T. S. Davis

THE RECRUDESCENCE OF THE MUSE: ONE POET’S JOURNEY

Freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against
the background of an artificial limitation.
          —T. S. Eliot

Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and
muthafucking rhyme.
          —George Clinton

I went through graduate school in poetry under the workshop paradigm that came to dominance in the 1960s as a result of professors who had rejected formal verse for free verse in their own writing. The thinking was that there was no need to teach the outdated metrical rules, forms, and techniques of traditional poetry because rhyme and meter had been replaced universally by free verse. In many cases, this resulted in an abdication of teaching altogether and the professor became simply a workshop facilitator for the many student voices who critiqued each other’s work. This was a qualitative change in the study of prosody which is the study of rhythm, rhyme, meter, stress, and language in poetry. For the first time, poets were being trained to be poets without being taught the traditional techniques of writing poetry. I could understand the teaching of the techniques of free verse in place of rhyme and meter, but free verse prosody itself seemed to be in its exuberant infancy, and still not well defined, despite 100 years of Whitman’s progeny. So no system of versification, whether traditional or modern, was taught. The only prosody I learned was that of my fellow graduate students as we sat around and talked about our poems and how to write them. For two decades afterwards, by default, I wrote free verse poetry pretty much exclusively.

Except that I also wrote songs and was the singer for several rock bands. As I brought my poetry skills to bear on my lyrics, the use of meter and rhyme in my songs began to influence my poetry. Soon, even without music, I found myself counting measures and stresses and enjoying a newfound strength in the implosive power of a more formal prosodic structure. The line between my poems and songs began to blur as more frequently I took poems and adapted them to rhyming lyrics.

I remember looking at one of my older poems one day. It had been written back in the graduate school workshop almost twenty years before. Out of habit, I scanned the unrhymed lines to determine the rhythm pattern. To my surprise and revelation, I had written a perfect iambic pentameter blank verse poem at a time when I prided myself as a rebel against convention. Iambic pentameter is a line of ten syllables with the rhythmic stress on every other syllable, for a total of five stresses or beats per line.

Although there are many other rhythm patterns, iambic pentameter poetry constitutes the overwhelming majority of all English poetry written prior to the twentieth century. The fact that I could unconsciously but flawlessly write an entire poem using that rhythm made me think that somehow it was not just an artificial construction but one of the natural and fundamental rhythms of the English language, maybe even its heartbeat. Yet as a poet, I was ignorant of how to consciously manipulate it, or any of the other accoutrements of traditional prosody, to my own ends. At that moment, I knew this had to change if I were to grow as a poet. I could not afford to ignore what had been so painstakingly learned and perfected by generations of poets before me. To figure out where poetry was going, I felt I had to know where it was coming from. Or as Eliot put it, “There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.”

That was the day I started teaching myself the prosody that had its antecedents in old Anglo-Saxon—the language modern English grew out of—the prosody that was born in Chaucer, and then refined through Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, and countless others. I realized I had accepted the benefits of the new without bothering to learn the lessons of the old.

At the same time, in the late 1980s, I was also beginning to listen to hip hop under the influence of my young nephew, who was still in high school, and had made it his goal to open his old rocker uncle’s ears to the new sound by sending tape after tape of his favorite groups. I was often amazed. Present were many of the elements of free verse prosody wedded to heavily cadenced rhyme: vocal presence or persona, wordplay, the specificity of vocabulary first engineered by Whitman, speed and breath control, the most personal of details jumbled with broad political swipes, braggadocio and humor, repetition and litany, all tied together with heavy meter and rhyme.

I started scanning the lyric sheets from Public Enemy and other groups. There were lots of metrically irregular lines, but iambic pentameter and tetrameter (four beats per line) tended to predominate. The traditional metrical “rules” were broken wide open, such as the prohibition against rhyming unstressed or weak syllables. In fact, what was considered frivolous and even clownish in traditional rhyming was the mark of highest skill in hip hop—the rhyming of words with multiple syllables or all the syllables of a multi-syllabic word being rhymed with a run of shorter words. Several slant or off rhymes could be used to “evolve” a rhyme into a completely different rhyming sound in the course of several lines. Enunciation could be exaggerated to make assonant and consonant rhymes prominent. These last two skills are what make Eminem such an amazing rapper, for instance. Traditional prosody tries to hide end rhyme with enjambment, making sure the sentence does not end with a rhyming word at the end of a line, but instead wraps into the next line. This hides the sound of the end rhyme in the middle of the sentence. But in hip hop prosody, the rhyme is proudly emphasized. In fact, overwhelming the listener with a plethora of rhyming sounds is much of the point in hip hop.

How ironic that as free verse prevailed from mid-century onward, it took a group of artists from outside the academy, way outside, from America’s black ghettoes, to revolutionize poetic prosody irrevocably, despite their lack of acknowledgement from the academy even today. I think the academy preferred to set up the more pedantic of the New Formalists as a less dangerous paper tiger to argue against. At least the New Formalists flattered the academy by desiring recognition from it. But doctrinaire fascination with traditional technique, combined with contempt for Modernism, made the New Formalists an easier target to be labeled reactionary, thus discrediting their return to form.

So the true innovators in the resurgence of formalism were the rappers who embraced the power of rhythm and rhyme but radically transformed both to meet the needs of their content, breaking and making rules as they went. Being outside the academy, the full impact of their influence has yet to be felt. But it eventually will be, in the same way, for instance, that Bob Dylan and John Lennon tangentially influenced an earlier generation of poets. The impact has already been fully felt among younger poets, slam poets, and performance poets in general who eagerly use the full toolbox of techniques available to them including meter and rhyme. One prominent example of this new type of poet who commands respect in hip hop and academic circles is Saul Williams.

Ironically, some in the academy complain that this formalism among rappers and young performance poets has occurred without conscious awareness or appreciation of traditional English prosody. They may have a point. But they can’t have it both ways. As guardians of the canon, they hid the keys to the toolbox and then complained that the keys were stolen.

T. S. Eliot himself had predicted that the free verse experiments of Modernism would eventually lead poets back to formalism. He saw the deviation from traditional prosody as a necessary corrective, as a “contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.” Presumably, the same fate of monotony would eventually befall free verse itself without an infusion of formalism for contrast. Eliot explains himself best in his essay “Reflections on Vers Libre” from which the quotes above are taken. But he demonstrates his concept of contrasting fixity with flux most demonstrably in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

A couple of years ago, I was asked back to my undergraduate alma mater for a poetry reading and to sit in on a class taught by my old mentor, the poet Ron Bayes. Ron is an excellent teacher. He is a Modernist, an Imagist, a Pound scholar, and completely eclectic in his aesthetic tastes. What little I knew about formalism before graduate school I had learned from him as an undergraduate when he had made me write in all the major forms, much to my grumbling and dislike at the time.

The class was discussing “Prufrock” that day and I was expected to provide them with some insight into the master. I had dusted off my slim volume of Eliot in preparation and reread the poem for the hundredth time. But since the last time I had read it, I had written about 75 Shakespearian sonnets. A sonnet is typically a fourteen line poem of iambic pentameter meter with a strict end rhyming pattern. The type of sonnet written by Shakespeare always ends with a rhyming couplet. So my eye was trained to take in fourteen lines at a gulp. My mouth dropped open as I read the first stanza, composed of twelve lines, followed by a space, and then the famous rhyming couplet, “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo,” for a total of fourteen lines.

This was something I had read many times, but never really recognized for what it is. Eliot opened “Prufrock” with an embedded sonnet! Can this really be, I thought? I scanned ahead. The next time the famous couplet appears in the poem, it’s also preceded by a discrete stanza of twelve lines. Quickly I looked back to the beginning sequence to scan the meter. Four beats, five beats, six beats, three beats per line, and so on, irregular regularity, the way some heartbeats are classified. Taking into account slant rhyme and off rhyme, I scanned the sonnets this way. The first I artificially broke into lines of three, tercets, to make the rhyme structure more obvious: AAB CCB BDD EFF GG. For the second I used the traditional quatrain, lines of four, to the same purpose: ABCA BDCD EFFE GG. From these scansions, it was clear to me that Eliot fully knew what he was doing. Continuing to read through, I found other remnants of form, pieces of potential sonnets, but never again complete fourteen line poems.

I pointed all this out to the class, using a chalk board to demonstrate, letting them sound out the beats and rhymes. It seemed to be a revelation to them as well. I suggested that this poem was the object lesson of the place Eliot occupied in poetry. He relied heavily on forms, but shattered them for contrast, for fluidity, for the sake of the poem rising out of the ruins of what had gone before. I suggested the class look at the poem structurally as a tightly controlled explosion of form to counter the prevailing view that Eliot wrote outside of form, or formlessly. I suggested his work echoed the cubism of Picasso, built upon and growing out of the representation that preceded it, but deconstructing it, taking it apart and exposing its architecture to suggest that what we take for granted as natural is really just the bias of familiarity. The poem demonstrated Eliot’s point in its transmogrification of the old into the new. Eliot knew the old rules. But he had the street cred and the balls to break them.

Eliot’s concept is not that far from Robert Frost’s notion: “Work easy in harness.”

When I started my self-study of traditional English prosody, I set myself the task of learning the old rules, the old forms, with the clear intention of using what I learned to push my own poetry into the future, to build on the prosody of the canon, including the prosody of free verse incidentally, but to “Make it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound. What I did not anticipate, but probably should have, was that the form would also make me new.

In my own writing, primarily Shakespearian sonnets now, I often deviate from the traditional metrical rules of accentual syllabic poetry by using a looser and freer scansion that conforms to my own idiosyncratic modern ear. Instead of parsing each arcane type of metrical unit (and practically every rhythmic deviation from iambic pentameter has a name), I count the overall beats in the line in much the same way it was done in Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the predecessor to Modern English. In my prosody, any number of unstressed syllables can be glossed over because what really matters is that strong thumping beat, similar to the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And like Geoffrey Chaucer, who basically “invented” iambic pentameter by combining the heavily stressed beats of Anglo Saxon with the syllabic poetry of his day, I have no prohibition on using a four beat or six beat line as needed. In fact, I often use the hexameter or Alexandrine couplet (six beats per line) for the final rhyming couplet of a sonnet. If the Alexandrine line divides naturally into two tercets, I find that the rhythm signals a distinctive counterpoint to the preceding pentameter. It slows down the reading and creates a visceral change in emotional content.

My cobbled aesthetic creates its own acceptance problems when I submit my poems for publication. On the one hand, I’ve received letters from editors who heartily objected to my formalism. On the other hand, I’ve received letters from editors who heartily objected to my cavalier notions of scansion when all my lines were not perfect iambic pentameter. I’ve found my work is often considered too formal for the free verse mags, too ragged for the formal mags. But what I find particularly comical are some of the descriptions of what an editor is looking for in Poet’s Market. Often an editor will say that if a submission is rhymed, it must be of the “highest quality,” whereas no such demand is enjoined on free verse. Apparently mediocre free verse submissions are less suspect and welcomed. Editors also ask that no “greeting card verse” be submitted, but apparently no restrictions apply to unrhymed free verse doggerel.

When I was a young man, I was much more confident about my ideas of the world and the impact I intended to have on the world. I had no doubt that my art, obscure as it was at the time, would one day take its place in the great canon of literature. I had all the time in the world to make it so. But now, at the age of sixty, I no longer have that time, and I certainly haven’t received the level of accolade that as a young man I had anticipated would automatically follow the recognition of what I naively thought was my undeniable talent. It has not helped me, of course, to buck the dominant academic paradigm of free verse with my turn to an invented formalism in late career. I look back wistfully, not so much with regrets, as with the desire to be able to talk to that young man, to tell him some things I have learned about the nature of life, and of poetry.

But looking back, I also realize I didn’t have much to say then in my poetry that wasn’t just an extension of my fairly rigid ideology. The older I got the less confident I was and the more I understood how little I knew about the world and how little my work is likely to influence the world. Paradoxically, now I seem to have more to say and I’m a better writer than I’ve ever been, though less well known than I once was. Somehow one needs to know less to know more.

I often think about the story of Antonin Artaud. He sent some poems to an editor who basically told him they sucked. Artaud struck up a correspondence with him, vehemently defending and explaining in prose pieces his rejected poems. The editor replied that the poems still sucked but that his defense of them—full of angst and passion and paradox—was brilliant, and he wanted permission to publish it. Those pieces became the prose poetry for which Artaud is most revered today. And his rejected poems still suck!

What this says to me is that beneath the assertion, is the real question.

I toyed with rhyme and meter for years, working it into my poems, creating new forms of my own fancy. And then one day in 2002, under the influence of a cobalt blue Arizona sky, alcohol, and John Keats, I took a leap and started writing Shakespearian sonnets, one after the other, exclusively. The first ones were like a child’s finger-painting, full of spirit, but naïve, as I was somewhat ignorant of what I had undertaken. But the sonnets came one after another, usually one a week, for months, and I was exhilarated. After a couple dozen, I thought if Shakespeare could write 154 of these suckers, then I can write 155! And so I set myself the juvenile task of doing just that. As stupid as that may sound, it has often been a motivator for me when nothing else was. I just recently broke through 100 sonnets, some good, some bad, but I continue to write them. But the better I get at writing sonnets, which is another way of saying the better I become at understanding the form of the sonnet, the harder they become to write, and the longer they take.

From the beginning what really surprised me was this: I didn’t know where they were coming from.

When I started writing poetry over 40 years ago, I wrote all free verse. I was making up all the rules then under the influence of the Modernists, deciding the shape or shapelessness of each poem according to what I needed to express myself, yet much of what I wrote then tended to sound the same. My content determined my form. And there is a point of view that says that is as it should be, that form should serve content.

But now, 40 years later, I come to the same template for each poem—fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a rigid rhyme scheme—yet I am continually amazed at how different each sonnet can end up sounding, at how this form can put the poetry under such intense pressure and yield such different results.

I’m also amazed at what I end up saying because usually I’m six to eight lines into the sonnet before I know what the poem is actually about, such are the hidden alleyways that rhyme and form lead you through. Toi Derricotte, in an interview in Rattle, once said, “I think a lot of times poems know things that we’re not ready to know yet, and we write the poem and then we figure it out.”

And even when I do know, I never know how it will end until it just does, because the rhyme controls where it goes. And that’s really odd because there is no stronger nor assertive couplet in English prosody than lines thirteen and fourteen of a Shakespearian sonnet. How could one start a sonnet not knowing where it’s going but knowing that twelve lines later a lyrical certainty, an epigram of unimpeachable elegance, would be required?

What this says to me is that beneath the question, is the real assertion.

It also says that my form determines my content.

Or maybe something else does, masquerading as form.

At the risk of waxing mystical, I must admit that writing sonnets has rejuvenated my belief in what the ancients called the Muse. Sonnets can be incredibly labor intensive and agonizing to write. So “finding” my way through the maze that the form creates, eliminating one rhyming dead end after another yet eventually coming out the other end, all gives me the strong intuitive feeling that I have been guided, led, coaxed into places I would not normally go by the “form” and made to discover what seems to have already and always existed. The more well wrought the sonnet, the more organic it feels, the harder it is to imagine a time when it did not exist.

This is a shock for a long time materialist such as myself. I do not pretend to understand it. I often feel like a translator of an ancient language no one else speaks with an incumbency to ensure the received wisdom is meticulously transcribed and correct. I never really felt that way writing free verse. Writing free verse, I often felt the exhilaration of what Kerouac called “spontaneous composition” when a free verse piece seemed to burst forth from nowhere completed on first writing with little or no editing needed. But I never felt the deep laborious ache that resolves so beautifully at the end of writing a good sonnet.

I have learned a few things about Shakespearian sonnets, commensurate with my modest chops. I usually start with a line I really like. Since I usually don’t know what I’m doing, I might as well start with something I like. There is absolute freedom in that first line, in fact, in the first two lines. But after that, the direction is dictated by the rhyme. If you’re used to writing free verse, this will come as a shock to you. You will need to learn to follow, not lead, or you will quickly find yourself down a rhymeless dead end, a babbling cul de sac, and have to hit the backspace key over and over until you’ve eaten that first line or two you loved and you’re staring at blank paper again. That’s when what you thought this sonnet was about crumbles and you realize George Clinton nailed it: “Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and muthafucking rhyme.” At that point you have a choice to make: quit, or trust the form to show you where to go.

Years ago, when I told a poet friend I was writing sonnets, he said that he assumed I was writing a free verse poem first and then manipulating it to make the shoe fit. I just laughed at the fanciful notion that I could impose the sonnet onto a poem. No, instead, the sonnet allows entrance—what you do inside determines whether you’re worthy of the form. It doesn’t conform to you; you conform to it.

But even with the form pulling you in the direction of a particular rhyming sound, the choices of where you can go in the labyrinth of the sonnet are still pretty much inexhaustible. Yet like the I Ching, the wisdom a sonnet can reveal as you write it is often serendipitous.

You may choose to bleed a sentence from the first quatrain into the second quatrain at line five in a Shakespearian sonnet, and that’s okay, but unless you wish to drive yourself crazy, truly crazy, trust me, put a period at the end of line eight. The first eight lines set up the problem. Line nine is “the turn,” and like “the river” in poker, fortunes should change, possibilities appear, or more in keeping with the extended metaphor, you should feel the centrifugal force of going too fast around a hairpin curve. So like Shakespeare himself, start line nine with a nice qualifier, such as but, or yet, or at least start a new sentence to signal your reader that change is coming.

You’ve now only got four lines to solve your dilemma. By now, the sonnet should have revealed to you what it’s about, what problem you are trying to resolve. Only four lines are left to basically end the poem, the first time, that is. Most sonnets have an organicity, a degree of resolution, by the end of line twelve. But it ain’t over yet: the biggest challenge of any Shakespearian sonnet is the final rhyming couplet.

The word sonnet in Italian means “little song.” And it is that, but “little” is also deceptive. A sonnet is little in the way a firecracker is little or in the way a toddler squalling his heart out on the floor is little. I think of the sonnet as a pattern of energy tightly pressurized and shaped by the tight constraints of the form. Eliot’s injunction of an “artificial limitation” is relevant again. At the risk of sounding ludicrous, I compare a sonnet to the internal combustion engine. Gasoline will always burn, but if you add a spark to a mixture of gasoline and air inside a cylinder, the resulting explosion is shaped by the cylinder and directed toward the end where a piston moves. It is the constraint of energy that creates the power. In a sonnet, that constrained energy is directed toward the final rhyming couplet, and the power, the tension, is released there. The couplet is no denouement. It is a full on climax, in every nuance of the word.

The final rhyming couplet is why I write Shakespearian sonnets instead of Petrarchan sonnets. Those two lines can be some of the most powerful and elegant lines in English poetry. They definitively end the sonnet on a much higher level of meaning than line twelve, while often standing alone at the same time as though a rarefied form of English haiku: “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”

A sonnet needs its couplet, but a couplet can often lead its own life. Any of us would be proud to be included in the canon for a body of work, for a book, or for a single poem. I would settle for a single rhyming couplet, cut off from its sonnet and author, anonymous and unattributed, quoted by unknown speakers at funerals, weddings, toasts, in bars, or in moments of triumph or despair. Is there any higher calling than to put your words on the tongue of the world? That is what the couplet should strive for, that is what anyone as a writer of sonnets should live for.

Unless of course…the couplet is crap. My best critic is Sue, my partner of twenty-five years. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve thought I was done with a new sonnet, exhilarated that I had stumbled through it gracefully somehow without it all falling apart, and allowing myself to rise after hours of rearranging approximately 125 odd words to read it aloud to her, only to have her say something like: “You know I really like it—up until the last two lines. Somehow they feel a little weak to me. You need to rework them.”

Dejected, intoxicated with rhyme, I’d return to my desk and try once more to fashion two elegant lines, for hours if need be. I try not to stop until I’m done—I don’t dare risk the loss of momentum because I already have too many twelve line sonnets in want of one good couplet sitting stranded and helpless in a digital doc. And if I feel the Muse is listening, real or imagined, you can bet I will continue to quietly sing my “little song,” to whisper my rhymes into the ear of the Muse. I also know that if it comes too easily, somehow it’s not earned. When a breakthrough finally arrives, from somewhere, nowhere, often simple, or obvious, or understated, no matter how tired I am, and sonnets are exceedingly laborious, I feel elated, relieved, awed, overwhelmed, and most interestingly, grateful, not for something I’ve done, but for something I’ve discovered. Any pride I may feel is on behalf of the beauty of the sonnet itself.

As a young man I tried to show the world something that I thought was coming from me. Now I try to show the world something I have found. It can be argued that literary vision is different for the young than for the old. The young choose their ideas and try to change the world with them. And that is good. The old allow the world to change their ideas. And that is good.

Yet I would argue that the path one takes is continuous. The choices you make today are the basis for whom you will become tomorrow. Just as the person you were as a child is still within you, so the person you have not yet become exists within you as well. Just as the person you are today has answers to the questions you asked when you were young, the person you have not yet become has answers to the questions you are asking today. So a conversation with your past and your future is entirely appropriate, necessary, and for poets, that conversation occurs in poetry.

But I do not mean to suggest the way to Nirvana is to ensconce yourself in traditional forms like the sonnet. After all, you are who you are, so “Come as you are,” in the words of Kurt Cobain. In fact, your view of the world and your character may lead you to destroy old forms and invent new ones in the same way Whitman used free verse as an axe to splinter nineteenth century prosody. If the Muse is poetry idealized, then as times change, so must the ideal—the Muse always demands the new. As poets we all need to be cognizant that the new tradition Whitman founded is still the dominant paradigm today and retains the faint aura of insurrection though it is now over 150 years old. No longer the revolution, free verse is now the status quo. And the Muse?—the Muse is bored, has been for a long time.

New art, whatever form it takes, can be brutal when it finally breaks free, suppressing what came before in order to gain dominance. But it also builds on top of what it obliterates. The Modernists ransacked the past for their influences, and they chose well: Greek literature, Japanese and Chinese poetry, the troubadours, Dante, the English Metaphysical poets, among others. What’s important now is not whom they chose, but that they chose. Because that is the task that faces us. All poets before us have stood precisely at the crossroads we now face. We would be stupid to ignore their counsel. Without their work, however antiquated by current popular tastes, our own prosody would not exist. Any true formal revolution in poetry will be a step into the future, not the past. But it is the fixity of the past that distinguishes the flux of the future.

What transcends time and form is the ancient heartbeat of our Mother Tongue, old Anglo Saxon. It beats now strong, now faint, now regular, now irregular, but it beats still today in line after line of your poetry and mine. We can choose to palpate it, or not. But as Chaucer put it, “The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

____________

T. S. DAVIS is the author of two books of poetry, Sun + Moon Rendezvous and Criminal Thawts. He lives in Asheville, NC.

Susan B. A. Somers-Willett

THROUGH THE INVISIBLE CLOAK: SOME PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES OF BEING A WHITE READER OF AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY

I teach college courses in poetry and poetics, which means that twice a year, I have to drop off materials for my course packets at my local copy shop. Last semester, the white employee filling out the order for my course packet asked me a question about African American poetry which, nearly a year later, I continue to contemplate. Our exchange went something like this:

“Course number?” she asked.
“English 376M, African American Poetry and Poetics,” I responded.
“…really?”
“Yes, but let me check the course number on my syllabus just to be sure I’ve given you the right one.”
“No…I mean…that’s funny—I just had another red-haired professor in the other day. She was even whiter than you, with an Irish complexion—teaching an African American lit course.”
Here I paused, said nothing as I contemplated her statement.
“So tell me,” she said with a smiling confidence between the two of us, “what is the deal with all the white professors teaching African American literature?”

That question struck me at once as both entirely offensive and entirely legitimate, and it spawned a dialogue in my writing and teaching that continues to grow more complex. It is not as if I had never thought critically or deeply about being a white person teaching African American poetry; I just had never heard perceptions around the issues of white teaching and readership put to me so bluntly. This perception is not, I believe, just limited to one employee in a copy shop. Students of various ethnicities have told me, by their own admission, that they were surprised to learn on the first day of class that their teacher of African American poetry is white. In my own experience, hiring committees comprised of people of many different backgrounds—young and old, black and white alike—will regard a faculty opening in African American literature as an opportunity to recruit a black faculty member because they assume that only African Americans will be interested in or authorities on the subject.

With this in mind, the question “What is the deal with all the white professors teaching African American literature?” begs a number of others. Why do so many of us expect African Americans to be the authoritative last word on African American literature? How does one’s perceived “degree” of color or whiteness influence how we see his or her understanding of the literature? How would my students learn differently from having an African American teach a course in black literature? Do others see me as a less competent or qualified teacher and critic of African American literature because of my skin color? And does the reverse perception hold true—are African American teachers perceived as somehow less of an authority on literature by people of ethnicities other than their own?

All of these difficult questions translate, I believe, to issues of white readership and criticism of African American poetry. Even in the optimistic and progressive age of Obama, it is easy for any reader—white, black, and shades in between—to participate in a kind of literary segregation based on who he or she perceives can authentically and legitimately engage the literature. If the reaction of this particular employee, my students, and my colleagues at various institutions are any indication, it appears that many of us reading African American poetry hold the deep-seated but largely unspoken notion that African Americans are de facto best equipped to engage and speak about literature written by African Americans.

In many ways, this is a dangerous assumption. It not only attributes a racial essence to African American texts, it also implicitly assigns a racial essence to African Americans themselves. Even as particular tropes, themes, and modes of address may re-occur in poetry written by African Americans, and even as African American authors themselves may share a cultural heritage including the acute and sometimes ineffable experiences of racism and slavery, we must dispel the notion that there is a “black experience” which is either singular or inherent to every African American. Such a belief denies the diversity of those who identify as black in America as well as the multiplicity of voices that make up African American poetry.

On the other hand, contemplating the voices of African Americans as they speak about their own varied experiences—both individually and as a chorus—is incredibly necessary. Because African American poets have been excluded from the canon for extraliterary reasons, it is important to consider the literary production and reception of African American poets as a group even as it is important to consider their contributions to American letters as individuals. Considering side-by-side the poems and poets collected in this issue brings into sharp relief some commonalities of black experience and the fraught politics of an African American literary tradition, one that began in 1772 with the Phyllis Wheatley’s testimony in court required to prove that she, a house slave educated by her master’s family, was intelligent enough to write the poems in her collection Poems on Various Subjects. Only after Wheatley was examined by a panel of white male luminaries was the title of author bestowed upon her. Their legal attestation was published as a preface to her book, launching a tradition in American letters in which white literary authorities introduced, “authenticated,” and attested to the quality of texts written by black writers for white readers (one which persisted through the early twentieth century). Although such prefaces are roundly considered racist today, in many ways the anxiety over agency, authenticity, and authority that influence the contemporary reception of African American poetry recall those of nearly 250 years ago. This persistent dynamic between black authors and white literary authorities prompted the late scholar Nellie Y. McKay to declare that the Wheatley court is still in session today.

Of course, there are problems inherent in putting together a tribute to African American poets such as this one. Some may regard a special section dedicated to African American poets as a politically correct way to segregate black texts from the larger poetic conversation or to hold it to different standards of quality. Others may see it as a way to fetishize black texts and black writers, valuing and valorizing the expression of a marginalized identity over the poem itself. Still more may view the tribute as a way to make the black poet a token, a novelty or oddity, or to put undue burden on a small group of poets to represent African Americans as a whole. All of these objections are valid, and yet none of them get to the heart of why it may still be appropriate to consider black poets together as well as apart. Not only does such a grouping highlight the diversity of African American poets, it also acknowledges the very real experience of being an African American writing as part of the American literary tradition and as an agent in American culture. Speaking at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference this spring, poet Duriel E. Harris summarized the necessity of African American writing communities and practices this way: “Black narratives help us organize our experience so that we can survive in the world.”

In considering black poets together, a reader is also (hopefully) forced to confront how and why whiteness and white texts are constructed as the invisible norm in American letters. In an interview featured in this issue, Toi Derricotte speaks of how it was not that long ago that there were few or no black poets included in most classrooms and anthologies, an exclusion performed under and in the name of that invisible cloak of “universality” so often synonymous with whiteness. The idea of literary universality, as Toni Morrison notes in Playing in the Dark, silently situates whiteness as normative, unbiased, transcendent, and timeless. The often unspoken but incredibly persistent idea that black readers, writers, and critics are the only ones who can fully engage literature written by African Americans is a child of the same logic. It too feeds the illusion of black authenticity, of white universality; it too renders the cloak of race identification into sameness and invisibility.

The idea that any poem can be universal, somehow apart from its author’s and reader’s subject positions, is an outdated and insidious fiction. Being a white person reading, evaluating, and teaching a black author’s poem carries with it certain questions and complications that a black reader probably does not have. But being a black reader carries with it other difficult negotiations of identification and representation. None of us are free from the limits of our own subject positions; as Derricotte notes in her interview, “We tend to read through what we know and what we read through are often the limits of our own understandings.” (Rattle #31, 152)

Still, we should also remember that we are not forever wed to those subjective limits; rather, our engagement with poetry should be about testing and expanding those limits. Poems are not just elaborate birds resting in snow; they are living animals that instigate empathy, realization, dialogue, and change. This sense of possibility is what I think is most important to remember as a white reader of African American poetry—that in this careful dance between poet and reader we begin to understand our connections to and through race with new nuance and complexity. By reading and criticizing black poetry in ways that challenge us, the invisible cloak of whiteness is made visible, and when it is visible, we must truly wear it. In doing so, we learn of the weft and warp of the garment of race, the lightness or the burden of its fabric; we know its rough texture and its fine tailoring.

My choice of metaphor here for reading through whiteness—the invisible cloak—is quite a deliberate one, even as it may conjure uncomfortable images including the clansman’s robe and hood. Though the white reader may disavow racism and hate crimes performed in the name of white supremacy, to make visible this metaphorical cloak is to acknowledge the sometimes violent and almost always secret history of the designation of whiteness as a social privilege. The cloak also conjures the professor’s or critic’s academic vestments, the garb of authority so often synonymous with whiteness (and also, until very recently, men). The white reader, in acknowledging the visibility of his or her cloak, acknowledges this sense of privilege without being doomed to recapitulate its oppressive power. The invisible cloak is also an imagistic analog to W.E.B. DuBois’s veil of double consciousness: the idea of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” and always feeling the “two-ness” of being an American and black. Making the cloak of whiteness visible and truly wearing it means assuming a similar sense of consciousness about one’s race—not in a way that inspires a crippling guilt, but in a way that can liberate and inform how and why we see the world the way we do. Finally, the image of the invisible cloak is apt, I believe, because its existence is fabled; the invisibility of both whiteness and of the cloak is only an illusion, a grand ruse. In its fabled invisibility, it is a festooned and pristine robe; when made visible—when we acknowledge its visibility—it is a second-hand coat showing all of its loose threads, its holes.

____________

I’ve come across another type of white response to African American literature, one that is perhaps the most well-meaning but that is also the most troubling: the response fueled by white guilt. Some white critics will effusively laud African American writers because of their guilt over the social position of some African Americans (I call to mind here certain reviews of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway in which poets of color are praised for their “gritty realism” and “fresh urban vibe”). Others go to the opposite extreme and translate that guilt into a crippling silence—It was not written by someone like me, this reader thinks, and so I have no authority to speak about it. Both responses are two sides of the same troubling coin. These readers consciously or unconsciously use the cultural politics of race as an excuse to ultimately disengage from black literature altogether. Not only are such responses unsavory, they more importantly fail to regard African American poetry for what it is: not some body of literature infused with an unknowable racial essence, but poetry that happens to be written by African Americans.

This begs the question: Can a poet’s race (or any other aspect of his or her identity) ever truly be separated from the poem that he or she authors? Probably not, but I think in the case of African American poets and poetry, we have to be able to consider the work both ways—as in conversation with both black and American literature as well as with black and American culture. In this regard, identity becomes not a matter of essence but of perspective. The spectacular (and arguably calculated) performances of blackness enacted by African American poets such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, and Maya Angelou suggest a dialectic beyond an audience of black readers and critics; they engage readers and critics as diverse as the body of American letters. Each of these authors helped to define in his or her own era what black is and black ain’t, but in ways that served to open doors for the next generation of poets of many ethnicities. The example of their poetic practice was what propelled African American poetry, if not American poetry, to take its next step. In light of this, the relevant question becomes not “Why group?” but “For whom?”

Although the goal of this essay is to discuss the complex dynamic that happens between white readers and black poets, I also have to acknowledge that some African American authors aren’t interested in engaging white audiences, and that too is acceptable. Despite my emphasis here on how black texts have engaged me as a white reader, I fully acknowledge that there will always be moments in black literature with which I may not be able to fully empathize or even comprehend because of my cultural position. It would be ridiculous to suggest that all there is to say about African American poetry can be told through how it engages or rejects the white reader alone. Exclusively black spaces, meanings, and expressions serve an important purpose, for they can provide models of identification for black poets and inspire work that speaks both to and beyond a racially exclusive community.

In underscoring why we should consider African American poets and poetry under the rubric of race (as well as apart from it), I don’t want to suggest that there is or ever has been one “black voice” in African American literature. The styles and influences that contemporary African American poets reflect are just as diverse as those in all of American poetry, from formal to experimental and from textual to performed. Poetry written by African Americans is just plain poetry after all, and in seeking such poetry out, one soon comes to realize that there really is no such thing as “African American poetry.” Black folks can share certain experiences, and they can share a history of struggle and oppression in the U.S. as they may globally, but political, social, or creative solidarity does not equal sameness of voice.

One of the totems of contemporary African American poetry is Cave Canem, a week-long summer retreat dedicated to cultivating the new voices of black poets in the U.S. Founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996, the Cave Canem community has grown exponentially in size and influence over the years; it now sponsors first and second book prizes, publishes annual and special-topic anthologies, and hosts regional workshops and readings in addition to the summer retreat in which residents participate over three years. This retreat is the center of the Cave Canem, fostering a close-knit community of adult artists that rarely exists beyond the framework of an artist’s colony. Every time I hear an alum speak about the program, he or she remarks on the breadth of styles and aesthetics among the poets, which range from formalism to the slam. In creating all-black spaces in which poets can write, the Cave Canem community creates a necessary insularity, a “safe space” for African American poets to experiment and try on many voices. In this regard, Cave Canem is not about fostering “the black voice” in American poetry (again, said in the erroneous singular) but about nurturing African American poets so that they can find their own voices.

And those voices are plural, indeed. The field of contemporary African American poetry, like the field of poets selected to join Cave Canem, is deep as it is wide. African American poets practicing today are formalist poets such as Marilyn Nelson and poets re-inventing received form such as Ruth Ellen Kocher; experimental poets such as Harryette Mullen and Nathaniel Mackey; poets experimenting with sound-text such as Tracie Morris, Douglas Kearney, and Duriel E. Harris; poets working in blues and jazz idioms such as Tyehimba Jess, Cornelius Eady, Kevin Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Quincy Troupe; Black Arts poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni; poets rising from and moving beyond the national slam scene such as Regie Gibson, Saul Williams, and Patricia Smith; poets of the South and Affrilachia such as Natasha Trethewey and Nikky Finney. And then of course there are two of my very favorite poets, Lucille Clifton and the late great Gwendolyn Brooks, who deserve categories of their very own. This short and very incomplete list of authors is evidence enough that African American poetry is as diverse as American poetry itself.

___________

One of the texts that I like to begin with when teaching an African American literature course is Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In this speech given at a women’s studies conference in 1979, Lorde discusses how asking women of color to present token perspectives on an issue asks them to place their experience against the backdrop of whiteness, an act which forever sets them apart as marginalized. “How come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us,” she asks of her white feminist colleagues, “when it is key to our survival as a movement?”

When I read this essay as an undergraduate student, that sentence resonated deeply with me and helped set me on the path of study I follow today. The idea that it was my own responsibility as a white woman to educate myself about writers of color—to initiate the conversation of difference rather than assume people of color were the best and only sources from which that dialectic could emerge—was profound. I decided to seek out African American poets precisely because their work challenged and taught me new things about black expression and myself. “Difference,” Lorde wrote, “must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark.”

As a result of my own imperative desire to read African American poetry and speak authoritatively about it, I have discovered a beauty and a complexity that I had not known before. Acknowledging difference does not erase the complications of my reading practice; rather, it is about embracing and welcoming those complications. Reading African American poetry from and through the cloak of whiteness carries with it the possible entanglements of cultural voyeurism and fetishism, and for white writers, it can produce a special kind of anxiety of influence. But the alternative to this is not to engage in dialogue, which is no alternative at all. I choose the trouble and the self-doubt of this reading practice because by embracing the complexities of race and of difference, by making the invisible cloak of whiteness visible, extraordinary possibilities emerge.

That, in the end, is the deal with this white professor teaching African American literature: she is a white reader critically engaging the troubles and joys of this poetry as art, as cultural engagement, as specific human connection.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

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SUSAN B. A. SOMERS-WILLETT is the author of two books of poetry, Quiver (VQR Series, 2009) and Roam (Crab Orchard Series, 2006), and a book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (U of Michigan Press, 2009). Her honors include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize and the Robert Frost Foundation Award as well as fellowships from the Millay Colony and the Mellon Foundation. She is anAssistant Professor of poetry and poetics at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Meta DuEwa Jones

DESCENT AND TRANSCENDENCE IN AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE, FORM

“To submit, just follow our regular guidelines, and include a note that you are of African American descent.” This was the compelling compulsion Rattle issued to writers submitting to this tribute to African American poets. Such a request seems simple and self-explanatory. We readers and writers all know what that means, don’t we? I heard the editors’ call as them frankly asking: Tell us, dear poet, who you are, or in the racially coded version, who you be. The goal of this identity-based caveat was not to police or politicize black bodies, as if the body could ever be free of such external or internal scrutiny. Instead, I imagine the editors hoped, through this prescreening, to distinguish between poetry written about African Americans, and poems written by them. They sought to insure that the racialized group of writers celebrated in this issue actually authored—created, authorized, and served as an authority on—the writing celebrated. This aim is important, especially for a journal such as Rattle, which has a predominately (though not exclusively) white readership. It helps to insure that black writers maintain positions as subjects and agents of verse concerning their individual and collective lives and avoids positioning them as objects passively acted upon or written about.

But what does it mean to be of African American descent? What does it mean to be an African American poet? More than a century ago poet Countee Cullen* told the world it was “a curious thing/ to make a poet, black, and bid him sing.” Paul Laurence Dunbar also implied that black poets, whether singing, speaking, or scribbling verse, “mouth with myriad subtleties” through a feigned smile, wearing “the mask that grins and lies.” (Dunbar) If truth is the poet’s province and lies are the domain of the storyteller, then Dunbar’s lament led me to wonder what blackness might mask and mark in American poetics. This essay seeks to explore contemporary African American poetry and the relationship between identity, experience, and form. I am, like Dunbar, curious about the relative importance of lines of literary, racial, and cultural descent, and how those lines become racialized into boundaries, and how poets transcend them.

Is “Black” mama’s baby but “Poetry” papa’s maybe? Is race a determining factor in one’s poetics or is it an accident of birth with no correlation to the concerns of black poets? Can one write about race in a manner analogous to writing about vocation, as a poet in a previous Rattle tribute to nurses did, that one is a poet who happens to be black? History indicates that distancing oneself from an inscribed blackness by evoking race as a coincidental or incidental matter is not so easily accomplished. Poets such as Toi Derricotte illustrate why we should not only ask what blackness means but how we learn its meaning from birth. In her poem “Workshop on Racism,” a child rails against other children taunting her as “The Black Briana!” to distinguish her from another classmate with the same name. Derricotte reflects: “Already at five the children understand,/ ‘black’ is not a color, it is a/ blazing skin.” (Derricotte, 30) This concern with the politics of pigmentation as a distinctive feature of African American identity is also signified in Tracie Morris’s scrambled haiku, “Why I Won’t Wear a Tattoo: skin color marks me/ been paying for it/ indelible already.” (Morris, 35) If the meaning attributed to blackness in these two examples seems to be primarily punitive, this is because both poets are speaking to the historical contexts of racial identification and indoctrination through personal and collective experience.

But when black poets choose to explore how notions of race are formed and informed by history and experience, they risk being aesthetically and artistically compartmentalized. In the U.S. context, racialized others, especially, though not exclusively, African Americans, are believed as possessing (a) race, and also being possessed—that is haunted, consumed, obsessed—by race matters. By contrast, Anglo American writers are often perceived to be primarily race-neutral in their writing. Even in instances when poets such as Tony Hoagland engage in explicitly self-reflexive meditations on white masculinity, white writers are not viewed as being obsessed with writing about “the European American experience” in a representative or politicized fashion. All too often, blacks bear the burden of racial representation, hefty as a ton of coal.

In poems such as “Coal,” however, the poet Audre Lorde, an alchemist of the word, transforms the sedimented rock of race, which she pictures as “the total black/ being spoken/ from the earth’s inside,” into a gleaming diamond of a poem. The terse couplet in the penultimate stanza flowers into acute imagery:

Some words
bedevil me.

Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes
into a knot of flame
I am Black
because I come from the earth’s inside
take my word for jewel
in the open light.
                        (Lorde, “Coal”)

At its core in “Coal,” the changing same of blackness, earthy and dark as the underbelly of the Mississippi River, creates an essential and essentialist racial origin myth. Reading poems such as these penned by black poets during the ’60s, one might say that African American poetry chose to descend from racial concerns, while other mainstream American poetry strove to transcend, if not altogether ignore, racial issues. But I don’t find such gross oversimplifications satisfying. They obscure the very complex creative process through which all artists combine language and experience, intellect and emotion to compose poetry. While Lorde affirms the power of black identity, she equally affirms the power of poetic imagination. While Lorde mines the English language to uncover its etymological linking of the color black with evil and evil with blacks, she also uses that same language to create new vistas of racial and human perception. While Lorde says “some words/ bedevil me,” she concurrently sings: these words will bejewel me. “Coal” illustrates her deft handling of the base materials through which poets work their will and their wares: word, sound, and image.

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“It is never to be forgotten that it is the business of poets to make poems, justas it is the business of readers and critics to appraise them,” Paul Fussell says in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, (Fussell, 155) and I hear him. Or rather, I hope more readers of African American poetry will listen to this advice. Regardless of its apparent themes or social contexts, the best poems written by African Americans are first and foremost that, poems. As such, they should not be mined for racial, political, and cultural ore. When I read criticism of some black poets’ work, I notice how much critical light shines on a poet’s subject matter, identity, history, politics, culture, and/or personal biography. Comparatively less limelight is given to illuminate the writer’s meticulous work with form in metrical or free verse: his or her line integrity; penchant for assonance, alliteration, parataxis or punctuation; dense or sparse stanzas; use of syllabic or anagrammatic patterns; subtle or stark use of volume, intonation, and cadence to amplify or mute their performances; or crafting of tension and release through these and other poetic devices.

But attending to contemporary black poets’ engagement in the freedoms and restraints of vastly different poetic forms yields profitable insight, providing potential answers to a query I posed earlier: What does it mean to be an African American poet? To practice poetry. To write. To read. To speak. To publish. To produce. To perform. To work with forms. As the poet Terrance Hayes asserts about his own aesthetic, “it can be limiting to put certain kinds of constraints on subject matter. But I also think it’s completely liberating to put other kinds of restraints on the form, so there’s sort of that tension—if I’m going to make any boxes for myself it’s going to be around the form and not around what’s inside the form.” (this issue, 172) Without getting mired in the form/content conundrum, I suggest many African American poets just might have experience with the dangers of making assumptions based on an exterior form (say, for instance, physical appearance) as revealing aspects of an individual’s interior motivations (say, for instance, potential behavior). Blacks’ experiences with racial profiling by police have led to this dilemma’s coinage in terms such as DWB—“driving while black;” I propose that its literary, if not literal, corollary, WWB—“writing while black” is also an insidious form of racial profiling by readers, editors, and publishers. The price of the ticket for trafficking in strategies that chain-link a poet’s race to her subject matter without fully considering her formal or formally innovative approach is high. It can lead to false divisions, interpretations, and identifications of the artistic arc, ambitions, and achievements of contemporary black poets.

Instead of writing poems that lift every line and sing with unassailable
certainty, “black is…black ain’t,” instead of constantly declaring, “I’m an African American and this is what it means to be an African American,” instead of articulating a single black poetic voice, emerging and established poets have created a kaleidoscopic poetics by employing a complex and colorful variety of literary forms, themes, and styles. As the poetics scholar Keith Leonard affirms, “the triumph of the African American formalist poetic tradition is the fact that African American poets from slavery to Civil Rights did indeed resolve the opposition of [the] binary logic of race politics in their best poems by combining the aesthetic power and social validity of traditional formalist artistry with the complexities of African American experience, culture, and heritage.” (Leonard, 3–4) Since the Civil Rights era, poets such as Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson, Yusef Komuyakaa, Wanda Coleman, and Cornelius Eady have continued the tradition of formalist excellence, writing finessed sonnets, syllabics and sestinas, as well as fine-tuned tercets, terza-rima, and triolets. The contours of formal innovation and graphic experimentation have also been expanded by artists such as C.S. Giscome, Ed Roberson, Harryette Mullen, Ronaldo Wilson and Dawn Lundy Martin. In her prose poem suite, “Negrotizing in Five or How to Write a Black Poem,” for instance, Martin inscribes the embodied and intangible interstice between race, reproduction and poetic form. She announces in the first sequence: “One. Formlessness./ One enters an unforgiving, inchoate world. No mold to make, fossilizing… Some castigating black marks condition the body, soften the skin, open into sepulcher. But the body will not be buried there. It will put down a thing on a page.” (Lundy, 11) Other poets’ adept manipulations of form lift lines and lyrics from the page into visual or oral performance. Poets with divergent aesthetic and performance sensibilities such as Carl Phillips and Patricia Smith illustrate how even the same metrical choice, like trochaic meter, can run very different routes. Phillips’ sophisticated use of trochees harnesses this galloping meter’s sense of abandon to meditate on the body’s hunger and the tethers of love, the desires of the flesh, and the fleshing out of the word through subtle shifts in syntax and punctuation. His high lyrics shape stunning semantic and erotic possibilities. While Smith’s strong and savvy fashioning of poems completely in trochaic meter demonstrates in print and performance how well the trochee’s accentual-syllabic lilt accommodates the skip, slang, and prepubescent rhymes of girls jumping double-dutch. Her disciplined use of trochaic form reveals a skilled and seasoned poet at work.

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The base, the beat, and the groove booming through funk, rap, and hip-hop music has also influenced the forms of scripted and sonic performance by current artisans of the spoken word such as Saul Williams, Carl Hancock Rux, Duriel Harris and Crystal Williams. Yet this has not meant that poets have abandoned jazz or blues as sources for poetic inspiration. Across generations, poets such as Al Young, Jayne Cortez, Major Jackson, and Linda Susan Jackson have trumpeted different genres of jazz vocalists and instrumentalists through their own verse suites, idioms and individual riffs. Where Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Alvin Aubert, and Shirley Anne Williams unleashed the power of the blues as music, iconography, and an enduring indigenous poetic form on 20th century readers, in the 21st century, contemporary African American poets as stylistically varied and accomplished as Sterling Plump, Harryette Mullen, Tyhemba Jess, and Honorée Jeffers have taken the blues, its pain-tinged whines and pleasure-teased moans, and played its changes. In Jeffers’ “Muse, a Lady Cautioning,” the blues form informs the cultural frames of race and gender; the blues muse croons her cautions through a channel of rich metaphors. She sings, “She’s aware—yeah, I’m going to kiss some man’s sugared fist tonight.” Jeffers’ “tableau” of Billie Holiday’s vocal “horn blossoming into cadenza…hollers way down dirt roads.” Yet it is not gravelly roads, but shapely little rooms, stanzas, that bring such terrible beauty into scenic view; taut quatrains retune the (vocal) chords bruised by one too many “predictable fifths” of cognac coating the musician’s dark throat. (Jeffers, 3–5) Nor have these and other poets taken the blues and gone down the disappointing path of cultural dilution, as Hughes bemoaned in earlier times. Rather, black poets have transformed the blues through an enthusiastic embrace of multi-ethnic cultural hybridity, churning out blues ghazals, blues villanelles, and blues sonnets with lyrical sensitivity and technical agility.

Still, work within the current crop of poets warns readers against the too-convenient correlation between black poetry and blues poetics, with good measure. The itinerant poems’ speakers in Thomas Sayers Ellis’ grandly geographic The Maverick Room, for instance, travel from Northwest quadrant to Southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C. His evocative and precise quatrains are not quarantined in the District’s Blues Alley; rather, they break out the percussive pulse of “Go-Go” music till “The Break of Dawn” at “The Black Hole and block parties/ In hard-to-find-inner-city neighborhoods.” Ellis’ “family discussion of percussion” in persona poems such as “Cowbell” put the “tambourine, vibra-slap, ratchet” on display; metallic pings and rings are “what gets heard” as “a prayer above crowd noise and soul.” (Ellis, 52) In an arresting counter-example, Jacqueline Jones LaMon’s elegant Gravity, U.S.A highlights what does not get heard on various sonic frequencies. In the opening poem, the speaker declares, “I cannot hear you/ You are speaking/ to my bad ear,/ my right side” where “a hushed mumbling,/ the refined titter of bored parishioners/ interrupts the message of light…” That light in LaMon’s powerful poetic lexicon beams through the fire of soul and R&B balladeer Chaka Khan’s voice, which the poem’s speaker, absorbed by “a single kiss,/ pale green and translucent…paisley chiffon and gossamer” ignores in “Muting Chaka.” LaMon’s lyric refinement calls readers to listen to “the glorious chord of refrain” beyond the blues, to hear “a dirge for cello and voice,/ soprano lilt, and tympani” as equally instrumental to black poetics. (LaMon, 13, 39, 59)

In a different sonic and lyric register, seasoned poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Eugene Redmond have created new forms bearing both individual imprint and ethnic cultural import, such as the sonku, the bop, and the kwansaba, respectively. Weaver debuted the bop at a Cave Canem summer writing retreat for African American poets. Despite the form’s relative youth, it has blossomed in the full flowering of its adolescence through its popular circulation, and importantly, publication, in several first-book collections. Incorporating lines from song lyrics, G.E. Patterson begins his debut collection of verse, Tug, with “Green,” a bop that opens the (lyrical) heart of the “hard love” between black men. (Patterson) In contrast, a fine example of how to blues the bop is evident in Lyrae Van Clief Stefanon’s “Bop, A Haunting” in which tensions between mother and daughter haunt the poem’s speaker. She transforms the grief over amorous love described in “St. Louis Blues” into a filial mourning by using the familiar refrain: “I hate to see/ that evening sun/ go down” to evoke her parent’s passing. While Mendi Lewis Obadike hip-hops the bop in her poem “What You Are,” hooking GrandmasterFlash and the Furious Five with the refrain “roaring as the breezes blow.” (Van Clief-Stefanon, Obadike) In many cases, poets employ forms that may or may not emerge from within racial or ethnic cultural expressive modes. By doing so, they transcend the boundaries implied by racial imperatives to draw their ink only from the well of black experience.

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Nevertheless, some readers—and writers, too—still expect one’s racial identity to reign over and rein in a poem’s subject matter. As Alan Fox observes, “some people think African American poets should stick to the African American experience. Others think, no, you’ve got to be universal.” (this issue, 171) Advising black poets to embrace or eschew writing through the colored lens of racialized experience is not a new phenomenon. During the late ’60s and early ’70s when black cultural nationalism and the correspondent Black Arts movement were in full swing, the tilt “towards a black aesthetic” demonstrably influenced writers and critics. In his landmark essay, Hoyt Fuller argued that to foster “black cultural community empowerment” a black writer’s work must “reflect the special character and imperatives of the black experience.” (Fuller) In the wake of critical articulations of these aesthetic and socio-political modes and movements, more plural and expansive concepts and practices in contemporary black poetry have emerged that supplant the notion of a commonly shared singular
racial experience. Decades later, critics began categorizing creative work by artists who grew up after the civil rights era as “post-black,” “post-soul,” and even “post-race.” Considering that the current president of the United States is an African American man, the catch phrase “post-Obama” may be added to the series of periodic signposts for developments in black political, cultural, and artistic expression.

The poet Elizabeth Alexander, bestowed the honor of reading a poem at President Obama’s historic inauguration, for example, favors a poetics that subverts attempts to quantify and codify race and celebrates the elastic nature of African American identity. In the second stanza of “Today’s News” she explains:

I didn’t want to write a poem that said “blackness
is,” because we know better than anyone
that we are not one or ten or ten thousand things
Not one poem              We could count ourselves forever
and never agree on the number…
                             (Alexander, “Today’s News”)

That the search for color everywhere can be found anywhere the writer chooses to focus her gaze, is evident in veteran poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ response to being asked to define the “black experience,” in a late ’90s interview. Brooks insisted that “[t]he black experience is any experience a black person has.”(Brooks, 275) While Toi Derricotte put it this way: “Everything you write has something to do with your whole experience, if you’re white or black or whatever.” (this issue, 152)

Derricotte suggests that writers have traveled a long way from the time and place in which universality was a language, mode, form, truth or claim about writing that “had nothing to do with race,” but I am not so sure. The inadvertent implication of Fox’s observation of the opposition often placed between black experience and the universal—the fact of that constructed dichotomy—gnaws in the back of the black writer’s mind. Or at least, admittedly, this black writer’s mind. The sense that black people and black poets are somehow still not considered fully part of that category that comprises the allegedly race-neutral “universal,” and by extension, the category of the putatively race-neutral but historically racially biased “human” still endures, if in more subtle guises, in American poetics. Derricotte implies that this perceived gulf between black experiences (note the plural) and universal ones can lead to racial essentialism and exceptionalism in literary publishing. As she tells Alan Fox:

You know, [Rattle’s] doing a special section on African
American poets… In some ways, that’s good that you’re
doing that, but at some point, of course, we’re hoping
that that doesn’t happen anymore. I mean, when I was
growing up, there were special sections in books called
“Negro poetry”…as if it wasn’t the same, as if it’s a
different poetry… [W]hen I was at NYU—I graduated in
’84—a professor, when I asked why he had never read
an African American poet, said, “We don’t go down that
low.” (this issue, 151)

Derricotte’s retelling of her decades-old exchange with one of her former creative writing professors is telling. His casual dismissal of African American poetry, and the implicit claim that black poetry was beneath the purview of one pursuing mastery in the fine arts at NYU, was delivered with confidence in his ignorance of these poets’ verses and assurance that their writing was beneath him. Quoted a quarter of a century later, the unnamed professor’s commentary still reeks with the stench of racial supremacy; its musty odor has fanned through centuries of enlightenment, imperialist, and colonialist ideologies which held that the art, music, philosophy, and yes, writing derived from European cultures was “Cultured”—with an uppercase “C”—that is, reflective of intellectual and artistic refinement and ethnic cultural superiority. By contrast, not only were indigenous writing systems by Africans unacknowledged, but also Africans, and their descendants in America, were viewed as beneath the biased barriers of “Culture” and “Civilization.” As such, they were seen as incapable of yielding the fruits of such cultured civilization, unable to produce imaginative art. The division between so-called elite or “high” and popular or “low” art forms is a racial, gendered, and class-based legacy of this history.

So, too, is the tendency to associate the most authentic forms of artistic expression (e.g. spirituals, blues, hip-hop, and before its ascendance into the realm of the high, jazz) in African American culture with the vernacular, with the “low.” Vernacular, of Latin origin, “vernaculus,” meaning “indigenous,” and the meaning from which that meaning descends, my dictionary tells me, is “homeborn slave.” And if the vernacular is the language of the everyday, if it is the common speech, if it is the voice of the slave, if it is polarized against the language of the literary, if it is the foil through which formalized diction distinguishes itself, then it is no wonder that African American poetry was outside the scope of that professor’s course syllabi. From his biased perspective, reading black verse meant descending from the heights of the high brow into the depths of the low. Such history-laden logic pits the rough against the refined, the slave against the master, and, to invert the dichotomy, the seasoned professor against the young, gifted, and black MFA student.

____________

I have read or heard Toi Derricotte retell versions of what I refer to as the “we don’t go down that low” story in different venues; each time it makes the (black) writer, professor, and student of poetry within me wince. The increased visibility and variety of African American poetry today leads me to believe, I hope not naively, that no professor teaching any genre of literature would have the gall to reject all of African American poetry a priori. Yet personal and professional experience tells me that traces of bias against African American literature—indeed against literature or art by members of other historically maligned or marginalized groups—still seeps through, within, and beyond the university setting.

How many readers of Rattle, I wonder, not only host or attend a reading, purchase books by, and read African American poets, but teach their verse? How many include whole collections of African American poetry in their creative writing or literature syllabi—beyond a token week or two, or during Black History Month? How many teach in a way that both engages and transcends a specialized ethnic or racialized context? How many teach poems and books by black writers that don’t contain explicitly “ethnic content?” How many use a poem by a black writer to illustrate an adept execution of poetic craft, form, or performance technique? How many teach black poets who are virtuosos of the pantoum, the sonnet crown, or the prose poem as well as those who write fiercely formally innovative anagrammatic scat or engage in performatively accomplished poetry slams? I hope, dear readers, that many of you already do go up that high. I hope, too, as a result of the fine quality and diversity of contributions to Rattle’s tribute to African American poets, that many more of you will find fitting poems in an array of forms by writers of African American descent to read, relish, recite, and teach.

*Note: In the original version this quotation was mistakenly attributed to Paul Laurence Dunbar. The lines are actually from Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel.”

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

WORKS CITED

____________

Alexander, Elizabeth. “Today’s News,” The Venus Hottentot (Graywolf Press,           1990).
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Conversation with B. Denise Hawkins, ed., Joanne           Gabbin,The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry(University of           Virginia Press, 1999).
Derricotte, Toi. “Workshop on Racism,” Tender (University of Pittsburg Press,           1997).
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “We Wear The Mask,” ed., Joanne Braxton, The           Collected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, (University of Virginia Press,           1993).
Ellis, Thomas Sayers. “The Break of Dawn,” and “Cowbell,” The Maverick Room           (Graywolf Press, 2005).
Fuller, Hoyt. “Towards A Black Aesthetic,” The Critic 26.5 (1968).
Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (McGraw Hill, 1979).
Jeffers, Honoree. “Fast Skirt Blues,” and “Muse, A Lady Cautioning,”           Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).
LaMon, Jaqueline Jones. “Bad Ear,” “Muting Chaka,” “Calling All Grace Notes           in Pianoforte” (Quercus Review Press, 2006).
Leonard, Keith. Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet From           Slavery to Civil Rights (University Press of Virginia, 2006).
Lorde, Audre. “Coal,” Undersong: Chosen Poems Old & New (Norton, 1992).
Martin, Dawn. A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of           Georgia Press, 2007).
Morris, Traci. “Why I Won’t Wear a Tattoo,” Intermission (Soft Skull Press,           1998).
Patterson, G. E. “Green: A Bop,” Tug (Graywolf Press, 1999).
Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae. “Bop: A Haunting,” Black Swan (University of           Pittsburgh Press, 2002); see also, Mendi Lewis Obadike. “Bop: What You           Are,” Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press, 2004).

META DUEWA JONES is an Assistant Professor in English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches courses exploring formal innovation in American poetry, gender and sexuality in jazz performance, as well as visual culture and African American literary theory. Her articles, interviews and poetry have appeared in African American Review, Souls, Callaloo, American Book Review, AWP Writers Chronicle, Black Arts Quarterly, PMS: Poem-Memoir-Story, and The Ringing Ear, among others. She is co-editing, with Keith Leonard, a volume for MELUS on “Multi-Ethnic Poetics,” expected in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University as well as fellowships from the Mellon, Rockefeller, and Woodrow Wilson foundations. Her book, The Muse is Music: Jazz, Poetry and Gendered Performance, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.