Intersectionality And The Black
Poet¹
“I
think I’ll borrow from Walt Whitman here and say, 'I contain
multitudes.' I write out of who I am, and who I am is a cis-hetero
woman, a Caribbean native, an immigrant, a woman of color, a member
of the African, Latino, and South Asian diasporas, a New Yorker, a
lover of British crime dramas and 'Doctor Who', an Italian-speaker,
etc., etc. The poems come out of all of me: I’m not black more than
I’m a woman. I’m not a woman more than I’m an immigrant. I
understand why people ask these types of questions, but I find them
impossible to answer as it always makes me feel like I’m reducing
myself somehow, slotting myself into a box. And if I select a
particular identity, how do I prove it? Am I then supposed to write a
certain way or have certain poetic heroes or write about certain
subjects? I want to be known as a good writer who is, also, quite
proudly, all of these other things.”
Paulette Beete (2018)
"There is great literature which has little or no social relevance; social literature is only one kind of literature and is not central in the theory of literature unless one holds the view that literature is primarily an 'imitation' of life as it is and of social life in particular. But literature is no substitute for sociology or politics. It has its own justification and aim." Wellek R, Warren A (1977), Theory of Literature (3rd Edition). Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, NY.
The
purpose of this brief essay is to present a tentative hypothesis
about the practice of poetry by African-American writers and to
illustrate my ideas using examples from a chapbook by Paulette Beete
(Voice Lessons,
2011, Plan B Press) and by presenting quotes from an interview I
recently conducted with her. In particular, I intend to show how form
and content can be employed in the service of transformative, even,
radical, reinventions of The Race Project. The old project derives
from Modernism's (post-Romanticism---->~1945 [WWII]) reliance upon
grand narratives (e.g., Marxism, Fascism, Science, Psychoanalysis)
and binaries (e.g., black-white, he-she, fact-fiction) that, applied
to the present case, advance the centrality and essential import of
race to African-Americans located as victims in a hostile, alienating
American landscape. The new project that I discuss herein is rooted,
instead, in Post-Modernism, acknowledging a world diffracted, not
essentialist—characterized by relativity rather than absolutes and
by meaning that is fractured rather than coherent. From this
perspective, the world is heterogeneous rather than unified and
predictable—an unstable universe of mutable facts and shifting,
multifarious identities.
In
2015, writing in the poetry journal, Yellow
Chair Review,
I proposed that some African-American poets appear to demonstrate
what I termed, "self-directed writing"—discussing what I
considered to be an increasing tendency for these authors to project
"identity's heterogeneity and complexity" rather than
project themselves from a fundamentally race-based place (consider,
for example, poets associated with the Black Arts Movement such as,
Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, or Amiri Baraka) [see my essay on "self-directed writing" elsewhere on this blog]. The “self-directed”
poets who come most readily to mind are Beete, C.M. Burroughs,
Gregory Pardlo, Arisa White [see my review this blog], Ishion Hutchinson, Ross Gay, Alan King, and Francine J. Harris [see my review this blog], among several others. In this note, I suggest that
African-American poets increasingly project themselves
intersectionally—as
writers with multiple identities and interests,
creating work, often, from an interior, subjective place, and,
sometimes, from no political or racial or sociological place at all.
These authors compose with personal voices, more or less
unconstrained by stereotypes and pressures imposed from society and
other outside forces (e.g., academia).
My concerns in this note derive,
not from empirical research, but from my earlier interest in
“self-directed writing” and from anecdotes based upon personal
experiences. Several months ago, I attended a reading by a
Washington, DC poet—Caribbean-American, male, 45 or so. The reader
presented some strong poems; however, I found it noteworthy that his
work communicated no angst, no opposition or resistance to the status
quo, few references to historical markers that might have
identified him as a member of a historically oppressed group. I came
away determined to explore my own reactions of surprise and
discomfort as well as the extent to which independence from topics
generally associated with poetry by marginalized poets might be more
common than I might have speculated (see, for example, epigraph,
above by Beete). As a result, I decided to test the validity of my
ideas by studying Beete's forms and content and by interviewing her
directly. I was, especially, interested to assess my intuition that
writing by some proportion of African-American poets communicates
“intersectionality” and conforms to post-modern criteria (“the
new project”).
One such criterion, for example, holds
that a poem as a whole may not be meaningful though fragments
or particular words, phrases may be meaningful to the reader.
In a post-modern world, then, the reader or observer has interpretive
control. Some critics have pushed the foregoing perspective to the
point of deflating the roles of both reader and author by
stating that a poem is about itself. I asked Beete, “What do
you want your readers to know about you?” She replied: “The
most important thing that I’ve ever learned about poetry—thanks
to the poet Maureen Seaton—is that you don’t have to understand
what a poem means to appreciate the poem. It’s fine if you just
like the sound of it in your ears. Or the way the words feel in your
mouth as you recite it out loud. Or how it looks on the page. Or
maybe you just catch hold of a phrase or two. And, it’s fine not to
like the poem at all. I hate that idea that there is some right
answer to what a poem means. That probably doesn’t answer the
question of what my readers should know about me, in particular, but
it’s absolutely what they need to know about poetry.” What we
need to know about P-O-E-T-R-Y!—rather than what we need to know
about Beete. Notwithstanding, the author's poems are often intimate,
telling us a great deal, indeed, about her and her experiences (“Why
do I write? Because that's who I am...Writing is how I make sense of
the world. It is how I make sense of myself.”). Yet, her governing
framework remains idealistic, even, intellectual, and, as her reply
indicates, the poem is, ultimately, about its relation to the reader.
Like
much of the canon of post-modern poetry, Beete's work can be
classified as “experimental” [see my essay on "experimental" poetry elsewhere on this blog] in the sense that she explores form
and, content in non-classical, non-traditional ways. For example, she
pushes the bounds of what we mean by a sonnet. Her poem, “Eva
Cassidy Sings At
Last”
(p 33), is an understated reference to jazz (and race?) in 14 lines
(but, not in every
line!) with universal import: “1. To be gone is to swing or be
inspired/2. vibrato & trill-laced ravings, an imaginative flight
of melody/or rhythm/....” As Beete explains in her book, this poem
“is collaged [sic]
from” several sources, including, Simone de Beauvoir, a personal
e-mail, and a newspaper article, among others. To “collage” a
poem is to arrange and re-arrange fractured parts, not, necessarily,
for coherency, but, consistent with a post-modern worldview, for the
artistic act itself.
Other “experimental” constructs
appear throughout Voice
Lessons,
violating expectations in numerous ways. Like Gertrude Stein, Beete
employs repetition so frequently that it might be said to be her
signature convention. In the poem, “She wears her beauty” (p 20),
this phrase begins a line 13 times in a 26-line poem that includes
other repeated phrases. Using lines such as, “She wears her beauty
all out of proportion.” and “She wears her beauty like a
ghostwritten memoir.”, Beete disguises elements of personal
narrative with subtle lyrical, often, metaphorical, undertones.
Elsewhere, she combines humor and surprise and self-effacement and
seriousness, as in the poem, “Curriculum Vitae” (p 31): “1. I
write poems to itch things out, to measure the antediluvian folds
of/the body, the woman's abdomen, stretchmarked hoarder of near
misses.” Again, identity is heterogeneous and imprecise and, while
not exhibiting herself literally as a person of color, the author
communicates that she is no stranger to struggle.
It
is in this, and other ways, that the author confronts different
aspects of her identity—or, maybe not. Again, in a post-modern
mode, accurate or literal interpretation is not the point. Though she
may refer to jazz or to physical weight or to God or to sex, etc., it
is not her primary intention for the reader to form a stable,
predictable impression of her “being in the world.” In this note,
I have used a few examples from one African-American writer's words
in an attempt to show how an intersectional, heterogeneous pose
re-invents what it means to be a writer of color. A related dimension
of this perspective inherent to the phrase, “self-directed
writing,” is the suggestion that African-American poets are
claiming the power to define themselves and to create work on their
own terms. I will continue to follow what I think may be a trend.
These poets are empowering themselves and creating their own niches
that often seem to be independent of the historical and current
expectations and characterizations others might try to impose on
them.
¹Originally
published in 7/2018 in the online journal, i
am not a silent poet [revised]
