Hi Julie (and Quincy)
They are useful tangents, Julie. You've never written anything that didn't make me think. And I too know the feeling of posting something I'll probably regret. I may be feeling it in about twenty minutes, but some of us seem compelled to wrestle with this stuff don't we? The title of David's essay is instructive here: The Minefield and the Soul. We step into it to bare it.
I didn't read the essay as having a political agenda. Rather, that it took the fact of identity politics, which is a widespread and divisive cultural phenomena and unavoidable for anyone who reads the media, and used it as a jumping off point for a discussion about the slippery nature of the self and its relation to artistic expression. I read a literary essay. Maybe that makes me naive or, as Quincy suggests, it makes the essay naive.
I completely agree with you that there's something very unedifying about the sight of members of a comfortable majority making a lot of noise about reverse discrimination when they are accused, justly or not, of bigotry or of not recognising the extent of their privilege. It's an insult to victims of true discrimination and brutality.
And here's where I say the things I'll probably regret. I know, of course, it was certainly true of the past, but in the overwhelmingly liberal world of poetry and literature (the topic of David's essay) is it really the case that diverse and minority voices are being excluded or silenced? I ask this as a genuine, not a rhetorical question. I'm not an expert, and perhaps this is the case, and if it is then it's a terrible wrong. I can see that systemic inequality, racial or economic or both, excludes members of disadvantaged groups from even contemplating cracking the world of, say, classical piano (pianos and piano lessons are expensive), and that this is something that Quincy's socialist dream might do something about. I'm all for that. But it seems to me that page poetry is the most democratic of the arts: you need the desire and talent, a second hand copy of a decent poetry anthology, a pencil, and an internet connection. You don't even need the social scene or extrovert nature required for Performance or Slam. So, is the silencing happening at the level of the poetry establishment itself?
The notion of the talented white male poet writing from the brown transgender woman's experience and therefore potentially silencing the real brown transgender woman just doesn't ring true. It seems like a myth that such a thing is happening on anything like a regular basis. (Perhaps this is one way that David's essay, if read from a certain slant, could be seen as part of a privileged wave of 'protesting too much'). When I read, and actually often really enjoy, Poetry magazine online (much derided round these parts for some reason) or listen to their podcasts, I feel like I encounter quite a wealth of diversity in terms of racial, sexual and gender identity. And Poetry is as prestigious as it gets, is it not?
Googling 'identity poem controversy' brings up two main cases. Neither are of minority poets being silenced or marginalised by white poets appropriating their experience. One is of a white poet being pressured into apologising, along with the editors of The Nation magazine who published him, for writing a persona poem in the voice of a black homeless person. The other is of a white poet adopting a Chinese pseudonym in order to help get his 40 times rejected poem published, which it then fairly quickly was, ending up in Best American Poetry 2015. In neither case did the poets' whiteness help them.
I'm happy to be shown counter examples to prove my naivety at having swallowed some mainstream narrative about the crazy identitarian left. Genuinely. Because a rational left feels like the world's only hope right now. And Mary Meriam, to whom I owe more than she knows, tells me that lesbian poets more than most groups have been made to feel invisible and excluded from the conversation, and for longer. I have a hunch, even from the diversity of voices I hear in Poetry and elsewhere, that she's probably right. Of course in other countries and cultures, writing the wrong poem or blog can still get you killed.
Anyway, them's my rambling thoughts and my head over the parapet (again). I sincerely hope that the broadest diversity of voices and identities, whether real or imagined, be allowed to flourish without fear in the poetry world and beyond.
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