hong’s essay (“given the similar and equally cogent arguments that have been previously articulated”), linking that receptiveness to “public rage and resistance to the police murders of unarmed black men.” At the University of Montana, Prageeta Sharma and Joanna Klink launched the conference “Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing,” which is now in its second year.
There are many reasons why poets deploy broken forms, leaps, disjunctions, irregular syntax, obfuscated meaning, improvisation, metonymy, and polymorphous subjectivities. But as some of the respondents to this forum underscore, an innovative surface does not make something politically, ethically, or even artistically radical: “certain radicalisms are brands,” writes Erica Hunt. On the other hand, as Mónica de la Torre points out here, identities can be claimed and deployed with similar shallowness. Attempting to understand the relationships of experimental poetic strategies to either institutional structures or individual, embodied lives we cannot simply follow the forms; form is not separable or distinct. The (necessarily temporary) answers have everything to do with history; with how lives are situated; with the relationship between private and public forms; with how experience gets written and to what end. This complicated set of forces is in dynamic play in the work of writers of any color. All of the writers gathered here generously give us a good deal of their own lives and aesthetics in imagining a way forward. It is our hope that readers will meet them here just as openly and searchingly. —Stefania Heim
Dorothy Wang, "From Jim-Crow to 'Color-Blind' Poetics"
David Marriott, Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
Lyn Hejinian, "En Face"
Prageeta Sharma, "Model Minority, Dreaming, and Cheap Signaling"
David Lloyd, "A White Song"
Mónica de la Torre, Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
Erica Hunt, Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
http://bostonreview.net/poetry/dorothy-wang-race-poetic-avant-garde-response
Poetry
From Jim-Crow to "Color-Blind" Poetics
Race and the So-Called Avant-Garde
by Dorothy Wang
March 10, 2015
The Boston Review
Editors' Note: This essay is one of a group of essays on Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde. Read the rest.
In the six months since we began to develop this Boston Review forum on race and the poetic avant-garde, an open discussion of the racial politics of the experimental poetry world has, finally—slowly and painfully—begun to happen. But even as late as 2013, when I was completing my book, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2013), speaking about what Harryette Mullen dubbed almost two decades ago as “aesthetic apartheid” in her essay "Poetry and Identity" seemed difficult, indeed precarious, personally and, more so, professionally. We were supposedly living in a post-race era and everyone knew that class, not race, was the real problem. Smart academics had told us so. Multiculturalism and “identity politics” had already triumphed—to the detriment of poetry—and to bring up the issue of race seemed to come across as churlish, entitled. To utter the “r” word would make one’s criticism or poetry “about outsiderness too outside the outlining norms,” in Prageeta Sharma’s words. “It made you look ungrateful.”
To speak about race and so-called avant-garde writing is not to beg for token inclusion at the liberal or hipster multicultural food court.
If one acted like an “angry minority”—especially if one dared to call out powerful gatekeepers in academia, the poetry world, and the world of arts and letters—one risked not being published in journals and anthologies, not being invited to conferences, and not securing tenure-track jobs or other forms of professional and economic recognition. It was all right to say in a general way that certain minority poets had been overlooked in the archives or in the canon but to name actual critics, poetry professors, awards judges, book and journal editors, players in professional organizations, and anthologists who had brought their own unexamined racial assumptions to their discussions of poetry and poetics and to their decisions about who would be included and rewarded for writing “real” poetry, was verboten. Those conversations were only whispered privately among poets of color.
Except for a few lone voices in the past few decades (Mullen, Amiri Baraka, and John Yau immediately come to mind)—voices that were either ignored or shot down—very few poets and virtually no critics dared to speak explicitly about the exclusions, tokenism, and double standards used to judge poems by writers of color in the “avant” world. Poems by minority poets are almost always judged on the basis of their thematic (sociological, ethnographic) content in the “traditional” or “mainstream” poetry world and rarely on their formal or aesthetic structures, properties, modes—in other words, what makes poetry poetry and not a memoir or treatise.
But the flipside of the same coin is true in the world of “innovative” poetry and poetics, where the “absence” of obvious racial identity is to be applauded—for not exhibiting the hallmarks of “bad” poetry” (read: “identity poetry” [read: "minority poetry”])— and this criterion, too, is content-based, albeit in negative form. A poem without any overt ethnic or racial markers is assumed to be racially “unmarked.” Little or no attention is paid to how poetic subjectivity, which overlaps with but is not limited to racial subjectivity, might inhere in a poem’s language and formal structures—in what is unsaid or unspoken at the level of “content” but manifested through aesthetic (poetic) means.
Minority poets are supposed to be happy to be included at all—as mascots or tokens—and had, and have, little choice but to yearn for “the towardness . . . as though it were inclusion” (Sharma's words). This is the best liberal multiculturalism can offer.
While I am heartened by the fact that in 2015 minority poets such as Cathy Park Hong are explicitly addressing the whiteness of the avant-garde, two troubling facts persist: 1) the relative public silence from white poets and poetry critics on this issue, and 2) the absence of a larger conversation that needs to be had by poets and critics of all races and ethnicities about the assumptions—racialized and other—that underlie and structure fundamental categories of poetry and poetics, such as the notion of the “universal” poetic speaker, the idea of “difficulty” and abstraction in poetry, literary tropes, the link between formal structures and social and historical contexts—to name just a few.
• • •
To speak about aesthetic apartheid is not to be concerned with the individual motives (well-meaningness) of individual actors, as Lyn Hejinian points out in her essay in this forum, or to accuse individuals of bring “racist.” It is, instead, to say that ideologies, institutional structures, and ingrained patterns of thought, especially if unexamined, come to have a life of their own. Did one individual or even a group of individuals create the situation in which, in David Lloyd’s words in his contribution to this forum, “whiteness is . . . the formal subject that lays claim to a universally representative position: that of the human as identical to itself”? No, but it was an accretion of the power of this idea over time and its reinforcement by countless individuals and structures of power that led to its unmarked status as normative and self-evident—an idea that undergirds our seemingly innocuous discussions of, say, the “I” in particular poems. This pronoun can be read as signifying a universal poetic speaker in poems by those who are thought of as racially “unmarked,” but universality never obtains for the “I” in a poem by an Asian American female poet.
The “sheer, formal abstractness of identity constitutes whiteness,” as Lloyd puts it, so that the dirty word “identity politics” does not pertain to white identity (a term that sounds foreign to us, a catachresis of sorts) or white poetry. Robert Creeley or Ron Silliman do not write “identity poetry,” while Langston Hughes and Marilyn Chin obviously do. “Abstract,” “difficult,” “rigorous” poetry—”real” poetry—is racially “unmarked” poetry.
These presuppositions also influence our writing of literary historical narratives so that in our discussions of the Beat movement, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufmann, and Amiri Baraka have either been erased or relegated to the margins. The same is true with Erica Hunt, Lorenzo Thomas, Ted Pearson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Henderson, and Harryette Mullen in our retrospective snapshot of Language Poetry. And it is as much the case with Conceptual Writing as it is with High Modernism. The linkages between Yone Noguchi and Ezra Pound, between Jose Garcia Villa and Edith Sitwell, between Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn (between Baraka and Jack Spicer, between Baraka and Frank O’Hara, and on and on) are forgotten or treated as incidental curiosities.
To speak about race and so-called avant-garde writing is not to beg for token inclusion at the liberal or hipster multicultural food court (hipsters being white liberals with edgier clothes). It is also not to demand the Procrustean choice between race or class—as if these two things were ever separable in the American context—in discussions of poetry. To those poetry critics who claim that “it is easier . . . to speak frankly today about race or gender than to disclose publicly the source of one’s income or net worth,” as Daniel Tiffany did in a recent Boston Review forum on class, I would reply that, just as endless discussions about “family values” do not mean that anyone is actually addressing the needs of actual families or children, so discussions of race almost never address the lived reality of race and racism nor confront unflinchingly and truthfully, without sentimental breast-beating, the constitutive role of race in centuries of American history—up to and including the present moment. Poetry is not de-linked from society. And criticism, as Edward Said reminds us, “is always situated.”
The poets and poet-critics in this forum open the door to a much needed and wider discussion about not just minority poetry but all of American (and English-language) poetry. It is time to examine the assumptions, suppositions, and concepts that constitute the foundations of our republic of poetry—and the ideologies and power structures that keep them in place.
ttp://bostonreview.net/…/erica-hunt-forum-response-race-av…
Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde
Erica Hunt
March 10, 2015
Editors' Note: This essay is one of a group of essays on Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde. Read the rest.
ERICA HUNT
(b. 1955)
Take your pulse, Reader: calculate the population breakdown in your Facebook feeds, of your Twitter account followers. Does your network look like you? Inventory your bookshelves: are they more diverse than your social networks?
It is a “fact” that most Americans self-segregate by race. We break down easily into tribes. Our social world inclines towards a comforting sameness and, by extension, our poetry readings, art exhibits, and classrooms tend to be homogenous. According to a recent poll, a startling 75 percent of white Americans have only white friends with whom they will consult on an important matter. For black Americans, this number is 65 percent, for Latinos, only 46 percent.[1]
Certain radicalisms are “brands” that don’t even begin to address the layers of difficulty, contradiction, tension, undertow, and residue.
It is no surprise that conventional aesthetics reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, and class within their historical narratives of artistic production and influence. So why is it surprising that the avant-garde—especially in its institutionalized form articulated through museums, universities, and the dwindling number of independent art presenter/literary centers—replicates this, however “good” its intentions?
The world is in the text and the text is in the world: every artistic practice is imprinted with its particular tensions of audience, time, and place. One of the realities that enable the current attention to experimental writing is the presumption of art’s tensionless and settled surface. So while attention to experimental practices may be welcome it tends to render that art into teachable, digestible bits; convenient (but ultimately skeletonized) assemblages: the Anthology, sprinkled with “minority” poets as singularities of literary (often white) “genius.” The preference for the teachable and the categorizable simplifies what is difficult about art that plays with surface andopacity, lifts the edge of the curtain and dances blind with what is minimally registered behind. The choice between surface and opacity is sublimated in the turn toward the teachable (Charles) Olson or (Melvin) Tolson, the teachable (Robert) Duncan or (Bob) Kaufman, (Maria Irene) Fornes or (Adrienne) Kennedy or (Adrian) Piper without directly grappling with each of these writers’ denser alternatives.
Often the mind-lock of custom overwhelms us. We’re seduced, many of us against our will, into settling for the surface, into celebrity culture. Even the so-called subculture winds up embracing a “winner take all” distortion that frames how art gets made. Truth be told, art is made in context, dependent on an infrastructure that connects writers, publications, readings, parties, projects into “avant-gardes” of radical presence and collaboration.
Writers churn in cycles of artistic fashion. In the long run, no artist benefits from the view that art is made by atomized individuals locked into cells, territories, homelands, and reservations, and yet this view infects curatorial choices in brittle ligaments of received ideas of aesthetic lineage. If we truly think the imagination is part of the solution—a way to escape bitter marginalization, compromise, and casual brutality, then we must confront the social difficulties as fully as we do the formal, existential, textual difficulties of writing.
For instance, the set of difficulties I confront here in this essay is the slipperiness of any way forward; any truth of mine contains its opposite, its mirror twin, its sibling and its exhausted binary. Each dialectic becomes the stage for yet a new set of contraries, fragmentations, and partialities. I am/was a New York poet. I am/was an (Antillean) “Afro-surrealist” poet. I am/was an activist poet. I am/was a “language” poet. I am/was a radical poet. I am/was a “jazz” poet. I am/was an essayist poet.
Throughout, the chief claim I make as “I” in a series of I’s, is always “Black woman poet,” whose inclinations are infused with a corresponding refusal to let curiosity or inclination be scripted. I have had to invent the person for whom poetry is possible. For me, writing and reading have always been inseparable from the radical project of freedom: imagining, engaging, and rehearsing in the space of freedom’s stuttering and insistent gait toward radical potential; taking inspiration from other artists who have planted the north star freedom as a psychic, material, and existential open-ended value in an aesthetic domain. There is no simple doorway into the practice of this kind of radical poetry. The stakes are high; one risks illegibility, sometimes to the very audiences that one most wants to address. But I think that more writers have to face risk, be willing to stare down the lies that are intended to domesticate a wilder more social art practice.
For me, a poem must demonstrate transformative agency and energy to lick the instant death of words (and the suffocation of the perceiving self). Poems that matter to me are works of imagination that suggest movement beyond the confinements of the permitted and the previously authorized in order to pre-figure a future that “expands the range of the thinkable” (in Anthony Reed's words). I am suspicious of “easy” answers and ready-made solutions. Our saturated fluency in consumer culture, whether we actively resist or not, predisposes us to commodified forms of resistance—easily digested presentations of identity, “oppositionality,” and avant-garde practice. Certain radicalisms are “brands” that don’t even begin to address the layers of difficulty, contradiction, tension, undertow and residue.
It is not so interesting to engage in these discussions about brand identities if they lead to a false totalization of experience, manipulated and manipulating, even when the intention is “radical.” Real experiment consists of nuanced forays into intersectionality and multiplicities of identities, social positions, and strategies: who we are and what role we take up or are conscripted into becoming and in what context.
I say: whittle away at the monuments to any fixed identities and the scripts that summon a practiced performance of precise deformations of un-freedom, stale and un-generative throw-away lines, the roads that lead to tunnels of false consciousness, the cul-de-sacs that eliminate the knots and difficulties and therefore miss the “promising” seed possibilities. Look for the undigested bits, the indigestible “I” that voices without speaking or speaks in other in a multiplicity of voices.
In our current moment, with the space of poetry imperiled on all sides—by a hemorrhaging humanities, a demonstrably shrinking cultural commons daily threatened with extinction, an oblivious, predominantly white discourse running out of excuses for its homogeneity—the spoils are spoiling, spilling, spinning, dwindling. But paradoxically the present is also the stage for an accumulating body of scholarship documenting how our contemporary art forms emerge from hybrid, fluid, and global cultural practices, problem solving, and crises.
The poetic and aesthetic strategies that grow out of our current paradox vary tremendously. This multiplicity, along with the critical mass of practitioners, artists, poets, philosophers, and cultural theorists of color, revise historical context, break up the hierarchies of influence and individual genius in re-contextualize art history, literary production, and movements. We re-frame the subject, probe Cartesian/DuBoisian/Fanonian questions of the self, and inject these concerns into the cultural blood stream. I do believe that there are now more artists of color who are fierce in their pursuit of radical potential. Many have created poetic lineage and aesthetics: an improvisation that is flash and “fugitivity” (as Fred Moten aptly names it) to mark paths that lead away from social and literary death.
Hurray for troubled waters, shifting pronouns, and blurred lines between lines, between genres and disciplines. In the muck, green shoots.
This excitement provokes unexpected kindred, encourages crossing alphabetical, historic, generic borders, cultural lines and language practices, reaching back from Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Aime Cesaire and extending to Kit Robinson, Harryette Mullen, M. Nourbese Phillips, John Yau, Charles Bernstein, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, Dawn Lundy Martin, Caroline Bergvall, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Edwin Torres, Claudia Rankine, and many others whose work points towards radical potentials and other others whose work I have not been introduced to but am burning to know.
[1] Public Research on Religion in Public Life Poll. American Social Values Survey 2013. Race and American Social Networks. Even among those who reported greater diversity in their social networks, the percentages of difference are remarkably low:for white Americans, 91 percent of their close friends were white; for black Americans 83 percent of close friends were black and for Latinos, 64 percent of close friends were Latino.
