[Mark McDonnell]

Ok, I’m back. Can’t stay away. Sorry for my little wobbly, but I reserve the right to be capricious.

I did get frustrated with myself, Jim, and here's why. Because in discussing the question of whether poets of colour were being excluded and silenced, I suggested that my hunch (based on reading contemporary poetry) was that the poetry world, compared to many aspects of society, was probably very liberal and inclusive. I admitted this was a hunch based simply on my own experience of reading. Matt produced some data suggesting that of nearly 20,000 poems published in major British publications over a 5 year period 9.1% were written by black and ethnic minority poets (BAME) and if you discount the poems all published by the same magazine (Poetry in Translation) it drops to just over 7%. The number of people identifying as BAME in Britain at the time was 12.9%. I then said:

‘These figures are not great, but not bad enough, I don't think, to constitute evidence of systematic exclusion or silencing. I suppose a true picture would have to also take into account the relative percentage of actual submissions by the groups quoted.’

Matt then did the maths and pointed out that the figures actually show that BAME poets were 43% less likely to be published than white poets. And I suddenly heard myself – arguing with Matt, going point-by-point, being so dismissive of those awful statistics ('not bad enough')...and to prove what? That racial bias doesn’t exist in the poetry world? How the hell do I know if it does or not? I suddenly felt that I must be coming across as a horrible, smug white male contrarian who doesn’t give a shit about social justice and just wants to win points in an argument. And I felt awful. Yes, wriggling on the pin of how others might see me. Very Prufrock. Very ironic.

I’ve thought about those figures since though, and some things struck me. First, how would the editors know the ethnic identity of the person submitting the poem? Their names? Many BAME people have typically western sounding names. My silly example of a generic ‘white poet’ in post 13 was Derek Smith, but it could easily have been Derek Walcott. If there was intent on the part of the editors, racism in other words (which ‘silencing’ and ‘exclusion’ suggest), then surely the figures would be even lower. Don’t editors choose poetry based on its quality, first and foremost? Would an editor really dismiss an excellent poem because it was written by someone with an obviously ethnic sounding name and they’d grudgingly reached their self-imposed 7% quota for that month? Also, other markers of identity may throw up similar results. If one ignored race and looked at class, working-class people (let’s say defined simply on earnings, rather than any of the cultural signifiers) may well score very low on percentages too. And BAME people on average have lower earnings and so are also more likely to be part of the working-class Venn diagram. Perhaps BAME people, and working-class people in general, simply write and submit less poetry on average than the more affluent/educated/middle-class white people. Does this mean that working-class people are also ‘silenced’ and ‘excluded’ from the poetry conversation? Maybe. Or maybe they just aren’t that interested. If this is the case, then the fact that they aren’t interested reflects badly on broader social issues of marginalisation and the failures of the education system, certainly. But, having thought about it, I still doubt that the poetry world itself is institutionally racist or exclusionary. Now, whether it should be practising positive discrimination to artificially get those percentages up in line with national demographics is a different conversation. I think there's a case that it probably should and that marginalised groups should be relatively more visible in the arts, to make them, well, less marginalised.

Talking about class gets me onto the broader notion of ‘identity’ and the idea that a writer can ‘speak for’ a whole identity. I’m suspicious of the whole thing. I still consider myself working-class (I suppose I 'identify' as working-class though it sounds like ridiculous talk to me), even though I have a nice house now and my Northern vowels have softened a little. My dad was a painter and decorator, my mum was a part-time cleaner, and my sister and I were the first McDonnells to get a university education (paid for by the state). Aside from my 3 years at university, I’ve barely met anybody beyond the Sphere who even reads poetry (and I’m an English teacher. Really, poetry isn’t popular) and I’ve met precisely one person who writes it (Annie Drysdale came to visit for a pint or three).

So. I should really like the esteemed popular English playwright Willy Russell shouldn’t I? Of Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine and Our Day Out fame? He’s Northern (born in Lancashire, same as me), white working-class, largely self-taught in literary terms, he was a teacher in a working-class comprehensive school and writes about people wanting to better themselves and escape from their cultural deprivation. Why, he’s me! He’s my people! Yeah, well, I don’t like him. I find his plays patronising, unfunny, arse-clenchingly sentimental bobbins. But when I read Philip Larkin for the first time in my late 20s, particularly his poem Afternoons, when I was skint and drinking too much and my relationship with my eldest daughter’s mother had disintegrated, the psychic recognition of the details and those last two lines was like a brick to the head:

Afternoons

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

Now, I know this isn’t a persona poem. But I have never once questioned whether Larkin (middle class Oxford graduate) gets to the truth of a feeling and an identity better than the more ‘authentic’ Willy Russell, let alone questioned his right to attempt it.

I was going to have a break from the Sphere, and getting into arguments, but poetry brought me back. I may still be utterly wrong about everything, but someone posted this on Facebook today and it inspired me to dive back in haha:

The Last Word

Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Vain thy onset! all stands fast.
Thou thyself must break at last.

Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will!
Thou art tired: best be still.

They out-talked thee, hissed thee, tore thee?
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and passed,
Hotly charged - and sank at last.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!

Matthew Arnold

Brilliant isn't it?

[James Brancheau]

Those numbers, Mark, probably also reflect other societal realities, like uneven educational opportunities. I don't think that there's a bias as far as one's background. Probably there's a real hunger for it. Of course, I might myself be naive, but I'm considering those usually involved with what we do (there are of course those completely whack journals, like First Things, where I'd never submit anyway (if they were real Catholics~ I'm of course lapsed, and don't care much for religion,~ but if they were in fact real Catholics, I might consider it)). I think the most underrepresented group in poetry is the poor. Which I'm sure also correlates in no small degree with race.

[Mark McDonnell]

Those numbers, Mark, probably also reflect other societal realities, like uneven educational opportunities...I think the most underrepresented group in poetry is the poor. Which I'm sure also correlates in no small degree with race

Yes, James, more or less what I was saying (I know I rambled on).

[Mary Meriam]

Mark - are you familiar with the VIDA Count? In the comments at that link, a statistician "noted a major threat to the internal validity of your findings regarding the racial/ethnic breakdown of the writers." Still, the VIDA Count is having a good impact on "the sloped playing field." Check it out.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by James Brancheau

Julie, you've stated before that your husband is Chinese-American. Was the Chinese part a particular draw for you? Were you intrigued by "difference"?

LOL, James, that's a complicated issue whose explanation is probably best attempted in a poem. Here's a link to relevant sonnet series (after the Bruce Bennet poem), which might answer those questions. Then again, it will probably just pose new ones.

My husband was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to parents who were born in Shanghai but who met in Chicago.

[Mark McDonnell]

No Mary, I wasn't aware of that and I did check it out.

You know, I am inexperienced in the poetry world and probably naive. I accept that. You've told me something of your own experiences in attempting to submit and publish. They are disturbing and sobering. I'll try to research more and pontificate less.

Cheers.

[James Brancheau]

An "abc," as Taiwanese would put it (American born Chinese). Great, Julie, but that's my point. Not a big deal. I do suppose that depends on where you live in the States, sadly. Before I lived in Asia, I travelled to meet my then girlfriend, who was Korean, in Virginia Beach (from Toledo). After a 10-11 hour drive, I pull up to find her sobbing on her steps because as she was jogging, some guys in a pick-up were following her yelling gook gook gook. Nasty, vile stuff. But we're talking about complete morons. You know, future Trump supporters. Nothing can be learned from this other than too many Americans are morons, and, more often than not, racist morons.That said, I find it beneath me to respond poetically. Maybe a brick or a bat would do for a response (as W A suggested in Manhattan). Basically, I think what passes for depth and thoughtfulness in the arts anymore is some commentary on how you come from somewhere else and need to be understood. Sorry, but that's not enough. (I just returned home to Taipei, and the 22 hour (in total) flight was made substantially worse because I chose to watch Crazy Rich Asians. I should have just gotten drunk.) Anyway, I'm out of energy. Cheers,

JB

[Quincy Lehr]

This talk, given at Poetry by the Sea by yours truly and published in somewhat mutated form (or was the ur-text the other way around) in New Walk might be apropos:

It’s good to be back in Stars Hollow. I had a coffee at Luke’s Diner, though the Dragonfly Inn was all booked up. Quelle dommage, which is French for “Oh, shit.” Since the election of Donald J. Trump to the American presidency, a great number of my fellow American poets have discovered politics as a subject. At least kind of. To be fair, and complicating this turn, politics and poetry have long mixed. Never mind Melville on the Civil War, Claude McKay on the "Red Summer" of 1919, Adrienne Rich's feminism, Amiri Baraka's black nationalism, or metric fuck-ton of other examples--I mean in the very recent past. The most interesting thing about Ocean Vuong's poetry is the way the Vietnam War haunts it, and I mean that in the Casper the Friendly Ghost sense. Biographical notes mention collections on, say, Korean laborers in Japan during World War II inspired by vague familial connections with some frequency. Gay poetry has long been a thing. (My own Heimat apparently doesn't count since it seems that Germano-British ancestry means one has not an "identity," but a dunce cap with the word "PRIVILEGE!!!" scrawled across it in burnt-ochre crayon.) Slam poetry is famously political, doubtless in part due to the happy circumstance of "revolution," "Constitution," and "solution" rhyming.
So there was a lot of politicking in American poetry, often fairly tedious, before Trump was elected. The Poems About the Revolution crowd tended toward a pale echo of Gil Scott Heron, while the more academic crowd, whose contest-winning collections often sounded more like public policy master's theses than artistic ideas, tended toward an engagement with history that, by referencing, indeed depending on the speaker's background, hewed close to the dominant lyric mode of the American McPoem. The aspiration here is somewhat different. I witnessed what was meant to be a celebratory anthology of poems in praise of Hillary Clinton's victory morph into an anthology of "resistance" on Facebook within twenty-four hours of the election. If it were on Facebook with spillover into Twitter, it would be one thing, jumbling up against this week's witchhunt of whoever publicly criticized "identity politics," or as I like to call it, Stalinism without the universal health care, but fuck me--the think pieces have started appearing.
Matthew Zapruder, best known for a kind of Establishment-approved, trust-fund kid stoner indie-rock poetry, as well as serving as an editor for Wave Books and the poetry editor for The New York Times, says his mind took a political turn due to the "massive shock" of Trump's election. ("Poetry and Poets in a Time of Crisis," Literary Hub, December 6, 2016) At the same time, though, despite illuminating quotes from the likes of Wallace Stevens and W.S. Merwin, he seems to have, at best, a nebulous idea how to do "political" poetry, going so far as to declare: "Poets, if you find yourselves worrying that your poems are not “about” political matters, here is my suggestion: every single time you feel that worry, finish your poem, make it as beautiful as you can, and then do some kind of concrete action." While such advice is clearly unobjectionable (although I have greater sympathy for some of his suggestions for "concrete actions" than others), it is not exactly satisfactory either if the question is one of how changed circumstances result in changed literature.
Also lurking in the essay is Zapruder's admission that, "even had the results been different, we would still have been in a time of crisis. All the local and global problems were already there, and remain." The "deep, potentially irresolvable fissures in our democracy have revealed themselves, along with an epidemic of rage, as well as hopelessness" that he notes are not the sole responsibility of Trump or the Republicans more generally, but also of the Democrats--particularly the Third-Way Clintonians whose co-leader Zapruder so effusively supported in the election. One cannot at the same time bemoan deep problems on a more or less stative level while backing a candidate of the status quo and expect compelling writing to come of it.
If Zapruder seems miffed that Trump harshed his buzz, making him think about stuff like global warming and how he can't wear his New Balance sneakers around his l*b*r*l friends anymore, Adam Kirsch approaches the question from a more rarefied position. He opens his article, "What Can Artists Do to Oppose Trump?" (Slate, December 6, 2016), with a rehash of Mike Pence's visit to see Hamilton in New York, an overpriced, heavy-handed exercise in jingoistic whitewash that Kirsch tellingly describes as " a patriotic attempt to open the canon of American history to people of color, to tell the stories of the past in the language of the present, in much the same way that Obama himself believed he could do when he was elected in 2008." Kirsch sees the much-publicized booing as a rearguard action by an urban, affluent, educated audience that had lost where it counts, but also declares: "One illusion that will be particularly painful to part with is the idea that high culture and the arts have any effective power in American life."
Notably, Kirsch sees the main exception as "a long moment, roughly coinciding with the Cold War, when circumstances conspired to make it feel like culture mattered," when James Baldwin and Robert Lowell would end up on the cover of Time and evening talk shows would invite poets to sit in. That Kirsch would wax nostalgic for the era makes sense. Not only does he have the politics of a mid-twentieth-century liberal, he dresses like one and writes for the same journals (e.g. Foreign Policy and The New Republic). But what Kirsch either fails to remember or chooses not to mention is that government support for the fine arts in that era came not from the National Endowment for the Arts (only founded in 1965), but the CIA. Want to start an international literary journal with your Harvard English major friends? Other Harvard English majors who seem to have sales jobs that take them to odd parts of the world for nebulous reasons know some guys who can hook you up with the needed funds! All in the hopes of peeling a few intellectuals out of the orbit of the French Communist party or some shit like that. Those days are over (with corresponding blacklists for those who didn't go along)--and good riddance.
As Kirsch notes, in the present moment, the reaction to anti-Trump art exhibits and anti-Trump statements by writers "from outside the 'coastal elite' was mostly silence." Kirsch takes a certain cold comfort in the notion that "every institution in American society that opposed Trump—from schools to unions to churches to Fortune 500 corporations—proved unable to exercise the moral power they believed themselves to possess," but he sees "this revelation of powerlessness" as responsible for "the mood of depression and shock that has gripped the world of the arts since Nov. 8." This seems off. Any book-published poet or literary novelist with typical mid-list sales who thought he or she was a figure of significant cultural influence on November 7, 2016 was delusional. One might reformulate it by saying that a great number of liberal poets suddenly ceased being at ease with a position of marginal influence.
So, what can one do? Kirsch's bottom line, shaped by his haute-l*b*r*lism, is... not a whole hell of a lot. Kirsch centrally insists on "the courage to insist on a private definition of reality, in the face of the overwhelming pressure of public events. If we continue to believe that the arts and culture matter, it will not be because we think a passionate poem or a rousing play has the power to change the world. They don’t: As the poet W.H. Auden said long ago, during a previous era of crisis, 'Poetry makes nothing happen'." Kirsch proceeds to argue against an agitpropish approach to art (with an inevitable swipe at Soviet art) and says that, "art works most productively at the point where politics becomes a personal, even private experience. Art speaks most honestly and effectively of the plight of the individual at the mercy of historical events."
While Kirsch successfully comes up with examples that match his notion (though he seems to interpret every deviation from the strictures of Realism as somehow less of an attempt to intervene in the world at large), he goes after Shelley and declares that the role of art is essentially testimonial. Artists, he tells us, "are not legislators but witnesses." But the key word in Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators" isn't the lawmaking bit, but the "unacknowledged" part of the famous formulation. No one asked us, so we shouldn't have to worry about getting our ideas through a fucking committee. Nor adhere to partisan talking points. Poetry (and the fine arts more broadly) lost their major roles as purveyors of official ideology a long time ago--they can, however, act as gate-crashers.
Also, while Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen" was an understandable reaction to a Europe sliding toward World War II and a Communist-led anti-fascist movement getting its ass well and truly kicked in Spain, I'm calling bullshit. The early poetry that Auden later disavowed (a/k/a the good stuff) stirred my left-wing activist blood as a young man, and the relationship of the Beats to a million adolescent rebellions is almost ludicrously well-known. But Kirsch's classically bourgeois view of good art, that which tastefully refines and redecorates the interior salon of the well-educated individual's mind, has little place for the topical satire and fails to realize that while Dylan might have gotten the Nobel Prize (albeit to Kirsch's chagrin), there would be no Bob Dylan without Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie.
Perhaps, though, the powerlessness Zapruder, Kirsch, and others of their respective ilk feel has less to do with the intersection of art and politics than, well, their politics. Very few people under fifty found Clinton's campaign exciting or inspiring, though a great number voted for her out of fear of Trump. If Zapruder's desire to party like it's 1996 is less than inspiring in the wake of the Iraq War and the banking crisis, Kirsch's evident desire to pull a James Franco and go back to right before Kennedy had his... well... Zapruder moment is nothing short of atavistic. Establishment poetry has long hung around the broader Establishment cultural and political apparatus like a cross between a poor relation and an ex who hasn't quite emotionally disengaged yet. Behave yourself, and you can be on NPR! Impress the right mentor, and get a book deal with a national press, or a poem in the right magazine, and maybe, just maybe, you can pull a Katha Pollitt or Adam Kirsch and parlay a poetry career into a career as an Establishment journo!
Fuck that. If the institutions of American capitalism are in as much trouble as we are told, who needs them? And if the American PoBiz can't come up with responses to this historical moment that aren't solipsistic, silly, or outdated, who needs them? Just because no one asked you doesn't mean you have nothing to say. But if you do say something, please, please, don't regurgitate American l*b*r*l truisms. Call out the Bozos, and don't worry about how it will affect some death-loving multimillionaire's election bid. The 2016 election season is over. May it rot. Can we please do something interesting now?

[Mark McDonnell]

That is a great, serious, funny speech, Quincy. I've read it before somewhere. You do have a way with a phrase and I like that how people dress is very important to you.

'No one asked us, so we shouldn't have to worry about getting our ideas through a fucking committee....Just because no one asked you doesn't mean you have nothing to say. .'

So let's say you were a fairly privileged white male poet back in 2016 with a suddenly inflamed political conscience, but whose relatively comfortable existence wasn't personally affected much by Trump. What could you do, in literary terms, beyond the ineffectual response of the likes of Zapruder and Hirsch?


Well, could one of the things have been to write a satirical persona poem, say from the pov of a young black mother in Flint Michigan drinking contaminated water with her kids, waiting for Trump, guzzling diet-coke in his helicopter, to arrive and wave a pretend magic wand while Hillary followed close behind, gritting her teeth and reading 'Deplorables for Dummies'? Well, no. Because you might get the voice wrong. And anyway what right have you to appropriate this woman's experience? And so you suffer death by Twitter followed by abject apology. Doesn't matter how good your intentions, or the poem, were or how sincere your anger. Now I KNOW, as Julie was saying, death by Twitter isn't the same as death by actual bullets because of the colour of your skin. Some things are self-evident, as someone else said. Just like the 'opponents' of Mr Mason's essay, such as they are for such a non- adversarial piece of writing, are self-evident.

You're a music fan. What were Bob Dylan (real name Robert Zimmerman: middle-class, Jewish) and Joe Strummer (real name John Graham Mellor: privately educated son of a titled diplomat) engaged in if not cultural and class appropriation? (or as I like to call it, expanding your horizons and using your imagination). If Twitter had been around they might have decided to give up before they got much further than 'No More Auction Block' and 'Police and Thieves'. Sure, it can be clumsily done, and it's easy to laugh and be cleverly superior to white kids listening to the blues or affecting a Jamaican accent, but is the opposite better? No traffic or tranference between culture and race at all?

I know all this isn't really addressing the subjects of your speech, but then the subject of your speech isn't really addressing the topic of this thread or Mason's essay.

I do really like the speech though.

Well, I've definitely said enough here. A lot of it subjective and instinctive, and some of it probably uninformed. Sorry if I'm exasperating. More connects us than divides us, in this thread as in life.

Cheers! Over and out.

Edit: I just noticed this. I wasn't reading close enough. Your wry characterisation here: 'If it were on Facebook with spillover into Twitter, it would be one thing, jumbling up against this week's witchhunt of whoever publicly criticized "identity politics," or as I like to call it, Stalinism without the universal health care' makes your feelings plain enough -- and kind of makes my points above redundant. And like Dave, you don't feel it necessary to name the purveyors of said identity politics or give any credence to the idea that there might be nuance within their differing approaches to it. So I wonder why the initial hostility to his essay failing to do the same? I think I know the answer you have in mind, but I may be off. That dismissing identity politics as a wry jokey aside in a speech largely directed towards encouraging left-wing political engagement is fine, but writing a whole essay where an amorphous idea of identity politics is set up for critique is not fine, because in the absence of any colours being clearly nailed to any masts, in the attempt at the apolitical, it may give off the air of the wrong politics: if you're not clearly with us, you're against us.

[James Brancheau]

Well, I finally read this in its entirety and regret posting anything on this thread as it's a remarkable piece. Should be required reading (and makes me want to read more of his poetry, which, typically, essays don't inspire me to do).