Review of play dead by Francine J. Harris (Review by Clara B. Jones)

play dead

Francine J. Harris

Alice James Books

2016

pp 85

$15.95

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones*

I am rarely at a loss for words—particularly, the written word. However, this is the most difficult review of poetry I have ever attempted. My mind tends to work linearly; thus, when confronted with experimental or postmodern writing, I struggle to repress a search for meaning, coherence, and the tendency to classify based on orderly categories. One of my favorite critics, Tony Hoagland, a mainstream poet, prioritizes subject matter, sincerity, clarity, exactness, and concreteness—characteristics of canonical writing; however, in his analyses of contemporary, “compositional poetics,” Hoagland deftly deconstructs poetry of the moment as collage-like and fragmentary. In many of my conversations with poets, especially, younger poets, over the past three years, a theme that often arises is the need for detailed analysis of current styles—what Hoagland sometimes refers to as “tone.” While, in the final analysis, Hoagland rejects contemporary poetry in favor of canonical forms, language, and functions, I have not read more insightful and useful essays about contemporary poetry as those provided by that critic¹. I recommend beginning with Hoagland's essay, “Fear of narrative and the skittery poem of our moment” (p 173), in which he states, “Generally speaking, [poetry of the moment] could be characterized as one of great invention and playfulness. Simultaneously, it is also a moment of great aesthetic self-consciousness and emotional removal.”

Not all of Hoagland's characterizations of contemporary poetry apply to Francine J. Harris' work since her relationship to her writing is decidedly attached and present. She does not keep her subjects, her themes, or her own emotions at arm's length. Nonetheless, Harris' use of language is playful, collage-like, and fragmentary, and she, also, uses punctuation and forms creatively. I first encountered Harris' work when I read her poem, “Canvas” (reprinted in the volume under review) in Boston Review...

“You want to make a painting of a fat woman.

As if you could render the skin translucent you start at the

stomach. Inside its bag, you start to fill in hot-cross pastries

and sausage and hot dogs on a stick.

You stand her upright.

You brush out a background in vats of all-purpose flour and

Swiss milk chocolate bars near the belly button and figure

you may dot areas of ambiguity with gummy bears and

popcorn chicken. But instead you find yourself stenciling in

pigs.”

Harris, a young African-American poet who has won several prestigious awards and fellowships, represents a new wave of young poets of color who are not bound to situate Race front and center of their work. Nonetheless, racial effects are apparent in her occasional use of non-standard English (“What you taking so long.”; “Like ants; maybe she crawl in the dark.”; “Kara, you wild.andIdontknow” [sic]; “One day when we grown”). Rarely, but effectively, Harris references current events, as, “A woman/in Oklahoma holds up a two-year-old baby girl/to keep her lover from being tasered, which is also not/an act of God. Science won't disprove a cop/hanging from a man's neck in a choke hold. We doubt/footage of alien ships in the sky.” Speculatively, Harris' frequent use of “fat” and “pig” may be references to African-American stereotypes—obesity and lovers of pork.

The poet often refers to “mother,” possibly expiating rage and sadness. Some of her lines appear to be cries de coeur and are often heartbreaking (“I mom of you. I mom of you a lot.”). Even as a young poet, Harris has become a rock star because of the widespread attention paid to her poem, “Katherine with the Lazy Eye. Short. And Not a Good Poet,” published in Rattle in 2011. In some ways, Harris might be classified as a writer of the grotesque because she emphasizes “dark” themes (unpleasant sexual encounters, drug addiction, alienation, damaged personas), Indeed, reading some of Harris' poems left me with the feelings I have when listening to Billie Holliday sing “Strange Fruit,” “Summertime,” or “God Bless the Child.” Perhaps more significant from an academic perspective, however, Harris poetry might be constructively compared with the “elliptical” poet, Lucie Brock-Broido since both writers, in my opinion, play with words in a similar fashion, especially, their penchant for using neologisms and their use of adjectives and nouns as verbs, a convention that I have found infectious and that I have, sparingly, begun to incorporate into my own work. This type of play, however, can quickly become tedious as well as seeming arbitrary or contrived, and I found Harris' frequent use of periods to separate phrases and to segment sentences an unnecessary and distracting conceit.

Similar to her references to Race, Harris' treatment of Gender is mostly understated; however, her identification with feminism appears strong. In a recent interview at divedapper.com, the poet stated, “The word I'd use if I were being kind to myself would be 'confidence.' 'Entitlement would be the word I'd use if I were trying to rein myself in....I still have something to say, and I'm going to keep having something to say, and I'm just going to keep talking. You can either be on board or not, but I'm not done.” It is rare to encounter a young female poet whose voice is so certain and so mature. Given the well-deserved attention Harris has received to date, her future work is sure to expand her audience. Even if “collage” poetics is not your preference, I encourage you to acquaint yourself with Harris' strong, emotional, and moving poetry. I suspect that her next book is awaited eagerly by many, and I look forward to following her career.

¹Hoagland T (2006) real sofistikashun: Essays On Poetry and Craft. Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota

*Originally published in Yellow Chair Review, August 2016

Intersectionality And The Black Poet (Essay by Clara B. Jones)

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]