Young Black Poets And A New
Sub-genre: Self-Directed Writing
“[Harryette]
Mullen's work...provides a telling reply to those who would argue
that lyric innovation should be, or just is, an inappropriate genre
for examining the political, the social, or the cultural.” Juliana
Spahr (2002)
by Clara B. Jones
Until I read the Jamaican poet, Ishion
Hutchinson's, poem, “The Coffin Maker” (“the alabaster hour of
day”), it never occurred to me that black poets were acknowledged
and rewarded for work that did not concern race as a central theme.
I've begun to pay close attention to styles, themes, and aesthetics
in contemporary poetry, especially, when reading black American
writers. My own standards tend to reside in a Formalist domain,
privileging Helen Vendler's criteria: pitch, innate rhythm,
interpretive power, distinctive timbre (lyric)--though my, often
experimental, poetry does not always follow these rules. I realize
that the esteemed poetry critic considers race, class, and gender to
be secondary to “temperament,” a standard subordinating language
to form. This effect is problematic since most of the poetry written
by members of marginalized and underrepresented groups,
fundamentally, emphasizes L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E. In addition, the latter
writers are characteristically concerned with what Vendler would
term, “politics” or “sociology.” as well as, personal
narrative and relationships, modes of literary expression that do not
always have “good staying power,” in Vendler's words. After many
pangs of guilt for regarding Vendler's principles with high esteem, I
have formed the opinion that the boundaries between LA-N-G-U-A-G-E
and F-O-R-M are more fluid than often presented in textbooks or
critical pieces written by members of the poetry mainstream and that
this observation is supported by considering several contemporary,
mostly, young and emerging, black poets now writing in this country.
Young black poets and their practice
Many of the poets in the category I am
tentatively defining are males, some of whom have received
recognition—awards, winners of contests, competitive academic
positions, and the like. In addition to Hutchinson, Gregory Pardlo,
Terrance Hayes, Jamaal May, Geffrey Davis, Ross Gay, Dante Micheaux,
and Reginal Dwayne Betts come first to mind. Phillip B. Williams is a
young poet who has taken control of his craft, engaged in
self-directed creative activity, rather than work produced within
Formalism's strictures or by adopting a separatist political posture
by directly addressing race and institutional racism. Williams,
instead, decides when and when not to employ race as a personal,
social, or political construct or marker—as a filter through which
to interpret and express interior experience relative to its personal
meaning, a local condition, politics, or other phenomena and events.
In “Canticle to the Tune of a Waistband's Slap,” he says:
“Imagine empty suits gin-/fanned to a river bottom, hollow
button-up shirts/Tuskegee's into silence,/in the shape of a Khoisan
woman/renamed for a planet and propped up for exhibition.”
Williams' reference to a South African “Khoisan woman” should be
interpreted as an indirect reference to race, gender, and identity,
since most of his readers will not know of the tribe or of
steatopygia, characteristic of female Bushmen. It is, also, of
interest that the physical trait (protruding buttocks) is considered
a sign of beauty in Khoisan society and that these women's facial
features are recognized for their comeliness around the world. The
poet, then, employs a poetic conceit by cleverly embedding race and
other markers into this piece in a manner that does not allow or
demand easy categorization or stereotype and that does not overwhelm
lyric or art. In this and other poems, however, and, without
self-consciousness, grandiosity, or an obsessive sense of obligation
(thus, not without authenticity and agency), the theme, race, is
woven with other signifiers in a manner permitting a creative space,
the poem, to encompass several individual markers, including,
personal (woman), impersonal (river bottom), social (Khoisan), and,
by implication, political (South Africa).
The young, female African-American
poet, Morgan Parker is much more direct when referring to race but
manages to “slant” (Emily Dickinson) her phrases and associations
in ways that do not corrupt the aesthetic features that have made her
one of the most visible black females in the mainstream poetry
community. Many of her poems assert gender, sex, and class themes as
well as concerns with race, demonstrating identity's heterogeneity
and complexity. For example, in her poem, “Magical Negro #217:
Diana Ross Finishing A Rib In Alabama, 1990s,” Parker writes, “All
my friends are sisters and husbands, I'm afraid/to be uncharted I
want an empire in my teeth....” In this piece, as in the work of
other young poets that I highlight, race can remain a backstory (in
this case, via the poem's title) upon which readers are
positioned, making a slanted approach that is, arguably, a more
significant message of the poem than if race were front and center
(glaringly “in your face”). Morgan Parker fuses race-talk with
fiesty, clever, technically competent, irreverent, sometimes
hilarious, writing in which her intelligence and personality project
themselves into the reader's awareness, as if to say to Formalists,
“Move over, I'm in charge here!” In this article, I am discussing
poets who, like Williams and Parker, take ownership of their unique
voices and variegated material by treating race as one component of
their identities comprised of many traits and markers, refusing to
“play to” the limits and limitations of classical standards.
These poets' Egos and skills are strong enough to voice a craft and
to stand on their own relative to an industry, particularly,
publishing, that has typically excluded them or kept them on the
margins.
Self-directed creative work is embodied
in what the young, African-American, female poet, CM Burroughs,
calls, The Vital System (2012, Tupelo Press), a book that has
been embraced not only by poets of race but, also, by the mainstream
poetry community. Like Williams and Parker, Burroughs has crafted a
self-directed creative project in which race is one of many
interconnected components of a complex tapestry of self. Like many
visual and performance artists (e.g., Pope.L who, in addition to
performance art, also produces “text art”), Burroughs makes clear
that she refuses to filter her her writing through race alone,
identifying with “post-blackness,” a contemporary critical
perspective rejecting notions that the person of color must speak to,
speak for, or bear the burden of race (“Like so: post-
slides into your/dailiness...call it Counter-Culture.
Post-/Black. Fancy it.”) Following an aesthetic tradition
situated in the poetics of Harryette Mullen and Jorie Graham,
Burroughs offers an “associative” poetry of fractured identity,
slaying the haunting dragons of death, sex, race, and gender with a
post-modern sensibility in which the narrator's voice is fluid and
short lines and white spaces denote heterogeneity without
straightforward or binary answers suggested by white vs. black or
male vs. female. Like a mark of Graham's work, Burroughs presents a
“revision” of what we mean by race, sex, and gender, employing a
model supported by several, rather than one (race) or a few (race,
class, gender) supporting themes.
Throughout her volume, Burroughs
returns to death and her seemingly ambivalent relationship to sex and
to black men, highlighting her obsession with personal history, and
the reader will note her implied reference to Shakespeare's use of
“die” and “death” to represent “orgasm” in some poems (“a
woman who allows a woman to die”; “we did not see its beak/gag,
did not see it die.”; “Dying happens just as your waking
happens”) The Vital System translates Burroughs' life into
textual form, represented, not only, via her language (“So
much has happened. I'm black. I have a dead sister. I love you, but,
and believe this,/I mostly want to talk.”). Several poems are
written in prose, and, like Graham's long sentences, carry thoughts
and feelings and situations from the present over the long term,
perhaps to an imagined eternity or place where separation and loss do
not occur. Both Graham and Burroughs combine elements of the poetics
of form and of language, bridging the concerns of both traditions
into literature that is taken seriously by highly-regarded poets,
critics, scholars, educators, publishers, and other professionals,
practitioners, and stakeholders, resulting in wide acclaim for each
poet's work.
Conclusion: Fusing aesthetics and
politics
It is interesting to note, and would be
important to study, Morgan Parker's recent call for black poets to
develop their own aesthetics based upon a radical resistance that she
traces to Nikki Giovanni and the [“angry”] Black Arts Movement of
the 1960s. Parker's White Paper, published as a Harriet
blogpost, was devised in opposition to current calls to increase
racial diversity among poets, and she suggests that black poets
should withdraw from that initiative. Elsewhere, I have termed this
nascent school, Black Nationalist Poetry, and it remains to be seen
whether a significant proportion of black poets will forgo efforts to
become validated by the mainstream poetry community in this country.
A conventionally race-based poetry, particularly, black nationalist
perspectives, might oppose the self-directed creative processes
represented by the young black poets mentioned in this article.
However, there are several reasons to argue that a self-directed
practice is a more powerful way to bring issues of identity,
including, race, to national and international domains. First, black
nationalist aesthetics characterize movements of the past, outcomes
of Modernist ideals of meta-narratives and utopian thinking based on
allegories (i.e., oppression generated by institutional racism rather
than discursive “performance” of race; reliance upon binary
thinking—black vs. white, male vs. female). On the other hand, many
of these writers' paradigms, also, exhibit Post-modern aspects since
they situate race in a social and political arena. Second, a more
heterogeneous, complex view of race and race-based poetics benefits
the poet and her audience by promoting an independent writer in
control over her product that, it can be argued, is less vulnerable
to commodification by counter-interests in poetry's mainstream.
Finally, heterogeneity and complexity permit more flexible and
differentiated responses to racism over the short-, medium-, and
long-terms, components of tactics and strategies to assert leverage,
if not immediate influence, in professional networks often biased in
favor of a limited set of phenotypes (putatively, male, white, and
economically privileged).
I have argued, elsewhere, that
“oppositional” poets, educators of poets, and progressive critics
should develop a systematic analysis of Formalism out of which might
emerge a new, progressive aesthetics linked by language to politics,
in particular, racial politics. The present article is intended to
propose a tentative conceptual framework by revising and expanding
the latter project for one based upon the idea that form and language
are both important to the aesthetics and politics of marginalized
poets who benefit themselves, their art, and their, direct or
indirect, messages by adopting literary standards and techniques
reaching the widest possible audience. It is only by these means that
the elitist strictures of Formalism and classical criteria can be
effectively impacted and modified by black and other underrepresented
poets. Like Burroughs' “vital system,” many young black poets, as
autonomous agents, are connecting the interior and the personal with
the social and political via language as a new writing model.
The latter paradigm might be crafted in a hierarchical or
non-hierarchical manner depending on the values and purposes of the
poet whose art is now generated by self-directed aesthetics and
politics rather than by the externally imposed, exclusive, elitist,
and divisive standards, priorities, and expectations of conventional
and mainstream poetry networks.
Originally published
in online poetry journal, Yellow Chair Review.
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