This paper was delivered as part of a roundtable discussion on “Poetry and its Public(s)” at the Modern Language Association convention in Austin, Texas, on January 9, 2016.
If 2015 was a year of controversy and seeming crisis in the American poetry world, it was arguably because poetry was coming to terms with its changing public. Of course, the belief in a general, literate public as the main audience for poetry has been under assault for decades by a sense, deserved or not, of poetry’s increasingly marginal cultural status. But what the last year has showed us, among other things, is that despite these seemingly humbling shifts in our sense of poetry’s public, many poets and critics continue to cling to this sense of a general, undifferentiated public for poetry. And of course, this undifferentiated public is a presumptively white public. The controversies that dominated the poetry world over the past year can ultimately be attributed to the failure, or refusal, to recognize the changing and pluraizing publics of American poetry. There is an increasing gap, in short, between American poetry’s outdated sense of its own singular public and the reality of its plural publics, particularly among readers and writers of color.
I had the opportunity to preview some of these issues a little over a year ago, when I was invited to contribute an essay to a volume on “the new American poetry of engagement.” The collection built upon an anthology from a few years back of the same name. The premise behind both was that a new “engaged” American poetry has emerged since 9/11, with a corresponding claim (debatable to say the least) that modern American poetry up to that point had largely shunned such “engagement.” It quickly became clear that what the editors meant by “engaged” poetry was in fact a more public poetry, one that spoke in a broadly accessible rhetoric on topics of general political interest. And these new “public” poets were nearly all white. (To be precise, 45 of 50 poets included in the original anthology were white.)
As I pointed out in my response, we can find ample evidence of such “public,” political poetry over the past several decades if we look to the work of poets like June Jordan or Amiri Baraka, like Janice Mirikitani or Ishle Yi Park, like our current US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. In other words, if we understand that the notion of public poetry is not limited to a poetry that speaks to an undifferentiated (read: white) public. Of course, to speak of Baraka’s “public” or Mirikitani’s “public” is to speak of a very different kind of public. These poets are often speaking self-consciously to other readers of color, a stance that is central to the politics of many US minority writers since the 1960s.*
It is precisely the failure to acknowledge the racial specificity of publics that I would argue is at the core of the controversies that engulfed the work of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place in 2015. It seems clear to me that both Goldsmith and Place believed that they were addressing poetry’s general, undifferentiated audiences with their projects, and that indeed both believed that their projects had a certain political value based on their presumed impact on this audience. What the response to their projects revealed was that the public each presumed to address was in fact a white public, and that neither seemed to have anticipated the very different impact their works would have on a public that included people of color.
Goldsmith’s “performance” of the autopsy report of Michael Brown, for instance, seemed unaware, or indifferent, that it was intervening into a discourse in which Brown’s death had not only become a rallying cry for African American communities resisting police violence, but a catalyst for African American poetic response. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, though published before the events in Ferguson, became a major point of reference, with its account of how black bodies are perceived in American public space. And in late 2014, a number of African American poets launched the Twitter hashtag #BlackPoetsSpeakOut to post poems and videos in response to police violence in Ferguson and elsewhere. Goldsmith’s after-the-fact explanation that his reading rendered Brown’s death an “American” death, in the vein of his Seven American Deaths and Disasters, claimed the text of Brown’s autopsy for an “American” public. But this came at the expense of erasing its specificity as an African American death, and neglecting the political implications of a white poet aestheticizing a young black man’s dead body.
Vanessa Place’s statement in the wake of her “Gone with the Wind” project, in which she tweeted racist dialect drawn from Margaret Mitchell’s iconic novel, shows a greater awareness of these problems of multiple publics, but ultimately founders on the same issues that Goldsmith does. Place’s statement distinguishes between those who were “undeservedly hurt” by her work, who she believes are owed an explanation, and those who were “deservedly hurt,” to whom she has “no response.” It quickly becomes clear that the “deservedly hurt” are white readers. Through her project, Place hopes to force white readers to confront their own complicity in racist oppression. But to the “undeservedly hurt,” Place offers an apology: “I am sorry for hurting people of color.” If we take Place at her word, and accept that the injury to readers of color was only collateral damage in her project, we can only conclude that the public imagined by Place’s project—those who needed to be force-fed the racist material she reproduced—was originally solely a white one. The backlash, then, occurred when it became clear that the public of poetry was not solely white, and that black readers mattered in a way Place had not anticipated.
The final event I want to mention was the controversy that surrounded this year’s edition of The Best American Poetry. One of the poets included, Yi-Fen Chou, turned out to be a pseudonym assumed by a white poet, Michael Derrick Hudson. [I’ve written more about the controversy here.] The incident provides a glimpse at the complexity of contemporary poetry publics. While the Best American Poetry series itself may already seem anachronistic, Hudson’s racial masquerade suggests at least one change in the landscape. In Hudson’s own account, he believed it would be easier to get published with an Asian name than a presumptively white one, presumably due to some kind of literary affirmative action. And he wasn’t entirely wrong. The volume’s editor, prominent Native American author Sherman Alexie, acknowledged that he had been seeking to increase representation by writers of color in the anthology, as part of “consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world.” In their very different ways, Alexie and Hudson—one earnestly, one cynically—acknowledge a changed landscape in which poets of color play an increasingly central role.
But I think it was the response to this event that shows us the most about the status of the public for poetry today. In the past, the so-called “debate” about Hudson’s stunt would likely have taken place on the ostensibly “neutral” ground of literary value and artistic choice, in a discussion dominated by white poets and critics. That discussion did happen. But it was largely surpassed in quantity and quality by responses from, and about, writers of color themselves, particularly from Asian American writers. When mainstream media outlets, from the Washington Post to NBC News, covered the controversy, they actually turned to Asian American writers and scholars, myself included, for comment. Institutions like the Asian American Writers Workshop published roundups of commentary. And perhaps most importantly, many readers drew attention to the actual Asian American poets who appeared in the anthology, including Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Chen Chen, Rajiv Mohabir, Jane Wong, and Monica Youn. Like Goldsmith and Place, Hudson seemed to have little awareness that his racial masquerade would be paraded before a poetic public that included Asian American readers, and who might respond in a very different way from the presumptively unmarked “general public.”
Some might be tempted to describe what I’ve outlined here as a “fracturing” of poetry’s public. But that would suggest a nostalgia for a racially homogenous audience for poetry that I hope few of us would endorse. Instead, it suggests that all American poets must now be aware of what poets of color have long known: that every poetic act speaks to multiple publics, and that any poem that refuses knowledge of this plurality of publics is increasingly likely to fail.**
*By this I don’t mean to say, of course, that all writers of color only or even primarily address readers of color, but simply that many poets of color are highly conscious of addressing other people of color.
**At the panel, Aldon Nielsen pointed out that most poems do not take multiple publics into account, and asked if that meant most poems should be judged as failures. I agreed that most poems do not take into account multiple publics, and amended my statement to suggest that the contemporary poetry that is most successful (such as Rankine’s Citizen) is likely to be poetry that does take account of a plurality of publics, while the poetry that most spectacularly fails is likely to fail precisely because it fails to acknowledge multiple publics.