Review of You're The Most Beautiful... by Arisa White (by Clara B. Jones)

You're The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened*

Arisa White

2016

Augury Books (NYC)

96 pp

Paper, $16

ISBN: 9780988735576

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

More than 20 years ago, the artist, Andrea Fraser, suggested that works by women don't have staying power because women are generally marginalized or incorporated—remaining invisible. Reviewing artistic work by women, then, may be seen as a recovery project to highlight women's practices that may, otherwise, be overlooked or ignored. In a patriarchy, females are objects, men, subjects, and men speak for women, creating a particularly challenging landscape for women expressing themselves via the spoken or written word (language). One of the pleasures attendant to reviewing books of poetry written by young, female, women of color (e.g., C.M. Burroughs, Francine J. Harris) is reading work with “interpretive power” (Helen Vendler) worthy of being taken seriously by other poets—men and women alike—and worthy of persistence over the long haul. I have been impressed with the degree to which many early-career writers of color, and, many young poets in general, are successfully expanding the strictures of Formalism by integrating form, language, and function.

I read Arisa White's, You're The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened (hereafter, YTMBTTH), after reading an essay on feminism and postmodernism by Craig Owens who quoted Fredric Jameson—“...it suddenly became clear that 'D.H. Lawrence' was not an absolute after all [a male spokesman about women], not the final achieved figuration of the truth of the world, but only one art-language among others, only one shelf of works in a whole dizzying library.” Young female writers of color, and other female writers, especially, feminists, have taken their place in the “dizzying library” of non-patriarchal forms and, like Harryette Mullen before them, have taken their place among postmodern poets disrupting the status quo by writing, as Owens put it, in opposition to “Western man's self-appointed mission of transforming the entire planet in his own image.” Contrary to most male writers, most female writers, especially feminist authors, have boldly chosen to address comfort; personal narratives and personal relationships; egalitarian associations rather than ones based on power differentials; emotions and feelings; language as authentic communication rather than abstraction and symbolism; and, a holistic and an organic view of the world.

White's book exhibits the foregoing characteristics, as well as, being an ambitious and intimate map of one woman's experiences as a female citizen of the world. Based on an e-mail interview, White stated, “I identify as a feminist poet in the same ways I identify as a black, queer/lesbian poet—these are identities I stand in and write from and out of. These are social locations that help me examine our political and cultural institutions and systems of thought. They are lenses and sites for feeling and knowledge. In many ways, all these things work together to help me nuance the world around me, give language to particular experiences. I am feminist because I care about the political parity of women/females, and I believe this sexist oppression is the root of all oppression.” In YTMBTTH, White addresses themes both subjectively and universally, including, childhood, loss, love, and chaos in lyric-like poems demonstrating a respect for form, function, and, especially, language (“There are little words,/that can fit in little places,/if you say them small enough.”; “She is pretty and perfect in sleep before language must be assigned—“; “When your friends are around, your hands language/near her to confirm she's close:...”).

White's poems are decidedly not derivative; however, their cryptic use of language and meaning remind me of Meghan Sterling's autobiographical and understated, yet strong, poems about female issues relevant to anyone concerned with a humanistic interpretation of life and living. White's poems invite the reader into her interior space without being didactic or literal (“Men, when they do, cross their legs in the way of academics./Never in the way of churchwomen who keep the secret/covered—there's nothing to be implored, explored, discovered./In the way of academics, the whole body thinks....”). White's lyricism often takes the form of homages, usually, to lovers (“Sounds the body/makes to keep quiet/while I take/your camisole down:/purple. Our sable bodies/an inappropriate math/in one stall.”). The author deftly addresses intense issues (HIV, sex, self-concept) without losing control of her emotions or language or focus or material. At the same time, her poetics and style communicate the limitations of language for exposing the full range of experience (Post-modernism), indicated, in part, by her frequent use of nonsense words, repetition (“...There's no going back from raw. New story/you, mezzo and wood bending. My love, you're the/darling dang—true-dat, true-dat, true—dat-dat-dat.”), as well as, avant garde conformations (see, especially, and, notably, the poem, “Four Square,” on page 71).

Other themes that struck me as I read YTMBTTH were references to West Indian/Caribbean culture (see poem, “Auntie,” on page 17), and British (colonial?) habits (“I prefer my tea with sugar/when I talk to you. You make/each minute an island where we,/crowned and carpeted by green,/sip Dragon Well from our palms.”). And, then, there is the matter of race—usually present but rarely explicit (however, see the poems, “Who Invited The Monkey To Omen's Party,” on page 16, and “Drag Up...dedicated to the white people who were asked to raise their hands if they would choose to be black,” on page 18). Via e-mail, White shared, after reading one of my essays, “The essay has me thinking about what it would mean for me to write directly about race, how does it feel creatively within? Immediately, I thinkfeel [sic] about being in an 'interracial' marriage, which is more so an intersectional state of being (race, gender, sexuality, class) than a singular way of identifying. I think the pressure is how to write from these intersections/interstices. . . using polarities to make a third thing, to create a lens for seeing what the opposites map out. If black and white are said to be my points of reference, what is the gray communicating in relationship to the blue-black?”

The “intersectional” is postmodern, indeed. Since the 1970s, approximately, identity has become a fluid, personal narrative. My essay, referred to in the previous paragraph, argued that many early-career poets of color, male and female, LGBTQI and hetero-normative, are defining race-gender-class on their own terms rather than writing about race explicitly, directly, or literally. Many of these poets are writing, following Emily Dickinson, “slant.” By her account, some of White's major influences are Saul Williams, Carl Hancock Rux, Erykah Badu, Toni Morrison, Patricia Smith, Rebecca Seiferle, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Hart Crane, Medbh McGuckian, Harryette Mullen, Tyehimba Jess, and Ross Gay—artists who challenge Modernism's meta-narratives, crafting individual voices and impulses derived from their personal experiences, interpretations, and perceptions. White's next project is in this tradition, “a craft talk about my queer imaginary [that will] unpack the queer imaginary that informs my work, examining the way my lesbian aunt and her friends languaged [sic] themselves in the world and how that became a model for how I create a poem.” My advice to the reader of this review is—Do not wait for her future projects in order to savor Arisa White's compelling work. Each of the poems in You're The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened is necessary, deserving a wide audience, and, with this collection, the author has made a valuable contribution to the literary community.

*Originally published in The Curly Mind, 2017

Review of Thief In The Interior by Phillip B. Williams (Clara B. Jones)

Thief In The Interior*

Phillip B. Williams

2016

Alice James Books

Farmington, ME

82 pp

$15.95

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

“I love my brother who wasn't a brother of mine./Walking in an alley alone at night I bury my hands/in my pockets to appear brotherless, bordered/by the decay blowing from the stench.” Thief In The Interior, p 41

In separate articles, critics Natalia Cecire and Paul Stephens recently addressed the difficulty of defining “experimental” or “avant garde” writing. Quoting Cecire, “'Experimental,' when applied to US writing, means many things, but tends to aggregate a relatively (but only relatively!) stable set of critical expectations, including, formal disjuncture, a sense of political or ethical commitment, and an association, but not strict, identification, with the experimental sciences.” To the extent that there might be consensus about this statement, it seems clear that, because of its inherent qualifications, experimental writing, in our case, poetry, may exist along broad continua of formal, motivational, and (loosely) empirical deconstructions. One of a reviewer's charges, then, is to highlight the aesthetic and pragmatic landscape(s) of a given text, in particular, the extent to which the text conforms to and deviates from, Formalism's (and, Modernism's) conventional standards and guidelines.

Philip B. Williams is a young, gay, African-American poet whose star has risen rapidly. The reader is referred to his divedapper.com interview for an intimate and comprehensive account of his accomplishments and opinions—about poetry, politics, and himself as an artist. As the poet says to Kaveh Akbar, his interviewer, all of the codes embedded in Thief In The Interior have not been broken yet, and, speaking as one sympathetic and admiring reviewer, I completed the book with a feeling that the writer might have been playing games with me or, perhaps, that he had taken on too much. For sure, I do not intend, with presumption, to be in Williams' head or to have figured the book out. Instead, I intend to provide a subjective view of the text, hoping that my schema is not unrelated to what I consider its common and recurring themes. Thief In The Interior made me think of Jungian Psychology's references to archetypes (sexually and physically vulnerable individuals, Mother, Father, Pain), to a “collective unconscious” of empathy over confrontation, and to the heterogeneity and complexity of the human psyche (“Because when I write 'tree' I mean fire/of autumn.”—p 7).

This poet's fundamental humanity is demonstrated by his commitment to a respectful re-framing of conventional structures and forms, particularly, the sonnet (see, for example, “Sonnet With A Cut Wrist And Flies” on p 20: “a man found in the wrist who wanted out but who/put him in?”), as well as, his reverence, even, spiritual, treatment of subject matter that verges, seemingly, on awe (“Turn your face that way where light no more/transfigures you than darkness makes a need for/transfiguration. Yes, the scar above your eye.”—p 52). I first encountered Williams upon reading his outstanding poem, “Canticle To The Tune Of A Waistband's Snap,” featured in Boston Review in 2015, a complex and probing treatment of identity and culture. After this experience, I was eager to know more about the poet and his work.

Williams is not an angry poet in the tradition of writers associated with the Black Arts Movement (e.g., Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Amiri Baraka). Indeed, some of his poems are heartbreaking (see, for example, the long-form poem, “Witness,” comprising part II of the book: “When Rashawn Brazell went missing,/the first trash bag of his body parts/hadn't seen his head, didn't know where/it could be.”). The title, Thief In The Interior, may, itself, represent a conscious or unconscious crie de coeur, telling us that outside events have torn out the author's guts or his soul and that these forces have, also, disrupted the lives of innocent or victimized black bodies and minds. Throughout the book, Williams employs innovative forms and word structure to communicate emotion indirectly, rather than, literally. The 14-line sonnet form, itself, is, apparently, repeated (many times, many ways) for it's reference to the (14) Stations of the Cross. Without overtly religious components, Thief In The Interior is a reflective homage to struggle and survival (“When he lifts his hands/lightning scythes below./From his weary blues/blues spill out but nothing around can/define how.”—“God As A Failed Figuration,” p 13).

Williams' responses to crimes and human failures are always tempered by a respect for life forces capable of almost-detached analysis and of basic respect for the capacity to confront reality head-on (“I was told I could turn my back to them,/the sickle-mouthed angels who rummage/through the church dumpsters looking/for wings or food.”—p 48). In my opinion, none of Williams' poems is sentimental, and very few phrases or lines, including, only one whole poem, fail (“A Survey Of Masculinity,” p 60, though the poem, “Apotheosis,” following it, on the same topic, is stunning: “The bats have come down, wooden/and sterile, to greet the joints, to rearrange/teeth and thoughts.”). Another sign of this poet's skill, imagination, and reverence is found in his repeated use of mandala-like (Jungian) drawings depicting a symbol of the universe or the whole. Indeed, one sign of the book's cogency and depth is it's elevation of individual cases and, often, personal themes (gay, black, mother, male, father), to universal status by presenting them as particular events, as well as, general templates (see, for example. “Of Shadows And Mirrors” on p 76).

An aspect of Post-modern experimental writing is contradiction, as well as, rejection of binary categories. These characteristics are expressed in Thief In The Mirror by way of juxtaposition of Romance and Conflict, Strength and Vulnerability, Whole and Part, Many and Few, among others (“He has/a bag that holds found edges/jagged as a stag's/horns or smooth as/a single pane smashed into/smaller panes...”—p 5). Though Williams deals with often grotesque material, one can quibble with his assertion in the above-noted interview that this collection exists in the realm of grotesque literature, if what we mean by that is literature that is comically or repulsively distorted (google.com). The book under review cannot be compared to the work of, say, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Franz Kafka, or Bobbie Ann Mason. Thief In The Mirror, also, cannot be classified as satire or (the) absurd.

Nonetheless, as the cover image by James Jean suggests, Williams' themes are both Ordinary and Extreme (e.g., “Door To A War I Never Knew”—p 47), ones that cause approach-avoid responses, as well as, some degree of depressing curiosity. Indeed, Williams told Akbar that he was depressed for quite some time after completing this text. Beyond the possible relevance of my own interpretation(s) of Thief In The Mirror, there is much more to assess and to unravel therein, such as, references to rappers and rap songs, use of iambs and soft rhyming, the significance of role models to young black men, resilience of human emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, copious use of literary devices, etc. This book deserves a large audience and conforms to at least one of Formalism's rules—“interpretive power” (Helen Vendler). The collection is at once a group of fine poems and a stimulating puzzle. One can only look forward to Williams' future work.

*Originally published in The Curly Mind, 2017

The Good Consort (Flash Fiction by Clara B. Jones)

The Good Consort*

“We were lovers once, living almost as man and wife, happier than most wives and men.” Ian McEwan (1978)

We love each other, but there are cultural differences. One mate always cares more than the other, and I was given the short end of the stick. She distanced herself from me soon after I fired my English tutor. Having mastered comprehension, I felt more than adequate as a partner. Trying to train my glottis to enunciate properly was a lost cause, a deficiency that led her to obsess on my animal nature. We reverted to sign language, but most of the time she ignored me or screamed that I had misrepresented myself from the start.

Though I received excellent socialization in the lab, pleasing her has required continual compromise. I am her junior by ten years, but any Primatologist will tell you that human behavior is the most flexible among the hominoids.

We were never equals. Her needs always dominated--she, the Research Associate, I, the experimental Subject. Even after she was fired from the university for ethical violations, her self-esteem never wavered. Though I am naturally promiscuous, her calculated defense of our relationship kept her the singular object of my desire. But I have been shunned since I began to assert myself. Our sexual positions disgusted me, and I felt greater intimacy when sleeping in a nest of blankets beside her bed. Cuddling only accentuated our physical differences. Recently I have become the target of her verbal abuse, and she is especially cruel in restaurants when I tear meat with my teeth. Who cares if she is brighter and uses a knife? We are so closely related that differences are not easily multiplied.

Last Tuesday she boasted that she has applied for an online program in Gender Studies. A Ph.D. will allow her to study the causes and consequences of trans-species lust. Science always has been in her blood, and, with or without me, she deserves to be happy.

*Originally published in 34th Parallel (Fr), 2015

Review of yr yr by Matt Margo (Review by Clara B. Jones)

yr yr¹

Matt Margo

2017

Ghost City Press

29 pp

Free to download with or without donation

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

It is difficult to characterize “experimental” or “avant-garde” poetry definitively. However, it is widely accepted that these forms break with conventional practices. Matt Margo is a recognized promoter of experimental poetry as a writer and Editor of two poetry journals and as Publicity Director for Gold Wake Press. They describe themselves simply as “a person who writes,” though their identity is, also, defined by use of non-binary pronouns and non-gendered creative work. Margo's 2015 poetry collection Blueberry Lemonade, established them as a prominent young poet of “angst,” addressing trauma and neurotic impulses. Rather than being a collection about the interior self, however, yr yr's poems position the writer in relation to language. Their poem, “sea,” exhibits the form of pieces throughout the chapbook, words or phrases separated by various graphemes unique to each composition. Titles are short, single words—“animal,” “craft,” “killer,” “whale,” “mind[less],” “arts.” Each word or phrase might be considered an element to itself, and, in a post-modern sense, meaning or interpretation is, for the most part, surrendered to the reader.

sea

sample of mint leaf ÷ matrix equation ÷ the end of the season

÷ relatively peaceful ÷ a raised stone basement ÷ beyond the

clouds ÷ performance and precision ÷ the science of human

history ÷ seen to be sympathetic ÷ this pathway is

suppressed ÷ boob tube inanities ÷ wrecked off the coast ÷

completely in lowercase ÷ eternal dream ÷ group stage ÷

coach of the dragonflies ÷ superparticular ÷ all animals be

stunned ÷ the variegated pink ÷ determiner of shoe sizes

“sea,” and the other compositions in yr yr, can be understood as true examples of minimalist “collage poetry,” and, if we are not to consider these poems as random collections of words and phrases, we must assume that they are intentionally positioned, perhaps, via the writer's process of free-association. Whatever the derivation of these pieces, they are Rorschach-like, and, if not intended for diagnosis, are intended to provide pleasure and non-representational fantasy. Sometimes, poems contain references to titles, such as the phrases, “in the hydrostatic equilibrium” and “a sudden change in the atmosphere,” in the piece titled, “fog.”

the poems, “futures” and “transient” contain the phrases, “opus of chaos” and “state of chaos,” respectively, possibly hinting at Margo's view of themself in an uncertain world. On the other hand, they may find comfort in “a universal human language,” an element of the poem, “logic,” and reminiscent of Noam Chomsky's formulations about “deep grammar.” In the poem, “gazelle,” one phrase highlights “pure poetic fantasy,” that may be a coded message about how the writer perceives their collection. Similarly, in the poem, “winter,” they embed the phrase, “derivation is uncertain,” within a poem whose elements are otherwise [seemingly] unrelated. However, in at least one poem, “red”, Margo includes the phrase, “form follows function,” an element linking the compositions, and the writer's view of them, to serious critical scholarship, in this case, about the writings as a whole.

However yr yr may, or may not, be connected to the mainstream literary scene, all poetry is fiction and cannot be completely realistic—though we may want to believe otherwise. With this collection, Margo has transitioned from a type of literal interiorization to poems that increase the distance between writing and reader. yr yr reveals Margo's aesthetic authority. They have seemingly moved beyond personal conflicts to address the contradictions, ambiguities, and complexities of adult life. I highly recommend this collection to any reader interested in ambitious and mostly successful examples of contemporary Experimental Poetry by a young writer, and I eagerly anticipate their future work.

¹Originally published in the curly mind, 2017

Review of Blueberry Lemonade by Matt Margo (Review by Clara B. Jones)

Blueberry Lemonade*

Matt Margo

Bottlecap Press

2015

45 pp

$10.00

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

The New York School poet, Alice Notley, one said, “I am alone, and that seems to make my personhood more urgent.” Poet and Editor (Zoomoozophone Review), Matt Margo, might say something similar. I feel that I know Matt well...though I don't. We follow each other on Facebook, I have published a few poems in his journal, and we have occasionally interacted electronically. I like Margo's poetry, even though some of it is so raw that it kicks me out of my safety bubble, and the poet's bravery, clarity, and insight never cease to amaze me. Matt (hereafter, the “poet,” the “author,” or “they”) describes themselves as “trans-feminine” and “non-binary,” regarding their gender as “feminine.” Most of the poems in this collection address the author's complex emotional life, including, their psychic struggles. A recent, professional grade, image of themselves posted to Facebook was superimposed with the text, “Saint Margo of Perpetual Anxiety,” and, indeed, their poems' substance locates the author squarely in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Poetry of Angst.

Bottlecap Press' statement describing the book says that it is about “reading poetry, listening to Gucci Mane, missing everyone, longing for love, regretting the past, fearing the future, wanting to die, wanting to live, being sad, and trying to overcome being sad.” I would, also, say that the book is about loss and reinvention of self. Some poets, Thomas Lux, for example, might view the present collection as an example of the “coming of age” sub-genre because of Margo's detailed, sometimes, tortuously self-scrutinizing, documentation of their struggles with identity and place as well as their conflicts. Blueberry Lemonade, of course, is a mixture of sour and sweet, colored blue [sic], and the volume's cover reinforces these ideas by displaying a tower of yellow building blocks, representing, perhaps, the poet's upward climb to wholeness or, even, the skyscraper the author refers to in one haiku...

“i dream of being

a skyscraper in the midst

of a hurricane”

It would trivialize the emotional currency of Margo's feelings to interpret “skyscraper” as a Phallic Symbol, and the author makes few direct references to physical expressions of affection.

As they suggest, Margo has been influenced by James Joyce's modernist style of “psychological realism,” and the poems' styles are reminiscent, also, of Virginia Woolf who described their writing as “interior monologue.” Some poems in Blueberry Lemonade reminded me of Michael C. Peterson's poem, “Repeater,” for instance, Margo's line, “you pull the trigger on a plastic toy gun that you have put into your/ mouth.” Many of the author's poems are dark, bordering, in my opinion, on nihilism and, less frequently, on self-pity (see the poems, “a fun activity for a sunday afternoon;” “do-it-yourself make-a-wish foundation;” “a garbage bag stuffed with internal organs;” “they told me i could be anything i wanted to be, so i killed myself;” and, the Haiku,“i am so sorry/ please forgive me. i am a/ monster. i hate it.”). This is a collection of radical, very serious poetry whose gravity is relieved somewhat by the poet's obvious love for music, their respect for other experimental poets (e.g., Steve Roggenbuck), and their clear understanding that, though self-concept may be fractured and complex, it exists in a larger community and a broader narrative (“in the end though, i just want people to participate/ in any way possible;” “we all were formed from/ dead suns & there is something/ beautiful in that”). Indeed, in addition to being a Poet of Angst, Margo can be viewed as a Poet of Identity whose strong images communicate that he has not given up (“the comedians & magicians/come together in search of footprints”; “bliss is not fixed in passing canisters”). Surely, for this poet, The Sublime exists though it cannot be contained.

While I am sympathetic with Formalism and with academic Poetry, including, theory and criticism, I think there is a degree of elitism among some in that community who have erected standards so rigid that they function as barriers to success, in effect, making “Others” of poets who privilege language, authenticity, present experience, and meaning. For example, one can only infer from Helen Vendler's critiques of Adrienne Rich's poetry after they professed their lesbianism and became outspokenly political as well as activist, that Vendler found Rich's poetry interesting (Vendler likes Rich's “themes”) but disappointing (“failed promise”, is Vendler's term). Without ever going on the personal attack, Vendler (very politely) dismisses Rich's work after ~1973, as “politics” and “sociology.” Is Vendler saying that Rich's mid- to late-career work is not Poetry or not good Poetry? And, what about Margo's writing that does not so much directly address politics or society but, rather, his own interior landscape. Would Vendler say that Margo is writing psychology rather than Poetry? Would Thomas Lux, one of my favorite poets who believes that a natural progression is for poets to move away from writing about “self,” consider Margo's poetry immature?

Certainly, years before Emily Dickinson, mainstream poets have held that enduring Poetry (poetry for “all time”) is written “slant” rather than in a straightforward, direct, and literal manner. Yet, Poetic Realism has been a respected sub-genre of The Canon since writers rebelled against Romanticism in the late 19^th Century and was clearly understood to be political—to represent a revolt against aristocratic norms. Is it possible, or, useful, to view the relatively recent wave of mostly young, counter-normative poets as, perhaps, Neo-Realists? Are these underrepresented (e.g., feminist, lesbiaan, gay, activist, gender-non-conforming, racially/ethnically minority, marginalized) poets producing a New Poetics, even, a New Aesthetics? Are Neo-Realist poets situated with the revolutionary French and Russian writers who expressed (personal, political, and social) life as it was instead of promoting Romanticism and Idealism?

Having said that, Rich and many other oppositional poets (e.g., Caseyrenée Lopez) appear to be Utopian (romantic? Idealistic?) in their philosophy, social models, and politics, a tendency that may be inconsistent with Realism. Surely, there is much material, context, and intersectionality to be evaluated in an attempt to give the new wave of outspoken poets, and their predecessors, an honored and deserved position in the Poetry community. A good place to begin to understand what these poets are about is to meet them on their own terms in journals such as Yellow Chair Review and Zoomoozophone Review in order to understand poets such as Matt Margo who is taking significant risks to honor their Truth. Finally, many of the lines (“you say 'we could eat at taco bell again'”; “the ice cream truck drives around until it no longer exists”) and poems (“washington, lincoln, lafayette;” “blessa”) in Blueberry Lemonade are stunning, deserving to be read over and over again. Indeed, this collection places Margo among the best young poets writing experimentally today.

*Originally published in Yellow Chair Review, 2015 [text corrected & slightly revised]

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]