[Quincy Lehr]

It has been noted in many quarters, sometimes for demagogic reasons, that the neoformalist movement, certainly in the United States, is an overwhelmingly white one. It seems to me that a discussion of why this is so is warranted.

In the first place, it is not because there is a lack of a metrical tradition among Afro-Americans in poetry. One can start with Phyllis Wheatley and move up through Dunbar, Cullen, and McKay, even on to the major black modernist, Tolson (who's only beginning to get the recognition he deserves)--and black poets wrote in meter in roughly the same proportion as white poets. However, the only major poet of African descent who is currently associated with the neoformalist movement (mostly because he lends his name to editorial mastheads--he certainly doesn't need us) is Derek Walcott, who, moreover, comes from a different national tradition. Leaving aside the demagoguery of the Amiri Barakas, why is metrical verse, though not in so many words, something in which black people are only infrequently seen to participate?

I do think we have to mention racism. Let me be clear: most neo-formalist poets of my acquaintance aren't racist. Many are actively appalled by and opposed to racism. However, each venomous squib, ostensibly directed at affirmative action or "multiculturalism," or what have you, that appears in certain formal-friendly journals--by no means all of them--will inevitably lead black writers who might otherwise be interested in what most of us are doing as "a white thing."

Again, to reiterate, I think the vast majority of us aren't in this to wage a culture war.

Added to this are the polemics against "multiculturalism" which echo from some quarters. It is true that a lot of dubious garbage has been spread under said rubric, but the fact remains that if one sneers at non-Western cultures (or for that matter, Western, non-white cultures), you're going to drive away writers who might have brought something interesting and important to the table. Thank Christ for Derek Walcott. He's the best we (and by "we," I mean English-speakers) have--and is, having been brought up at the intersection of several cultures, quite literally "multicultural."

The response to the problems laid out so far is pretty straightforward--denunciation and refutation.

But there's something else, too. Black people and non-black people--particularly whites--often live pretty different lives. Slam poetry by other black people--whatever one thinks about its aesthetic qualities--is going to address black life in a way that a satirical poem that I might write about white hippies in Oklahoma will not. While we shouldn't just write out of our autobiographies, we're all from where we're from. Tim Murphy isn't going to write a poem about Watts or Harlem any time soon--he lives in North Dakota and draws his inspiration from North Dakota. Which is fine. I wouldn't want Tim to start writing about the inner city. (And I'm really not picking on him--it's just that his rural focus makes for maximum contrast.)

All of which is to say that I don't have a good solution to what I see as a genuine problem. At the very least, though, we do need to allow a greater space than we have for non-white--and particularly black--authors.

Quincy

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited June 26, 2006).]

[Clay Stockton]

Hey Quincy. I'll wade in here. I want to ask for clarification on your first point. Do you mean to say that the neo-formalist movement is even more white than other corners of the poetry world? Because one obvious response that I can think of is, well, most of the American poetry world is pretty white, as are many of the other upper-crust arts.

(At least, I think they are. My ignorance is going to show pretty quickly here, I'm afraid, but I suppose I'm reacting to the stereotypes in my head of white opera singers, white ballet dancers, white museum curators, etc. I will readily admit that I know almost nothing about the opera, the ballet, or the art world. I'm pretty good on baseball, though.)

--CS


[This message has been edited by Clay Stockton (edited June 26, 2006).]

[Quincy Lehr]

Clay,

I think that the MFA world is disproportionately white as well, but I'm not sure if it's to quite the same extent. After all, you do see some black people, some Asians, etc. And I'm not going to go so far as to say that the neo-formalist movement is inhospitable to non-white writers--the Sphere's own Rhina Espaillat is rightfully well-regarded in many quarters, for example--for being a really, really good poet. But this is the part of the poetry world I inhabit, and so my comments are directed at it.

Moreover, the politics of who gets published and publicized are going to work differently for a poetry scene that is linked to a university system than one (like the neoformalist movement) that isn't. So I do think we can talk about neoformalism in particular.

Quincy

[Mike Slippkauskas]

Quincy,

A good and inexhaustible subject and especially apt after a boggling post on the "Grammar" thread. I have no answers either. I feel that accessiblity and education must have something to do with it. Let me speak personally. I have a psychiatric history and have had longish stays in hospitals. I've always grown to love the others patients. Many are sorely deprived, economically and otherwise. Many of the young men love "rhymin". I, white, 38, Sarah Lawrence educated, gay, would bond with them by joining in their logomachies. They'd thrill, partly at the comedy of me lamely imitating their hip-hop gestures. Then I'd slip in a little Larkin, then Shakespeare. These youths are curious, intelligent, ask spot-on questions. Their status is not threatened by evincing their curiosity.

We live in a racist society. There is no level-playing field. The powers have an interest in keeping it that way. It can work subtly. At least once a month in the New York Times there's some bio-determinist, pseudo-scientific crap in the Science or Health sections, or in the Book Review.

Clay, I'm not sure on numbers or proportion of the population, but the New York City Ballet, core and principals, looks beautifully diverse. And there are Black companies. There have been great opera stars of every race for a long time now.

Best,
Michael Slipp

[Quincy Lehr]

Mike,

A thoughtful, moving post that actually serves as something of a corrective to my initial comments. The question is a lot bigger than we are, and bigger than poetry. I remember hearing Derek Walcott saying something to the effect of (I'm paraphrasing): It's hard to be a writer, and it's harder to be a black writer, and its harder still to be a black woman writer. He then noted that a disproportionate number of his black women poetry students--from BU, a well-regarded institution--stopped writing poetry over the years under the pressures of life. What can I do about this? A fair bit, actually, but not necessarily through poetry as such.

Quincy

[Clay Stockton]

Michael, thanks for the post, and for the information.

--CS

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I think part of it is the fact that neoformalism comes out of the tradition of drawing room poetry, which is rather an upper middle class thing. For the US, that means predominately white.

Out here in California, however, I've met several black neoformalists. I've been too polite to ask, but I suspect that some come from black upper middle class culture--which for California is pretty much upper middle class culture--and some others come from the aforementioned poor urban black inner city environment and ran screaming from it at their first opportunity. Of course the folk I know are also gamers, neopagans, science fiction fans, ren faire family and computer geeks, so that probably skews the sample.

However, how you increase the number of black neoformalist poets is fairly simple: You increase the number of black people in the upper middle class who then gain the time needed to write and moreover are drawn into the drawing room tradition. Which of course doesn't increase the number of poems about the poor urban black experience, but how many sonnets do you see on the poor urban white experience?

Then I wondered if anyone had been bothering to write rap sonnets, so I googled it. Oh dear, look at what the top result was:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ts/3008210.stm

As one of the response letters said, "Cromwell would have been kinder."

[Daniel Pereira]

Hey Dr. Lehr,

Thanks for starting this thread. I think it's an interesting question, even if (or probably because) we're unlikely to resolve it any time soon.

I think at least part of the reason for the disparity you note is about access. People who are not introduced to formal verse at certain formative ages are less likely to incorporate it into their concepts of culture and artistry. Two anecdotes about that:

One of my friends works as an English teacher in Jersey City. The student population of his school is something like 95% black. The position of his department, and of the administration, is that since the kids are black, they need to read black authors because those authors speak to their experiences in voices they understand, and because they provide positive role models. I guess in theory there's nothing wrong with that, but my friend tells me that the practical upshot is that for four years, they get the same authors over and over and over again. He got tired of hearing his students go "Audre Lorde? AGAIN?" "More Langston Hughes?" and decided to maybe broaden what their exposure. He was met with stiff resistance.

At this point, there certainly is a "black American canon" -- Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks etc. Ironically, most, if not all of these authors were recognized and celebrated by white society during their own lifetimes. Formalism is not a substantial part of that canon, in part because Black authors started to catch their breaks right around the time that Formalism died, (Though of course Brooks has written sonnets).

My wife, who is black, grew up in the upper middle class, went to a magnet school and had the opportunity for a broad cultural outlook: she liked Nirvana more than NWA, Pearl Jam more than Public Enemy and, (God help me) Barbara Streisand. But as far as literature went, her schooling still focused largely on that black American canon. In college she took some literature courses and was frustrated because she began to realize that her exposure to literature had been extremely narrow. If she hadn't taken those classes, she still might never have read a sonnet or a villanelle or have had a conversation about what meter is.

In the long run, there are millions of things more damaging to a person than not knowing how to write or identify a sonnet. But I do think that the race gap in Formalism is at least partly a response to the de facto segregation of our educational system. In the middle ground, I got a very competent literary education from teachers that expanded my experiences of literature without abandoning the canon entirely.

Thanks also to Mike, Clay and Kevin for their thoughtful and interesting responses. That "rap" poem's a real stinker. It's a lot trickier to rock a rhyme than people suppose.

-Dan
p.s. Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote an article in the New Yorker a while back (must be about a year now) about Phyllis Wheatley. I think it was called "Phyllis Wheatley on Trial" or something similar. The basic thesis is that Wheatley was too black for her contemporaries and too "white" for later readers (a charge that gets leveled at Derek Walcott all the time, by the way). Anyway, it's an good article that obliquely touches on the issues you've raised here. Couldn't find it online though.

[This message has been edited by Daniel Pereira (edited June 27, 2006).]

[Quincy Lehr]

Daniel,

I do think you're right, that some degree of cultural nationalism is in play in the curriculum in many public schools. But when talking about the "black canon," it often seems as if aside from Hughes, the black poets of the Harlem Renaissance don't rate. Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" might get taught, but not "Harlem Dancer" (the following's from memory and may be screwed up in a couple of places):

"Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway.
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players on a picnic day.

She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form.
To me, she seemed a proudly swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through the storm.

Around her swarthy neck, black, shiny curls
Profusely fell, and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys--and even the girls--
Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze.

But looking on her falsely smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place."

Now this is a great sonnet by a great poet who isn't "writing white" and can, as far as I'm concerned, hold its own against anything else in the form from this century. Countee Cullen also has his moments. But the 1920s was, I think, rather too blithely rejected in the black power era, with a few writers held over, but too much swept away unfairly for rather dubious aesthetic and political reasons. He wasn't a metricist, but think of poor Robert Hayden being denounced as an "Uncle Tom" in the late 1960s.

This is, perhaps, the dark side of "multiculturalism"--the canon becomes a balkanized cluster of semi-hostile identity groups scrambling over dwindling educational resources (which in my mind, has a great deal to do with why it can get so ugly) with relatively little being integrated ito a coherent whole. Thing is, I want white kids reading McKay as one of the great poets of the twentieth century as much as I'd like black kids to read Frost.

Quincy

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited June 29, 2006).]

[Katy Evans-Bush]

The problem is that people will persist, even people who say they "hate" racism, in identifying themselves and each other purely in terms of race.

I had this whole thing way back in the day when I spent a year at an "alternative" high school in Hartford, and boy oh boy was it an education! My first experience of real oppression, all levelled at me for being too white.

I even got beaten up by some girls whom I was apparently "oppressing" with my "vocabulary" and my interest in the history of the Dark Ages, and my "counsellor" refused to do anything about it because I was the oppressor. I was 15! Hilarious, now, but maybe not. I think I stood out as an oppressor because of my refusal to take part in the "racism awareness workshop," saying I had read all the books anyway and was busy. In fact, they had tried to get me to talk at school meetings about how oppressed I was "as a woman." (at 15, remember. I didn't know anything yet!) Fortunately I was suspicious of the spurious and contagious victim-complacency that seemed to result from these discussions, noting that it left a bad taste in the mouth. All that sympathy! All that tut-tut! No need ever to question yourself! Now I just count myself lucky that that's the lesson I took from that place.

Anyway I was, by virtue of being at an "alternative" school, supposed to be interested in a knee-jerk way only in things that LOOKED OPPOSITE to the traditional schools. I say LOOKED opposite because the traditional schools had never empowered me (sic) to learn about Alfred the Great, either.

Sometimes you just can't win.

And now we get to where a 14-year-old black girl thinks she doesn't have to give her seat on the bus to an elderly white man so frail he can't even stand up when the bus isn't moving, because she thinks he hasn't "respected" her! (And on that occasion I'm the only person on the bus who'll even tell her off. The others are afraid presumably of looking racist. I just come at her like a cross mother.)

Quincy, we grew up reading Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton etc in school.

KEB