Beyond the Norton: Anthologizing Innovation in Contemporary Black Poetics

Beyond the Norton: Anthologizing Innovation in Contemporary Black Poetics Joshua Lam Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 40, Number 1, Fall 2016, pp. 169-176 (Review) Published by Indiana University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/643368 Access provided by Nanyang Technological University (16 Feb 2017 06:05 GMT) Beyond the Norton: Anthologizing Innovation in Contemporary Black Poetics Joshua Lam Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey, eds. What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2015. xiii, 324 pp. $39.95 paper. Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America seeks to expand the contours of contemporary American and African American poetry by collecting the work of twenty-nine experimental black poets published since the late 1970s. Placing well-known innovators like Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine alongside many younger poets, the anthology presents an impressive array of formal experimentation in order to dispel canon-centric notions of aesthetic conservatism in post-war African American poetry. By privileging poetries that use conceptual, philosophical, visual, and appropriative techniques, the collection also implicitly challenges current views of contemporary avant-garde poetry as an overwhelmingly white endeavor. Seeking to re-map the inheritance of an interracial, cross-arts modernism, What I Say makes a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics by emphasizing the wide range of forms and content present in innovative black poetries. Keywords: race / contemporary poetry / African American literature / poetics / avant-garde A nthologies are inherently exclusive. hey seek to preserve some authors and texts at the expense of others, usually in safe, marketable ways. his does not mean they are inherently conservative; anthologies can also preserve Joshua Lam (lam1jd@gmail.com) received his PhD in English from the University at Bufalo – SUNY and is a lecturer in the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His current book project, “Creatures of Habit,” focuses on race, technology, and the human sciences in literary and cultural modernity. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, College Literature, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, among other venues. Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 40, No. 1 • Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.40.1.10 170 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 40, Number 1 writers whose languages, forms, ideas, and ideologies are marginalized for being too radical or challenging. his is the intent of the new anthology What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey. Ironically, What I Say is also an anthology that includes poets who have made incisive critiques of the anthologizing endeavor, such as Erica Hunt, Harryette Mullen, and C.S. Giscombe. As Giscombe points out in his Introduction to the collection, anthologized authors and texts are frequently ushered into a narrative of progressivism that coddles the canon’s centrism, abandoning those perceived to be at the margins of their already marginalized literatures to the dustbin of history (2). his is because the inclusion of “minority” literature in anthologies often depends upon marketability, the legibility of racialized identity, and a dubious editorial preference for poems of “experience.” All too often, anthologizing writers of color implicitly underwrites “whiteness” as racially unmarked. his irony is made painfully evident in a passage quoted by Giscombe, which comes from the introduction to X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia’s Introduction to Poetry (9th edition, 1998): What is it like to be black, a white may wonder? Perhaps Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Dudley Randall, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others have something to tell. What is it like to be a woman? A man who would learn can read, for a start, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Anne Bradstreet, Carole Satyamurti, Mona Van Duyn, Sharon Olds, and many more. (Qtd. in What I Say 3) In this passage, we witness an all-too-familiar and unarticulated opposition between a universalized white male reader (whose experience requires no explanation), and the particularized, consumable experience of other Others (who educate and revivify the liberal white male subject seeking to go beyond the sphere of his own awareness). he editors of What I Say have oriented their new collection of “innovative poetry by black writers in America” against precisely such white editorial privilege. If the voyeuristic impulse to peek behind the veil of whiteness is nothing new, it is also not yet a thing of the past. We can see the same silent validation of the white critical perspective in Marjorie Perlof’s recent back-cover blurb for Citizen: An American Lyric, written by Claudia Rankine (one of the 29 poets included in What I Say). Perlof asks: “What does it mean to be a black citizen in the US of the early twenty-irst century?” he substitution of signiication (“what does it mean?”) for communicable experience (“what is it like?”) may constitute some kind of progress, but the long-standing critical habit of assessing poets of color according to the dictates of experience — prior to considerations of aesthetics, politics, and form — still haunts contemporary poetics. To counter such tendencies, editors Nielsen and Ramey have curated a collection of formally experimental and innovative poetry that explodes narrow notions of contemporary black poetry seen solely as an inward-looking, aesthetically conservative tradition. Anthologizing Innovation in Contemporary Black Poetics 171 What I Say seeks to amplify our sense of poetry by black writers in America — and poetry in America — well beyond the familiar names of canonical voices, best-selling authors, and Pulitzer Prize winners (e.g., Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, none of whom is included). his is its primary goal, which it achieves admirably. Collecting the work of 29 poets published between 1977 and the present, the book includes well-known innovators like Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen (both included in he Norton Anthology of African American Literature, but not he Norton Anthology of American Literature); poets who came of age in the era of the Black Arts Movement and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (Giscombe, Hunt, Will Alexander); and many younger poets (Douglas Kearney, Mendi Lewis Obadike, giovanni singleton, the Black Took Collective). he book is also an unnamed and unnumbered companion volume to Nielsen and Ramey’s earlier collection, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (2006), which focused on the period between the Second World War and the mid-1970s. he shared efort of these anthologies, as the editors put it in their Introduction to the earlier volume, is to voyage as far as possible from “the shores of an unassuming blackness, a blackness bathed in the white light of canonical benevolence” (“Fear” xx). In this light — or the absence of it — the title of What I Say speaks volumes. he title’s most obvious reference point is the Miles Davis composition of the same name, “What I Say,” a jazz-fusion track irst performed in 1970, which has become emblematic of Davis’s “electric” period. Like Davis’s controversial albums of this era (Bitches Brew, Live-Evil), the poems in this collection move in multiple directions at once, jettisoning well-established boundaries for crosspollination. he title itself evokes a chasm between the performative, individual “I” and the larger collectivities holding the work together (seven musicians, or 29 poets) — the overlapping rhythms, patterns, structures, and slippages that form a chorus of “I”s, sometimes within a single poem. See, for example, Kearney’s “Atomic Buckdance,” a “crossroads of voices and values” that splays across the page in varied fonts and type styles, pitting six archetypes (trickster, victim, singer, griot, two-head, and authority) against one another (86). Davis’s “What I Say” also strains between scathing free-form improvisation and technical virtuosity, employing a range of technical efects (tape loops, reverb, elements of musique concrète) — all of which have poetic correlates in What I Say. Witness, for example, the hallucinatory, philosophical bravura of Mackey and Alexander; the lexical dexterity of Mullen, Harmony Holiday, and Tracie Morris; kinesthetic play in visual and concrete poetry by singleton, Julie Ezelle Patton, and Evie Shockley; and the broken time of archival appropriations by Tisa Bryant, Pia Deas, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Tyrone Williams. Gathering this collectivity — what they say — into a book whose title speaks as one lends rhetorical force to the counter-narrative profered by the editors. Yet to anthologize radical, innovative, or marginalized poets is also a paradoxical endeavor, as the critical writings of many contributors suggest. “he problematic 172 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 40, Number 1 action that anthologies take,” Giscombe argues, “is to canonize [the] marginal, to move it to the center” (5). Relecting on this problem, Hunt asks: If the canon of American literature has served mainly to exclude, silence, or erase the full chorus of literary practice, the many cross inluences, the many independent discoveries, the many formative inluences coming from the non-dominant culture, why would we, as Black people, adopt this form? Is the response to canon making more canon making? (Qtd. in What I Say 5–6) About this question, Nielsen and Ramey remain silent, but the existence of this volume and its earlier companion, both published by the University of Alabama Press, implies an airmative answer. Ultimately, however, the goal seems not to be the admission of these writers into the hallowed halls of new Norton and Oxford anthologies, but rather the preservation and dissemination of “the more radical poetries of Black America” (xv), whose political or aesthetic challenges make that level of institutionalization unlikely. At the same time, the vast majority of poets in What I Say are not without institutional support: the bio pages list PhDs and professorships; critical monographs by university presses; nominees and winners of the National Book Award, Bollingen Prize, Whiting Award, Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize, and more. his does not necessarily make the poetry any less radical, but it does remind us that even radical poetry may be institutionalized. his is important, because it is an institutionalized narrative that the editors are challenging. As Nielsen has suggested elsewhere: “from the modernism we choose we get the postmodernism we deserve” (“White Mischief ”). If our versions of modernism are too narrow, too white, too faithful to the mythological wholeness of the nation, our vision of contemporary writing is likely to devolve into mere caricature, in service to the same fantasy. In the wake of a modernist canon that has largely displaced experimental writers of color, critics of contemporary poetry all too often privilege “black writers[’] poetic works which replicate known formal gestures while fulilling a predominantly white audience[’]s hunger for the supposedly authentic voice of African-American experience” (Schultz). his has devastating consequences for our understanding of contemporary experimental and avant-garde poetry. As David Marriott argues in a recent forum on “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde” in the Boston Review, black experimental form has itself become a readymade in the marketplace of modernist content, which is precisely why contemporary black avant-garde poetry is only read (often very badly) insofar as it resembles the old modernist boudoir, or imitates the avant-garde’s wishful resembling of its own lost discrepancy. (n.p.) To avoid this misstep, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone and What I Say re-map the inheritance of “the interracial, cross-arts dynamism of international modernism” by focusing on contemporary black literary innovation “at the intersection of poetry, music, art, politics, and performance” (“Fear” xv-xvi). Privileging a rhetoric of proliferation, Nielsen and Ramey eschew direct links to canonical Anthologizing Innovation in Contemporary Black Poetics 173 modernism. In doing so, they allow the “diiculty” of innovative black poetry to remain intact, complicating our view of contemporary poetics by refusing to re-brand the political or aesthetic radicalisms included under this rubric. In addition to ofering a more complex view of contemporary poetics, What I Say — like all anthologies — makes a historical argument. Anthologies are backward-looking in nature. Even when they advance the vanguard, they are also protecting a version of the present for posterity. Speciically, What I Say aims to combat the critical narrative “that black poets in America were busy ‘telling their own stories’ while white poets pursued a more experimental course” (xv). his is a much-needed historical correction; the incredible range of forms invented and détourned by these poets helps to deconstruct narratives that privilege the poetry of black experience without acknowledging the multiple spheres of inluence black aesthetics have wielded over American poetry in general. hough What I Say forcefully reroutes our narrative of contemporary and innovative poetry, it is also driven by assumptions about the implicit value of formal experimentation that the editors shy away from fully acknowledging. One wants to pause and ask why the authors included in What I Say might be commended for not “telling their own stories” — or indeed, whether some of the poets are not doing just this. he unarticulated assumption behind Nielsen and Ramey’s counter-narrative is that experimentation and innovation form the index by which narratives of aesthetic progress are measured. Yet innovation is also an echo of the Poundian imperative to “make it new” and the argot of neoliberal expansion. By what criteria does experimental writing become signiicant beyond the mere diversity of forms? By what criteria does black experimental poetry become signiicant beyond the airmation of whitewashed modernist techniques? Because the editors are silent on these subjects — and on the cultural stakes of “innovation” in any sense — the elevation of experimentation over experience remains implicit, despite the falsity of this binary. his silence comes dangerously close to validating another critical habit, one recently criticized by Cathy Park Hong: the spurious division between avantgarde poetry and racialized identity or identity politics. Such a misreading of What I Say would be tragic, because its most important contribution is not to ofer proof of formal experimentation in black poetry alongside pat dismissals of “personal narrative” and “MFA program verse” (xv). Rather, What I Say curates radical poetries that often question the ways in which identity can be used and abused. hough Hong argues for the historical importance of “voice” as a means of challenging political disenfranchisement, What I Say also includes poets such as Harryette Mullen, who declares, “In poetry I have no voice, only text. I like it that way” (qtd. in What I Say 6). Like Mullen, many of the poets use conceptual techniques, appropriation, and polyvocality in order to trouble the notion of “voice” and challenge its aura of authenticity. hey do so not in order to circumvent what some consider the crude simplicity of “identity politics,” but rather, because “voice” and “authenticity” have historically framed critical and editorial decisions about who is ushered in and kept out of the poetic tradition. 174 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 40, Number 1 his review is not the place to take up in full the fraught tensions between race, identity, and innovation in contemporary poetry, but Nielsen and Ramey’s Preface might have been an ideal venue for a more explicit reckoning with these concerns. One wishes the editors had done more to contextualize their collection in the contemporary moment. hough the poems are thankfully unmarred by obtrusive footnotes or over-determining biographical content, the lack of historical markers and publication history (along with an alphabetical rather than chronological presentation) will make it extremely diicult for most readers to “re-map” contemporary poetry. he editors also might have taken up some of the ways in which formal experimentation can accommodate or complicate “experience” and racialized identity, since these are the very terms around which the anthology is organized. Fortunately, these are also terms that are interrogated by many of the poets included in What I Say. See, for example, John Keene’s poem “Self,” which begins by posing the question: “Self, black self, is there another label?*” Sixteen unnumbered footnotes follow, a series of short philosophical explorations: “*Does selving assign or resignify?” “*In the mark, how does one identify authenticity or its inverse?” (95). In a language that echoes post-structural meditations on subjectivity — perhaps parodying them via generic distance — the poem interrogates the myth of selfhood, warning against the ways in which those “*In the mark” — or racially marked — are used to consolidate (and unmark) the identities of others. he inal lines introduce an unidentiied “he” in the process of such consolidation: “*To precisely describe all conigurations, positionalities and momenta, he draws the black images to shore up these parameters. // *In the end, refuse signature” (96). Against the ubiquity of simpliied “black images” and identities that prop up racist ideologies, Keene suggests: resignify or refuse. Yet such a refusal must contend with a culture of consumption that seeks to name, trademark, and package our bodies as well as our selves. As Hunt has argued, “Certain radicalisms are ‘brands’ that don’t even begin to address the layers of diiculty, contradiction, tension, undertow and residue” that might inhere in a poem (“Response”). One of the virtues of What I Say is that it collects poems that truly encourage more complex modes of engagement — sometimes because the poems themselves interrogate the imbrication of branding, identity, and aesthetics. In “Phaneric Display No. 2: he Meta,” Duriel E. Harris presents a fragmented phenomenology of trademarked dolls (“babythataway™”), those uncanny objects by which we learn to form ideal images of ourselves and others. hough the speaker resists identiication by declaring that “you need not know the name of a thing to / know it[,]” the negotiation of that process is violent (55). he poem ends with the destruction of an ofending image and the mutilation of plastic lesh and hair: . . . | pinkseamed joint and toes the child will chop the blonde | mop to sheer plugs and plastic until the frames collide | but she’s always looked like that and raggedy ann™ and raggedy andy™ (55) Anthologizing Innovation in Contemporary Black Poetics 175 As the corporate overtakes the corporeal, new images emerge — white-complexioned, storybook personas. hey multiply. If black images and stereotypes haunt the margins of Keene’s and Harris’s poetic abstraction, they proliferate and take center stage in the poems of Douglas Kearney, which conjure the violent history of blackface minstrelsy and its implications for claims to authenticity. Scored for polyvocal performance, “Atomic Buckdance” uses the language of dance to stage, with sardonic wit, the grim contrast between the legacy of slavery and the historical compulsion of black performers to embody joy and merriment for white audiences. See, for example, an exchange between “the authority” and “the victim” (respectively): (Kearney 87) Critiquing the commodiication of black afective labor, the poem ends with the “trickster’s” dubious advice: (Kearney 89) Dawn Lundy Martin (a cofounder, with Harris and Ronaldo V. Wilson, of the Black Took Collective) also relects upon the violent process of subject formation, choreographing quotation, citation, autobiography, and stereotype in a ten-part prose series called “A Bleeding: An Autobiographical Tale”: 7. Dancing here, too. Paly. Play. Which came irst the black or the nigger? Who is relected in “nigger jim” or the fat black smiling “mammy”? What is seen? he self. Or, hate. Rippled soldiers “that can be made, out of formless clay, an inapt body.”1 [Performing gentle strokes to measure and erase the brute. Earthy, not licentious. A goodness. A black pride. Attempt at exorcism.] A niggarealness. Impossibility of erasure. To purge, instead, by erupting, confronting, lifting to surface. (143) In a context where we spread and consume hateful images of black bodies, Martin uses polyvocality and appropriation to question the violent unity and disciplinary nature of identity formation. Strategies of resistance multiply: resignify; refuse; purge; erupt; confront. 176 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 40, Number 1 hough Nielsen and Ramey establish only the widest contours of the counternarrative What I Say plots, their light-handed editorial approach also has its merits. he real contribution of this collection, after all, is in the poetry. No editorial apparatus — or review — could delineate the many lines of light in these poems, as varied in content as they are in form. Some of the many important works not discussed in this review include: the “cosmic bop” of Ron Allen; Tisa Bryant’s grim mash-ups of genealogy, slavery, and recipe; Giscombe’s “mnemonic geographies” of place, sound, and history; the impeccable minimalism of Renee Gladman’s heterotopian cityscapes; the mythic incantations of Mackey’s well-known Andoumboulou and “Mu” series; and oblique meditations on black sufering and objecthood by Mark McMorris, Fred Moten, Tyrone Williams, and Ronaldo V. Wilson. he writing included in this collection exceeds the boundaries of any story a critic might want to spin — the “I” of What I Say remains plural. he timing of this collection could be described as urgent, its function essential. Emerging at a moment when conceptual and avant-garde poetries are being pilloried for their “delusions of whiteness,” and when writers of color who use conceptual techniques are being called out for not toeing the party line arbitrarily drawn by an anonymous coalition, this collection of avant-garde, experimental, innovative, and conceptual poetry by black writers in America does much more than present black poetry outside the conventional bounds of “personal narrative” and “MFA program verse” (xv). It complicates our conception and pluralizes our history of the avant-garde itself by demystifying its white mythology. Notes 1. Martin’s note: “From Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995), page 135. (originally published in France in 1975).” Works Cited Hong, Cathy Park. “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.” Lana Turner 7 (2014): n. pag. Web. 7 Aug. 2015. Hunt, Erica. “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde.” Boston Review 10 Mar. 2015: n. pag. Web. 9 Aug. 2015. Marriott, David. “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde.” Boston Review 10 Mar. 2015: n. pag. Web. 9 Aug. 2015. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “White Mischief IV: he Imus Efect.” Jacket2 1 Aug. 2013: n. pag. Web. 7 Aug. 2015. ———, and Lauri Ramey. “Introduction: Fear of a Black Experiment.” Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. Eds. Nielsen and Ramey. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006. xii–xxi. Print. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Print. Schultz, Kathy Lou. “Rock and a Hard Place: Erica Hunt and the Poetics of African-American Postmodernity.” How2 1.5 (2001): n. pag. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.