"The Atlantic": How Poetry Came to Matter Again
 

I sometimes like the poems of Sharif, Chen Chen, and Danez Smith, though I find the latter two often anti-intellectual, narrow-minded, and Americentric. The less said about Sharif's propagandist "Persian Letters" poem the better. Recently a friend, who lives in Abu Dhabi and travels widely, was speaking to me about how American writers take identity politics as a universally acknowledged fact, when really it is accepted by a small percentage of people and only within the Anglosphere.

Identity politics can be dismissed on Marxist grounds (Asad Haider explains it well here, though he is definitely not the first to do so). In literature, one reason I dislike the poetry of identity is because identity deals in the general—being gay or brownish—and not in the specificities of the individual, which cannot be reduced to identity. Identity is what you call yourself because of other people and society; the opposite would be what the cat at the end of T. S. Eliot’s The Naming of Cats is doing: “When you notice a cat in profound meditation / The reason, I tell you, is always the same: / His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation / Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: / His ineffable effable / Effanineffable / Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”

The current movement will pass. I am not surprised that poetry is more popular than in times past, but then again, more people are in writing programs now than ever before. Most of the poets mentioned I find unimaginative; and I already know what it's like to be gay and brownish, so I am not sure what their poetry offers me.

Walter,

I do like the Haider article. As an ardent lefty myself, and someone who constantly tries to be an advocate in my school, I find some some of the recent Twitter explosions (say, surrounding Anders Carlson-Wee's not great poem in The Nation) interesting and challenging.

I find some stuff to enjoy in all three--though, in the case of Smith almost entirely when I hear him read his own poems and almost never on the page. (In the case of Sharif, is this the poem you're talking about: [Persian Letters]).

I think for a long time poetry ceased having "popular" poets. There wasn't a way in for people who had one major talent but not another. When you think of almost every major era--even Modernism--there was a popular poetry that was actually, you know, popular. Sometimes popularity coincided with talent. Byron is an easy example. Very frequently it didn't. But those popular poets allowed an entryway into the good poets--it kept poetry both ephemeral and important. That strikes me as something the industry has lacked pretty much since the novel took over. Our culture (and I'm generalizing) with it's lac of attention span, should ultimately have a similar reading market to the eras where could read: shorter pieces that engage and draw people in. I think the popularity of poets--even if it's based solely on racial/sexual/gender identity at first--is what, at first, draws people in, it helps poetry in general.

Hi Walter,

Interesting post. Turning to civic engagement, protest in the US often seems to me to choose consumer paths: purchasing choices, product boycotts, sooner than demonstrations or organizing for elections. I have a little experience on this topic, having run a presidential campaign in Monroe County, IN back in 2003-04, and done door to door canvasing often enough. This hand in hand with the slow death of the American union movement. Perhaps the US does a better job of producing informed consumers than informed citizens.

On a parallel track, what people refer to as identity politics feels to me suited to just this cultural moment. I'm not sure I can express this better; I'm just trying to situate the movement in terms of political theory. Clearly it has improved the world in its role as a continuation of civil rights. What is that quotation - one person oppressed is everybody oppressed? The sum of human happiness has increased in measurable ways through the work of identity politics, such as marriage equality in the US.

All this quite independently of any aesthetic question, though those are worth asking. But I'm interested in the political theory, and the consumer question.

Cheers,
John

Update: cross-posted with Andrew, who does a much better job of addressing the aesthetic questions than I do. I'd argue though that popular poetry is alive, well, and quoted daily by tens of millions in the guise of music lyrics...

Hi Walter,

I think I pretty much agree with you. Of course, it sounds better and more palatable coming from you (gay and brownish) than it would from me (white and straightish). And I can't think of a better way to put it than from the voice of Eliot's cat haha.

Like Andrew I'm an 'ardent lefty', or instinctively feel I am, though having looked into the Anders Carlson Lee controversy I do begin to wonder what that means. I didn't find the debate around his and the magazine's forced apologies interesting and challenging, I just found it pretty unequivocally disturbing that they felt it necessary to make them. I wonder (Andrew) why you felt it necessary to add the editorial 'not great' to your link, as if this softens or justifies the ridiculous treatment the poem/poet received.

Generally, however well-intentioned, I tend to look on poetry (or anything for that matter) which claims/seeks to speak for a 'group identity' with some skepticism. I'd far rather be invited into a unique and private universe.

Edit: having said this, I should also say that I'm not familiar with the three poets mentioned in Walter's opening paragraph. I did watch the youtube clip Andrew linked to of the Danez Smith poem ('Dinosaurs in the Hood') which, like a lot of spoken word, seemed more akin to good political stand-up, which seems a better medium to me for cathartic collective identity.

OK, I read the Atlantic article. It's hard for me to get any sense of the poets discussed there other than from the extracts cited, since the whole piece reads like a long publishers' blurb. Forget William Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”: Guzmán’s poem was an almost instant eulogy - this does not inspire the sense that we are reading an impartial witness to the scene.

Cheers,
John

Well since Eliot and Wordsworth are getting some play, I guess I'll quote some Auden. He said what I would.

A poet’s hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

Hi Mark,

I found the debate interesting because I saw a lot of it on Twitter. Some of it really was brought up points that I hadn't thought of. I found it challenging because I still couldn't bring myself to think that Carlson-Wee did something that he needed an apology, and yet he still did. As did Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith.

I specifically mentioned the quality of the poem because that should be the foreground of a reading: the poem was raised up and published in the journal, despite it's mediocrity, in part because of identity politics; for that very same reason it was torn down.

As for the treatment, I think there are interesting questions, and specifically Americentric questions, about blackface and minstrel-shows. All the language of appropriation is, to my mind, unconvincing; I'm more interested in the former, and what those lines might be. Here's John McWhorter on it.

(The "ableist" language Burt and Smith apologized for, given the context, is frankly absurd.)

Andrew, well why didn't you say all that? ;) But thanks for the clarification. I clearly read things other than your intended meaning into 'interesting', 'challenging' and 'not great'.

Cheers.

Fwiw I quite like the poem. It's an amusing irony that many of the professionally offended (white) people who caused the furore on social media would no doubt happily describe themselves as 'woke'.

Hi Andrew,

Interesting link. It ends "JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University", which does a fair job situating the frame of reference he brings to bear on the question of Black English. Similarly, I was at a Chomsky talk some years ago where he described Black English as in linguistic terms an independent language with an independent set of rules.
So much for neutral linguistic observation. As for the sociological question, well, it's fascinating, and McWhorter does a fair job reviewing it to my mind. Here in the Rio Grande Valley, the choice between Spanish and English is similarly fraught. Some people will be happy to hear Spanish, some offended; getting that choice right requires experience and focus. For instance, in my classrooms, students are startled when I begin referring to Spanish to explain French or German; it takes a moment to break the ice of stereotyping and show that these are world languages from a common family, and learners will in fact learn quicker if they have Spanish under their belt and available. But with the ice broken, then that choice can become a matter of confidence and pride.
As McWhorter indicates, what the Dalai Lama calls insight certainly helps when faced with questions like these.

Cheers,
John

Update: Found my quotation. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” - Dr. Martin Luther King.

I would be considered leftist and progressive. There is a distinction between this and, for lack of a more eloquent word, SJW leftists who use progressive causes for reactionary ends (paradoxically enough).

I won’t defend Carlson-Wee’s poem, though if it were better he would have gotten away with it. The Nation’s response was the worst of all possible responses; what the magazine should have done, if it felt that it needed to do anything, was publish a few of the poems bouncing around Twitter written in response to Carlson-Wee’s poem and which were well-done. This would have allowed the reader to decide and learn for himself what was problematic with the original, and it would have given an audience to those poets who found it offensive and who were able to articulate why instead of assuming it was self-evident.

Two points of absurdity:
• The massive backlash against a leftist poet for writing a tone-deaf poem. I don’t think Carlson-Wee is racist; I think he totally misjudged and didn’t realize why what he had written was bad and embarrassing and deemed racist by some. To paraphrase Zizek talking about liberal nation-states: those on the left will be criticized by other members of the left for failing to do enough, while the people who do nothing avoid all criticism but also help no one. Carlson-Wee is not the problem.
• This happened at the same time Israel jailed a Palestinian poet because it found the poem she wrote and shared on Facebook to be offensive.

Yes, Andrew, that Persian Letters poem. I don’t think poems have to be historically accurate—they don’t have to be anything at all—but “barbarian” didn’t have the connotation then as it does now—the Greeks weren’t comparing Persians to animals, like the speaker suggests—and the Persians were the invaders and would-be conquerors of the Greek city-states, with Alexander’s later conquests revenge for what Xerxes and Darius did. The speaker calls the Greeks the brutes, but they were just defending themselves. Am I misreading the poem? Definitely possible.

I agree with most of what you say, Walter. Apart from your assertion that the poem is unquestionably 'tone-deaf' and 'bad and embarrassing'. Are these qualities really inherent in the poem, or is it that political squeamishness can't allow us to separate the voice of the poem (old homeless black guy) from the reality of the poet (young skinny white guy). The voice seems authentically enough rendered to me, though being English I'm no expert (I honestly thought the speaker could have been a southern 'poor white' stereotype). Can anyone honestly say that if they didn't know the identity of the poet, they would know this was written by a white person? Should that matter in a persona poem or are some identities off-limits? This is the crux of the issue isn't it? We talk a lot on the sphere about poems having 'earned' the right to address certain experiences. I'm not saying the poem is great, but for me it was the poet's 'appropriation' of the experience of being homeless, as much as his use of black vernacular, that rang my 'exploitation' alarm. But nobody seems concerned with that.

Anyway, I don't think The Nation should have done anything. Maybe not published the poem haha. But once they had – don't apologise. Don't feel an obligation to print poetic 'responses'. The offended already have an audience: Twitter. I hear it's massive. Well ok, don't The Nation have a 'letters to the Editor' section? A couple of disgruntled emails in there would have been enough.

(Nice coat btw)

I world normally agree with you in regards to voice, but in this poem, the black vernacular isn’t linguistically correct. I’m not an expert; however, I got my degree in linguistics and did take a semester of Black English that focused on the syntactic properties of that vernacular (and its history) taught by a black feminist who was going to call the course N*****! (exclamation mark included in the class name but not the asterisks) until NYU put an end to that (boy does this last sentence reads like a parody of liberal arts education). My point is I can’t defend the poem on linguistic grounds. What you say about poor white American English is good. Where are the poets working in this linguistic register?

(Thanks about the coat!)

John McWhorter, celebrated black professor of linguistics, doesn't seem to agree (see link on post #8).

Maybe all black people don't all talk exactly the same all the time. Maybe the old homeless guy that Carlson-Wee was channelling talks exactly like this. There's a thought...we're back to those wonderfully individual cats.

'IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap- hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.'

Explanatory note: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

(Edit: re the coat. You're welcome. Snazzy!)

If linguistics is a science, it shouldn't of course matter whether McWhorter is black or not, just as it shouldn't matter whether Chomsky is black or not. Or Walter, whether your NYU professor of linguistics was a black feminist or not. Folks either master the science or they don't. That is perhaps science's two-edged sword.

Cheers,
John

Mark,

I'd say that a lot of the 'woke' white people weren't the first people to jump on this. Consider that Stephanie Burt published the piece. I think a number of bright and perceptive POC were the first to jump on this. I'm not going to Twitter search it, but I'd suspect people like Eve Ewing were probably at the forefront, and it made a number of people reconsider the initial reception. And I think that is valuable.

The long apology? Well, that strikes me as foolish. Walter's suggestion there is probably right on. But it wouldn't have made people happy, as the reaction to Grace Schulman's NYT opinion piece showed. A lot of the problem, to me, is that people assumed, as Walter said, that the poem is self-evidently racist/problematic/whatever; to many people, it isn't. Some of the more nuanced voices on twitter challenged Schulman's piece in interesting ways--and on her terms--but most threw up their arms and suggested that she was supporting racism by supporting the Carlson-Wee piece.

Yet Carlson-Wee isn't racist; he just wrote a mediocre poem in a dialect he may or may not understand. Walter is right again that if he pulled it off most wouldn't have cared, but he didn't. So a journal that isn't racist published a poet who isn't racist; the content of it? Well, that does get more problematic. McWhorter tries to wave his hand and pretend that Black English is treated outside the academy as it is inside it; it isn't. I have racist white family members, and they have (not in front of my recently, but when I was too young to have the courage or clout to stand up to them) descended into what amounts to black face, in poor Black English (in their own ignorance, they just assumed you could, say, throw a "be" anywhere). I knew kids my age who did it, too...and that's in the inner-city public school I went to that was majority-minority. A butchered "black-voice" is and has been used for harm. But what do you do about that when, again, the journal, the editors, and the writer are manifestly not racist? Do we spend all our attention on it when the poetry world actually has more serious injustices (see, again, Walter's point on the Palestinian poet). The answer, to me, is no, at least not in the way it was dealt with. Without Twitter, the smartest critiques that led the way would have had some primacy; instead, we got a mob.

Walter: on the Sharif poem I hadn't thought that deeply about it, perhaps because the references are all over the road (Ovid, David/Goliath) and so I merely took it as a poem less about East/West and more about what it means to be defined by someone else, and finding power in that. It doesn't strike me as shedding much interesting light on that, but I hadn't thought about it in terms of propaganda, and I feel like I'm missing something in that.

Andrew: "Walter is right again that if he pulled it off most wouldn't have cared."
I don't think it's by any means self-evident that aesthetic quality would uniquely determine most people's reaction to this or any piece. History I think does not bear out this assumption.

Cheers,
John

He wrote at a different time, but black poets still like Berryman's Dream Songs. Terrence Hayes, who admitted they were problematic, said they were an inspiration, of sorts, for his American Sonnets.

Hey Andrew,

When I made the comment about 'woke' I wasn't suggesting that white people were the first to jump on the poem. I was just pointing out the irony that 'woke' seems to be the African American vernacular expression that it's ok for white liberals to use. I know lots of black people complained too. A Google search of 'Eve Ewing Carlson Wee' proves fruitless though.

Your sudden dismissal of McWhorter (who you enthusiastically linked to remember?) as being unaware of how black English is treated in the real world 'outside the academy' seems a weak argument. Do you really think the publication, in a left-wing magazine like The Nation, of a poem whose only crime may be clumsiness is going to fuel more racism of the sort you describe from your upbringing?

I agree. Though I'd go much further than foolish. 'Craven' is about right. And worrying in the precedent it sets. Schulman points out in her piece that in her 35 years as editor (1971 - 2006) the magazine never felt the need to apologise for a poem it published. Now it has, for a poem that you acknowledge is clearly not racist.

I don't agree with this. From what I've read of the Twitter comments, most people's objections weren't that he didn't 'pull it off', they were that he dared attempt it at all. No doubt if Berryman were writing now he would get the same response. Very few of the comments were along the lines of 'black people don't talk like this'

(“I’m trying to understand the voice in this poem, it feels offensive to me and like it’s trafficking inappropriately in Black language, but is there something I’m missing?”
“Don’t use AAVE. Don’t even try it. Know your lane.”
"AAVE isn’t a costume. do better" (this to the magazine, not the poet))

Now, all of these comments were from black poets, so who am I to say they're wrong? And yet it feels wrong to me. Are they automatically right because they're black? I'm sure you wouldn't say this. Imagining oneself into another persona is a fundamental creative freedom. It can be done well or badly. If it is done with malice or mockery then it should be rightly called out. And remain unpublished. I still don't agree with Walter's suggestion that publishing the poetic 'responses' from Twitter would have been the best course of action. A poem should be published in a magazine for one reason only: because the editors think that it is of sufficient artistic merit. Not to assuage some sense of guilt or under pressure to provide some sort of balance. Again, that's what the 'Letters to the Editor' page is for. The Nation clearly decided that this poem was of sufficient artistic merit. And then, suddenly, they apologised for that decision.

Indeed. I agree that there is a nuanced conversation to be had about this. The problem isn't the Twitter mob though, it's that The Nation capitulated to that mob. It didn't have to. It could have ignored it or, as I say, simply granted some of the more nuanced voices a right of reply on its letters page.

This, from the editors' lengthy apology, strikes me as particularly chilling coming from people supposedly versed in how poetry works.

As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received.

No no no.

Now, I know you agree that the magazine shouldn't have apologised, but we seem to disagree on whether or not that is the main issue. For me it is. Obviously it isn't as important an issue as poets being jailed for what they write, but bringing that up just seems a facile way to conduct an argument, like a parent saying 'stop moaning, there are kids starving in Africa'.

I posted the McWhorter because I am interested in the debate.

"Do you really think the publication, in a left-wing magazine like The Nation, of a poem whose only crime may be clumsiness is going to fuel more racism of the sort you describe from your upbringing?"

No, not really, but I can see why people of color might be wary of something edging on minstrelsy, and no surprise you can find people who are more right-wing on Twitter trying to champion the poem. They were doing so even before 'The Nation' put up it's apology.

Craven is a better word; I don't know Smith's poetry, and I don't love Burt's, though I respect the hell out of her intellect and criticism.

Woke is just white people who "get it." I'm not going to go through Eve Ewing's whole twitter feed to get back to roughly when it was published, in part because I may be wrong, though I suspect given the domain that she treads that she was one of the first on it, and probably one of the more insightful.

As to creative freedom, I'm generally on your side. But I think we do have to have context. Here's an idea:

Philip Roth has his Zuckerman character fall in love with someone he convinces himself is Anne Frank. Can that even work if he isn't Jewish?

I can't seem to find the novel--and it generated a lot of controversy even among the Jewish population--but it came out a few years ago and Anne Frank survives and is quite vulgar in it. Can a non-Jewish person do that?

Mel Brooks made "The Producers" in the late 1960s. Could anyone else do that?

There was a lynching in 1981 in the US, and in certain parts of the country the noose comes up as a threat hanging places still to this day. The Confederate Flag waves over some states. I can imagine it's more real here than it would be elsewhere.

Here's the poem so we all know what we're talking about:

How to

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,
say you’re pregnant––nobody gonna lower
themselves to listen for the kick. People
passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee
funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely
to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know
you is. What they don’t know is what opens
a wallet, what stops em from counting
what they drop. If you’re young say younger.
Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t
flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough
Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,
say you sin. It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.

If there were right-wing people championing this they either missed the point or they were just trying to piss off the left wing people who were attacking it. For sport. The editors say they published it because they originally thought it 'a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization.' I'd say that's a pretty good analysis and they should have stuck to their guns. I don't agree it 'edges on minstrelsy'.

Yes, yes and yes. That was easy wasn't it? They could do it well or badly. In the same way that Jim Moonan, raised Catholic, can evoke the holocaust in his poem currently on non-met. I don't think Jim's poem is entirely successful, as I've told him, but I'd damn well defend him against anyone trying to make him apologise for writing it!

I was just looking at responses to Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lion." Here's a page of comments, including that of the poet:

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps...evine/lion.htm

And here's the poem:

They Feed They Lion
By Philip Levine

Listen
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.


Cheers,
John

We're also not talking, necessarily, about apology. I think we both are in agreement that the apology of the Nation was craven. Anders Carlson-Wee also apologized, and I'm of the mind that if you do such a bad job at a poem that you accidentally evoke minstrelsy, you should at least meditate on the choices that led you to this.

We're also not talking about legal, here. I don't think someone else trying to do "The Producers" should be jailed. But perhaps it might be more problematic for a non-Jewish person to make, let's say, a hardcore Anne Frank porn, than a Jewish person, no? Aren't these choices not just moving towards taste but moving into exploitation?

We're also not talking about, say, merely evoking the holocaust as Jim did. People complained that he may not have earned the weight of the association (I haven't gone through the whole thread). We're instead talking about actively picking up and speaking in the voice of someone who went through a collective tragedy. Imagine all you want: aren't you inevitably going to fail? Aren't the costs of failure necessarily coming across as exploitative?

We're going round in circles, Andrew, but never mind. Carlson-Wee 'evoked minstrelsy', for most of his critics, just by writing the poem, regardless of its quality or the accuracy of his use of the vernacular. He simply didn't have the right to, according to them. I disagree with this. And we are talking about apology, that's the issue whether you like it or not. What he meditates on in private is his business, but he shouldn't have been made to apologise. The forced public apology is worthless. One's own conscience should dictate that. Maybe, given time, Carlson-Wee would have read enough criticism of his poem and genuinely reflected and honestly, quietly, apologised on Twitter, or in private, of his own volition. Maybe not. His choice.

I'm glad to hear you don't think a non-Jewish person putting on a production of The Producers should be jailed! That's wonderfully liberal of you! As to the hardcore porn version of Anne Frank, no, I don't think it would be more 'problematic' for a non-Jew to make this. I think it would be equally distasteful whether made by Jew or non-Jew. If you're asking whether the Jewish pornographer should be spared jail and the non-Jewish pornographer jailed then no again. If their motivation was the same, then I think they should be treated with equal contempt. But then I'm not sure I even think holocaust denial should be a crime. It just makes martyrs of right-wing extremists for other right-wing extremists. They should be ignored or, if they won't go away, publicly humiliated with facts.

I also don't believe that a Jewish or African American writer, born in say 1982, has any more or less of a right to write a first person persona novel or poem about the holocaust or slavery than anyone else. They might be more likely to do it better, but they might not. What matters is empathy for humanity, sincerity of intention and artistic merit.

'Imagine all you want: aren't you inevitably going to fail?'

That's a depressingly pessimistic view of the human capacity for imagination and empathy that might one day get us out of our tendency towards tribalism.

My point on jailing, which should be obvious, is here we're talking about artistic stakes and audience tastes; a world like "could" (which I used) perhaps could open up more. I don't want it to.

Do you think white actors should play roles in blackface? How is visually recalling minstrels different than aurally? You keep saying that it was Carlson-Wee's very act of trying on a black persona is what caused the furor, but you are wrong on this. All the serious critiques, whether we agree with them or not, focus on his language. First, not every black person speaks in AAVE. Second, in jumping in to that specific persona and speaking from it poorly, I can see the argument that he's not far from minstrelsy. You talk about the Civil War, but that's not what this is about. The history of minstrelsy pushes far past that, and the history of appropriating a black voice to denigrate black people's intelligence stretches to today. To keep the black/jewish parallel, it would be like a non-Jew writing a poem and being overly concerned with money. Are there ways in which it logically fits into the poem? Sure, but that's a narrow window that isn't going to stink of anti-Semitism, and a Jewish person who is writing that poem is necessarily going to strike the audience differently. Take, for instance, pretty much anything Sacha Baron Cohen does. That's what the critiques are.

There are many effects that art can and should have, one of which should be unsettling the reader. Far too many poets fear trying new things or pushing their audience. That said, the further a poet pushes into areas that unsettle the audience, the more excellent the poem needs to be to justify it. It's like walking out onto a triangular edge over an abyss, or being asymptotic. Can a white man write a poem about Trayvon Martin? Sure, but it needs to be damn good for it not to come across to most as exploitative.

You don't ignore holocaust deniers or the Alex Jones' of the world; they're symptoms of a disease in society, and you don't ignore symptoms (though I don't think they should get the excessive media they do get). But that's a side-bar.

That's a depressingly pessimistic view of the human capacity for imagination and empathy that might one day get us out of our tendency towards tribalism.

I don't think so. I think it's realistic for the reasons I noted. I think we ultimately can and must move past tribalism. And I'm not telling people that they can't or shouldn't empathize. There's a difference between empathizing and creating well-meaning art about it that misses the mark to people and then attempting to publish that.

Here's an article appearing on my Twitter feed that basically says no one should ever use AAVE: https://wearyourvoicemag.com/identit...opriating-aave

Here's what I find frustrating about this: "As a mixed race Asian-American growing up primarily in the United States, I acknowledge that I, too, have been part of the problem, and am guilty of appropriating AAVE—online and in person. However, I am actively trying to unlearn these habits because I believe they are harmful and disrespectful to Black folks, given my positionality within the racial hierarchy of the United States."

Okay...but why is this harmful? I'm genuinely confused how me using "hip" or "bae" is a problem. This isn't a person talking about "minstrelsy," this is a person concerned that "Over time, these innovations are appropriated into the dominant classes, after which their true origins are erased, forgotten, and reclaimed by the very groups who continue to oppress the original innovators." But we're talking about slang, and frankly the birth of such slang strikes me as more a class issue than a race one: wealthy people, particularly in the music industry, have taken words from the poor and popularized them for their own profit. When was the last time Beyoncé or Jay-Z had anything to do with the typical user of AAVE?

I find the arguments I've outlined above in previous posts compelling. Even if I think the whole Carlson-Wee incident might be overblown, I can see an intelligent disagreement; in this case I struggle because, as has been stated, the writer takes her position as obvious and doesn't deign to explain why using slang that may have originated in AAVE might cause actual harm.

Hi Andrew,

Are we still doing this? Ok. Well let's look at your second post first. I only skimmed through the article you linked to because I can't keep up a debate with you and someone else, but unsurprisingly I agree with you. If you want to say 'bae' and 'hella' then you go ahead and don't let the mean lady from the Twitter stop you. I won't be using those words, not because of cultural sensitivity but because I'm 46 and my kids would stop speaking to me. I could make many more serious points but I don't think her article is worth the time. I genuinely think she's inventing a problem that doesn't exist. Or rather taking a phenomenon (that language is in constant organic flux) and making it a problem that needs to be policed or fixed.

As to your first post: lots of points, lots of questions.

I'm sorry I genuinely still don't understand the point you were making about jail and this doesn't help.


What, as a rule? As the norm? Of course not. But it's so easy and tempting to say 'No! Never!' isn't it? Nearly all of the time the answer would be no. And in mainstream entertainment it rightly pretty much never happens any more. But I can imagine some arthouse film or experimental theatre production where a director makes that artistic decision as some sort of Brechtian alienation device. I can imagine a play commenting on race with white actors in blackface and black actors in whiteface. That could be interesting. So like anything in art, one shouldn't make make hard and fast rules. I thought I'd answer this question seriously even though I think you meant it as a rhetorical one to set up your next…

It's different. Can a white playwright, screenplay writer or novelist create a black character and write dialogue for them that include some of the vernacular of black speech? I think so, don't you? Unless you envisage a future where all fiction with a multi-racial cast of characters should be written by committee. Should a white actor then be hired to play the part in blackface? Of course not, that would be ridiculous.

Well, provide me with links and I'll read them. Maybe they'll change my mind about the poem. They wouldn't change my mind about the magazine's decision to apologise for publishing it though, however well argued. 'All the serious critiques' suggests you must have at least three. All the Twitter comments from the black poets I posted earlier suggest the former.

Of course not every black person speaks in AAVE. The poem isn't suggesting that. But I'm sure you'd accept that there's a good chance that a homeless black person might, given your own comments about AAVE and class. I suppose you might now ask 'why choose a black person to be the homeless character?' Statistically, black people make up around 14% of the US population, yet comprise 46% of the homeless population. That's a terrible statistic, but it's a good argument for the poem's artistic choices unfortunately. You keep telling me how 'poorly' the AAVE is achieved in the poem. Can you be specific, in terms of syntax and word choice, if it's so obvious? It might be my English ear, but I don't hear 'minstrelsy', nor do I hear an unintelligent voice. The speaker seems sharp and insightful. That's the point of the poem isn't it?

I haven't mentioned the Civil War.

I have no doubt. But I don't see anything in this poem that denigrates the speaker's intelligence. See above.

I assume you mean a non-Jew writing from the persona of a Jew who was overly concerned with money? No it wouldn't! That's a silly comparison. Being homeless isn't a 'black stereotype', it's a terrible reality. See statistics above. For that analogy to work Carlson-Wees poem would have to have his speaker talking about how much he loved watermelon.

Well, you know my answer. Yes he damn well can! Just as a black writer can write a Jane Austen-esque novel about the English aristocracy in the late 18th century if he damn well wants to. And I don't think it would have to be 'damn good' not to come across as exploitative. It would have to be sincere and meant, that's all. Whether it is published is a secondary issue to the creation of art. 'Can a white person...?' 'Can a black person...?'. That's identity politics talking. For artistic freedom to mean anything the answer to a question starting with 'can' should always be 'yes'.

How can anyone dictate what is or isn't to be allowed expression from a person's imaginative life? Anyone can write about anything under the sun that moves or interests them, and imagine themselves into any situation or persona they want. They might do it clumsily or awkwardly, but unless their motives were to deliberately cause harm they SHOULDN'T BE MADE TO FUCKING APOLOGISE for it.

Cheers Andrew, this is interesting. Sorry for the swearing and ALL CAPS haha.

Since I'm running a parallel commentary on this discussion, I'll add another comment. :-)
The British comedian Lenny Henry began his career with an impression of Michael Crawford, which everybody was doing in the late 70s, only Lenny Henry did so while black. He also did a TV spot in, oh, the early 80s which began "Hello. I'm Eddie Murphy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dath4xOukPs
Meanwhile, Spike Lee's movie Bamboozled entirely concerns a group of black actors performing in blackface, and what ensues.
Patrick Stewart starred in a race-reversed Othello in DC, and besides Carmen Jones, there was a Black Mikado in the 70s whose soundtrack I have. The movie Jesus Christ Superstar had a black Judas in 1971, Carl Anderson.
My point being just that yes, all these choices are visibly and appropriately open to art. It's what's done with them that matters.

Cheers,
John

Well it is an interesting discussion. It reminds me of the controversy over William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won a Pulitzer and was published in 1967.

At the logical limit of the group identity argument, no one should try to publish a book like Styron’s except someone who was a black slave in Virginia in the early 1800s. That seems absurd; it makes historical fiction impossible. Toni Morrison should not have published Beloved, because Toni Morrison was not herself a slave, nor did she have a daughter, much less… Annie Proulx should not have written "Brokeback Mountain" because Annie Proulx is neither a male homosexual nor a cowboy.

I think the strict group identity argument finally rests on the denial that there is such a thing as human nature. I affirm that there is such a thing, and that we all partake of it, even if I can’t define it with mathematical rigor. I believe with Mark in the miraculous human capacity for imagination and empathy, which lives in literature at its best. We need more of it.

My buck fiddy.

"Being homeless isn't a 'black stereotype', it's a terrible reality. See statistics above. For that analogy to work Carlson-Wees poem would have to have his speaker talking about how much he loved watermelon."

It's not the person or persona it's the language. Again, all the critiques that matter focused on the language. In that sense my analogy is right: misusing or misappropriating AAVE to denigrate black people is still a thing. That's the problem people pointed out. Even McWhorter's piece focuses on the language.

Again, we're talking across each other because of a few things. You're standing up for freedom of expression; I think people should be allowed to do whatever they want. You think the issue is solely about writing from another person's perspective; I don't think that's what's happening here, at least not in the interesting crits. I think if you're going to talk about a great tragedy that you're really not a part of, you are treading on difficult and dangerous artistic grounds, and it's more difficult for someone who is white to avoid appearing exploitative than it is for a black person or a jewish person, to keep our analogy going.

I can only surmise this ties into some New Critical idea of poetic quality standing alone, divorced from the author and its historical context that I can't fully get behind, and which itself was only the vogue in the mid-20th century.

Most of your last paragraph I agree with, but of course I run into trouble here: "but unless their motives were to deliberately cause harm they SHOULDN'T BE MADE TO FUCKING APOLOGISE for it."

I don't buy this. One, we run into issues of discerning intention. It's nearly impossible. Second, it's not how this works in any other realm. Pick the law: I may cause harm to others and have to spend time in jail or pay a fine if the harm I cause stems from, say, ignorance or negligence, right? If a white American (and let's keep it as American, since this is unique to America) imagines himself a black man, and in doing so just plays up a shitton of stereotypes, he actually can cause harm, and probably should apologize, even though it stemmed from ignorance rather than malice. (cf. Gob Bluth in the link.)

Michael: "I think the strict group identity argument finally rests on the denial that there is such a thing as human nature. I affirm that there is such a thing, and that we all partake of it, even if I can’t define it with mathematical rigor."

Humanus sum, et nihil humanum a me alienum puto; I am human, and I think nothing human alien to me. Terence.

Cheers,
John

John: While those are really interesting, I don't think they are analogous to the situation at hand.

Michael: yes, to be clear I'm not advocating for such a rigid system at all. To be fair, I think some of the most ardent people who called for Carlson-Wee to apologize would either, though they probably would go there with slavery, which I think they're wrong on but can intellectually understand.

Simply, there is something common to us all, but there are things that divide us, too, and when you try to understand someone else's experience you want to 1) embody it fully, cliche-free, and accurately; 2) avoid engaging in it in ways that might exacerbate stereotypes that have been used in fundamentally harmful ways.

Since mostly I brainspill here and don't treat my posts like formal essays, I'm all over the road, I'm sure, though hopefully I've said some useful things. I'm also trying to merely channel the opposing viewpoint: some of which I agree with. That's in part because the easy answer is "The human imagination can do anything! Nothing should limit us!" and as true as that may or may not be, such a position ignores reality and history. Universals are good in theory, in the real world nothing is universal.

So this isn't really about "can a white person write from the perspective of a black person." That was really never the question at hand. It becomes a question on the limits of human imagination (not placing limits); it becomes a question of what happens when you try and fail to engage artistically in something, and your failure engages in harmful stereotypes; it's a question of when using an historically downtrodden group's experience as a vehicle for your art crosses over from being empathetic to exploitative; etc. I think those questions are important, and waving a hand and saying "I can do anything and no one can tell me otherwise" minimizes real challenges.

Yeah, in theory this is true, John.

In reality, unless you do a ton of actual research, and maybe live somewhere for a while, you're not going to be able to accurately reproduce the experience of the Kalahari Bushmen, for instance. That experience IS alien to us. Not permanently, but it is. As is the experience of poor African Americans to wealthy white men.

Terence's line is a nice feel-good thing, but the reality is that empathy takes a lot of hard work, and the critique of Carlson-Wee is that it was lazy, and that lazy writing of another's experience is problematic in a host of ways. Were they right in that critique? I don't know, but I keep seeing it be essentially straw-manned.

Andrew, many people, like me and maybe you, enjoy the Rolling Stones. Yet Mick Jagger, a white middle-class English fellow, learned to sound (ok, used to sound) like a black Delta blues man. And he made millions to their pennies while he was at it.

And yet we enjoy the Rolling Stones because it's only rock 'n roll but we like it.

Would that be a harmful appropriation? I dunno, but their music seems to have done a lot of people good.

In short, what Michael Ferris said.

I think I understand you, Andrew S. There is definitely a place for discussions like this. We need critics. We also need artists who try, and fail, and try again. For us there is only the trying, as Possum said...

(edited in -- thank you, Andrew F.)

Andrew,

You keep telling me that all the intelligent critiques of the poem focussed on the use of language and not merely the fact that the poet was attempting the persona at all, but where are these crits? I've asked you to point out to me specifically where you think Carlson-Wee gets AAVE so wrong or point me to the links to these 'critiques that matter' but you haven't. McWhorter's essay is about the history of AAVE and its appropriation generally, and when he does discuss Carlson-Wee's poem he says it gets it right!

'But more to the point, the Black English Carlson-Wee uses is not exaggerated: It is true and ordinary black speech. …

Now, however, educated whites are quite often aware that black people can talk in two ways depending on circumstance. Carlson-Wee, for example, is certainly aware of this: “If you a girl, say you’re pregnant,” the protagonist says, alternating between leaving out the be verb (a process actually subject to complex constraints in black speech—you don’t just leave it out willy-nilly) and using it (you’re). This is a spot-on depiction of the dialect in use, as something dipped in and out of gracefully.'

This is nothing to do with New Criticism. I'm not an academic. It's just what I think.

Edit: Cross-posted with half a dozen people

Hi Michael,

"Since mostly I brainspill here and don't treat my posts like formal essays, I'm all over the road, I'm sure, though hopefully I've said some useful things."
My position exactly. And to answer you, I think a variety of things. First, Terence's line is not a feel-good thing for me; it is the position of Susan Sarandon's Sister Mary Prejean at the end of Dead Man Walking, saying "I love you" to Sean Penn's rapist and killer as he prepares to die. It is an ideal to be aspired to as best we can.
Second, plenty of appropriation makes me uncomfortable, and as you note, it presses a whole set of different buttons when, say, Lenny Henry does Michael Crawford, or Dave Chappelle a blind black KKK member. I just like adding data points for context. I mentioned in another thread how I have personal qualms about art's easy appropriation of forms developed by other cultures within specific contexts: for instance, haikus and ghazals, though I also spent a while ten years ago trying to write the blues and deleted almost all those efforts. Somehow this appropriation seems to get a free pass in today's USA - but look, say, at the Boston MFA kimono business. I think borrowings should respect what they've borrowed more for instance than the faux punk velveteen studded wristbands you could see in the UK in the early 80s.
Third, as for my opinion, I come back, as an old ACLU member, to the view that an open society at its best will err on the side of free speech. As Voltaire put it, "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it." That's why the ACLU defended the neonazi march in Skokie, way back when. Let the marchers' words shrivel in the light of day.

Cheers,
John

Andrew F: "Andrew, many people, like me and maybe you, enjoy the Rolling Stones."
I think it's more than coincidence that almost all the great blues bands of the 1960s were British. They had distance and leverage. For instance, the Stones could write (and sing) "Brown Sugar," they had in a way stepped through the mirror. These artists also worshiped the old blues artists, toured and dueted with them over time and brought them crossover sales that would have been otherwise impossible, in the US to begin with.
I don't believe the Rolling Stones are nice people. But they loved and could play the blues. Here they are in 1969 playing Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao9Rbr7uybQ

Cheers,
John

Whoa!

Bob Dylan (did some mean blues)
Paul Butterfield
Allman Brothers
Mike Bloomfield
Janis Joplin
Johnny Winters . . .

??????

White Americans were doing pretty good too, no?