Dwayne Betts has left a very good comment on my previous post, my ongoing thoughts on diversity in the American literary industry:
I’ve been reading some books lately, few contemporary poets – and sometimes I wonder if the intent is to widen readership. If the intent is to create voice and story. My problem, my issue with the idea of tokenism is that if we look at that, and make that the issue, we fail to look at the machine in general, and we don’t really interrogate how irrelevant much of poetry is to the lives of people who look like us. (At least in the lives of people who look like me)
And I think that’s the conversation I want to have. I’m not even sure where it begins, but I figure part of it has to be finding venues to review books in a way that acknowledge part of the poet’s intent is to reach someone.
I think about Poetry, and how they publish a cat like Bob Hicock and I think, dude writes, and he seems to walk to the page writing to talk to someone. I would like more folks of color in a journal like that – but maybe I’d like more places where the writing of people of color gets talked about in some approximation of the way we talk about songs, about movies, about how pissed I am after shoveling snow for five hours in two days.
I agree, that a lot of American poetry reads as or feels irrelevant to people who look like us. This could be a result of MFA program proliferation, and the compromises and negotiations writers of color feel they must make there. But I think more so it’s a result of a shift in a writer’s perceived audience. So that’s one thing worth talking about — when, how, why that shift happens, and if it’s related to the MFA experience or the book contest phenomenon, then how do we change this.
As I’ve previously blogged, I believe it’s so important for folks of color to be able to find our stories in literature, art, film, various other cultural productions. I believe in writing in our own languages about our own histories, mythologies, political movements, faiths, and families, but I also believe in being open to a variety of perspectives, in stepping up the language and artistic quality of the work, challenging our communities beyond stereotypes and conventions.
As Alvin Lin recently posted on the Hyphen blog, re: a film adaptation of Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, for and to whom are our stories being told, those which penetrate the “American mainstream”? Must the API stories which garner lucrative book contracts with major publishing houses and which get optioned for Hollywood films all conform to the formulaic white savior saving the oppressed, backward other from him/herself?
Why does the Literary Industrial Complex, “the machine,” as Dwayne says above, open up to us mostly when the above formula is employed? Is this the only way we are relevant to the literary industry? What can we concretely do to make this no longer the case?
Hi,
I think it’s a great question. How can we create our own standards of what is good. I think your earlier question re: poetry magazine is interesting. I am not sure a review in Poetry magazine would necessarily change things. I mean if Poetry magazine started to review more than one Latino/a author perhaps it could open things up a little, but over all I think it is a slow process. It seems being “political” is more important than being a good poet in some circles. I think this is why we are often unfairly discredited. In time, these separations will not be so distinct and far apart. I mean the white literary establishment and the community need not always be separate in my opinion, but over all it seems that there’s a tendency to go for tokenism over good art within the communities themselves at times. It can happen is all I’m saying.
I don’t like it.
“It seems being “political” is more important than being a good poet in some circles. I think this is why we are often unfairly discredited.”
Honestly, the idea that being “political” is more important is an excuse some poets have leaned on for years, maybe even communities. But it’s jy shallow, I mean Baraka was all up in Poetry for years. Maybe not his most charged work, but he was there.
Maybe one of the problems is just the failure of good literature teaching – and good literature exposure. We’re competing with a kind of access to information and entertainment that is really unheard of – and many people (myself included) aren’t writing poems that lend themselves to being memorized – I mean most of us don’t memorize our work. I walk around and carry poems in my head, but I more so carry song lyrics and my aim as a poet is to get more poetry in my head, more poems that I can spit at a whim, not to impress, but to create an experience that is more in tune with how I live, and how I recognize my folks as accessing the art that gets them through days.
I say the “machine” but I don’t mean to break down a line between the white literary establishment and those of color – I think I more mean sort of the ways in which parts of the community dominate, control and police – and those parts, at times, are the Callaloo’s, even if it’s not popular or legitimate for me to say that, and even if saying that will get me banned from some list.
And I’d add that since so few literary journals are readable from cover to cover, it’s sort of understood that the ambition of poetry today is not to share table space with Essence, or Jet – while, for what it’s worth, Harpers, the New Yorker, the Atlantic and several other top quality magazines that publish long form journalism, that at least rivals poetry in its demand from readers, does aim to be read cover to cover.
But I’m rambling.