This beautifully understated ballad of a jilted lover moves relentlessly toward its deadly conclusion. You need to listen closely to understand that a murder has occurred, because it’s not gory or passionate, but rather described with a sociopathic calm.
This version comes from A&E’s Live By Request. The song is originally off his “Pontiac” album.
This month on the Jesus in Love Blog, a resource for queer spirituality and the arts, Kittredge Cherry interviews Hunter Flournoy, a psychotherapist and shamanic healer who teaches “Erotic Body of Christ” workshops to help gay and bisexual men make a mystic, sensual connection with the divine. Here’s an excerpt. I was struck by the commonalities with Buddhism: the idea that the root of suffering is separation not only from God but from one another, and that we can attain transcendence by embracing the suffering of the world, not as self-punishment but as compassionate participation.
KC: Many LGBT people have been wounded by the false teaching that homosexuality is a sin. What message does the erotic Christ have for them?
HF: Our sexual energy is the most powerful tool we have to shatter the illusion of separation, which is what the original Christians meant by “sin.” The essential question we must ask ourselves is, am I using sex to bring myself alive, to overcome separation and incarnate the divine, or am I using it to medicate or avoid my own experience of being alive? This was the original understanding of chastity: it calls us to the highest possible relationship with our own sexual energy. All sexual experience can break down the boundaries and defenses we use to separate ourselves from each other and from God – we become one body, one being. Sex can also teach us how to give ourselves totally (kenosis) to each other, how to receive each other completely (plerosis), and how to surrender to the transfiguring power of our own erotic experience. As LGBT people, we also have an innate understanding that our erotic experience, our pleasure, desire, ecstasy, and union, can serve a purpose other than reproduction. Our erotic joy is a source of profound creativity, deep empathy, and a wild ecstasy that can take us out of who we are into a far greater sense of being.
KC: As you say, the idea of “suffering as Christ suffered” has been abused in legalistic religious systems. But gay bashing and other forms of “crucifixion” continue. How can the erotic Christ help in situations of real human suffering?
HF: There is nothing inherently spiritual or useful in suffering; it is useless to suffer as Jesus suffered. Nor did Jesus advocate cooperating with abuse and injustice. What he advocated and demonstrated – what really matters – is loving as he loved, embracing everything and everyone, including suffering, as Jesus embraced it. Instead of rejecting our suffering, trying to medicate, numb, get rid of it or distract ourselves from it, we learn how to embrace it, without indulging it or running from it. We let our suffering shatter our sense of self, our sense of control, and our need to make sense of the world. This is what the Christian mystics called katharsis. Second, our embrace transforms suffering into a searingly powerful erotic experience . . . it is like a fire that fills our whole being, a great trembling ache that breaks into the profound peace the mystics called theoria. Finally, we discover through this embrace that we are welcoming not only our own suffering, but the world’s suffering . . . we begin to experience ourselves as the world, as Christ’s body, and ultimately as God, in the mystery of theosis.
Read the whole interview here. Visit the Erotic Body of Christ website to learn more.
Continuing my reflections on the AWP 2011 literary conference last month…
Two of the most memorable panels I attended addressed issues of gender and literature. I have never had much use for the head-counting strain of liberalism that correlates diversity with simple demographics. Is there such a thing as a (or worse, THE) “female perspective” and what’s wrong with me if I don’t have it? Thus, I was happy to discover that “The Great Indoors”, Thursday’s panel on women’s under-representation in major magazines and book reviews, also took aim at our assumptions about “women’s subjects” versus “universal subjects” in literature. The panelists were Cate Marvin, Patti Horvath, Mary Cappello, and moderator Randall Mann.
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts was founded in 2009 by award-winning poets Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding women’s work as well as the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture. Their most high-profile project is “The Count”, an annual compilation of statistics comparing the percentages of men and women published in top journals like Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. The ratio is usually one-quarter to one-third women. (Even I have noticed that The Atlantic scarcely ever has women as contributors, except for the lifestyle articles about why the sexual revolution has failed.)
Marvin said that since most of the work in these journals is solicited by the editors, it’s possible they are not working hard enough to reach outside their circle of friends. Women also tend to be less proactive about sending out work. We don’t take ourselves seriously enough as professional writers.
The gender imbalance is even more pronounced in the critics’ reception of women’s work. According to VIDA’s stats, fewer than 25% of the books reviewed in the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Review of Books are by women. Since the majority of book buyers are female, why isn’t there more perceived demand for women’s books?
Horvath suggested that critics assume that typically male subject matter (e.g. physical adventures in far-off lands) is universal, more impressive and important, while typically female subject matter (relationships) is special-interest. What makes one topic male and another female? This is where essentialist feminists usually lose my vote, with their sentimental division of the world into gendered skill sets.
But instead, Horvath contended, with great wit and passion, that constraints on women’s physical safety in a patriarchal society steer us towards some topics and away from others. She recalled the time, early in her studies, when a creative writing professor told her that to be a great author, she had to hop on a boxcar and tour the country, hobo-style. Yeah, good luck with that, hope it’s a boxcar full of mace… More recently, she was walking through New York at night with a male friend who pointed out winsome architectural details that she’d never noticed. How had she, a writer, not been more observant? Because, when a woman (but not a man) is walking alone through the city at night, a large share of her attention is devoted to threat perception. She keeps her head down and moves quickly.
As someone whose lifestyle is much closer to Emily Dickinson’s than Jack Kerouac’s, I found this quite validating.
The other panel that made a big impression on me was “Don’t Call Me Mother”, Friday’s panel on women writers who were child-free by choice. For me, being at AWP was a refreshing break from the endlessly frustrating and surreal process of looking for a child to adopt. I was surrounded by women whose identity and community were not dependent on motherhood, whether or not they had children. I saw models for how a woman could still be creative and connected to past and future generations, even in a distinctly female way (if she wanted to be), but outside the family unit. This is important to me because (1) I may never succeed at having children and (2) I never, ever want to put that pressure on my imaginary future scion to be the fulfillment of my life story instead of the protagonist of his/her/hir own.
The organizers of “Don’t Call Me Mother” were pleasantly surprised at the response to this topic. At least 50 women were packed into this small and hard-to-find seminar room in the remotest corner of the hotel. Many were asking for submission guidelines for their proposed anthology, which didn’t even have a website yet. Clearly they’ve touched a nerve.
Panel moderator Ellen Placey Wadey talked about the taboo in our society against women saying they don’t want children. It’s seen as unnatural, perhaps cold-hearted, perhaps threatening to our need to believe in mother-love without regrets. Both motherhood and non-motherhood have costs. All of the women on the panel (Wadey, Miki Howald, Geeta Kothari) decided that their writing and their other interests meant more to them than parenting. There’s not enough energy to “do it all”. On the other hand, how does it impact your own aging, your sense of legacy, when you know there is no next generation to care for you?
This is the ambivalence that I, too, live with. It’s taken me several years of infertility and adoption losses–years that were also outstandingly productive for my growth as a writer–to affirm myself as good enough to be a mother notwithstanding that ambivalence (or maybe even because of it).
Panelists and participants alike expressed frustration at the frequent second-guessing of their choices. As writers, we find it insulting to be told that an important area of human experience will be beyond our understanding unless we personally live through it. But this is what child-free women often hear from doctors, relatives, or friends who are concerned that they’ll have regrets after their biological clock runs out of batteries.
Howald reported that her mother asked, “How will you know how much I love you if you don’t have children of your own?” and “Aren’t you afraid of being alone when you’re old?” However, Howald noted, we are all capable of being abandoned–children grow up and move away, disappoint their parents, die young, etc. In parenting as in writing, every decision forecloses others. We need to have faith and not fear the consequences of following the path that feels true for ourselves.
Both Howald and Kothari observed that parenthood seemed encumbering to their own mothers. Kothari read an excerpt from her nonfiction book-in-progress about her mother, a girl from a traditional Hindu family who left India at 22 to become a U.N. translator in the 1950s, thereby becoming wholly foreign to her family’s culture of early marriage and housewifery. Kothari’s parents’ marriage was difficult, and she wrote about feeling guilty for trapping her mother in a situation she would have left if not for the children.
I can’t imagine a panel like this about non-fatherhood by choice. For these women, and probably many others, the decision against children is not entirely about the children themselves, but about rejecting this role of “mother” which still entails unequal sacrifices based on gender.
Without children to transmit our stories, we have to get creative about our legacy. Who will know or care about the unique memories embedded in the objects we leave behind? Inspired by Sotheby’s auction of Jackie O’s possessions, Wadey is creating an auction of her own: Contact her, get to know her, explain why you’re the right person to have her grandmother’s embroidered tea towels (for example), and she’ll leave them to you in her will. She brought a few of her legacy objects to the reading, including the tea towels, which were decorated with girls doing chores and the names of the days of the week (though a couple of days were missing). The presentation was memorable, amusing, and somewhat sad, at least to me, however much the panel was about putting a bold face on childlessness.
That said…someone who collects Barbies is going to be very happy when I die. (Other people will be happy for other reasons.)
Wadey also read poetry by Jan Beatty , who was scheduled to be on the panel but couldn’t make it. Beatty’s powerful, raw poems delved into the traumas of being an adoptee–the unwanted result of a one-night stand–and losing her uterus to cancer. In place of the power to create new life, her work finds a darker power, the strength of a woman who has survived rejection and incompleteness and lives with those wounds. We are indeed all vulnerable to aging, death, and abandonment, but childless women have to face the truth sooner and
with fewer illusions–which is also the writer’s prophetic burden. As Beatty wrote, “What is a woman without a uterus?…She is the night coming into view.”
Read more reflections on this theme on the Wunderkammer Poetry blog, where Wadey curated a week of “Don’t Call Me Mother” essays in 2009.
One of my favorite panels at this year’s AWP conference featured the novelist Wesley Stace , also known as singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, talking about storytelling in music. Ballads and poems provide essential clues to the mystery in his excellent first novel, the comic melodrama Misfortune, and also feature in his just-released book, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer.
Stace praised the ballad form as a deceptively simple yet profound form that gets right to the crisis point in a character’s history. Though retribution is usually swift and inevitable, there’s rarely any moralizing about the characters’ crimes, an open-endedness that allows us to choose how deeply we identify with the story.
I thought of his analysis when I heard these lines toward the end of the classic murder ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” performed here by Jimmie Rodgers: “This story has no moral, this story has no end, this story just goes to show that there ain’t no good in men.”
The poet K. Silem Mohammad, who blogs at Lime Tree and is credited/blamed for co-inventing the absurdist experimental poetry movement Flarf, has been writing a series of deliciously nonsensical “Sonnagrams” that are anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I discovered this project in the latest issue of Fence. Here’s a sample from Boo Journal:
OMG, Dog Pee!
Don’t screw around with darkling yellow finches:
Their feathers harbor deadly poison quills,
There’s bird flu in their tiny talons’ pinches,
And bad saliva dribbles from their bills.
If you escape the Scylla of their antlers,
As well as the Charybdis of their hooves,
You yet must dodge the anti-guy Dismantlers,
That whup the ass of every dude that moves:
We’re talking fifty-five-foot-tall vaginas,
With wicked fangs and terrible disdain
For evil men in both the Carolinas
Who diss their furry magnitude in vain.
Can any bums pump gum at “Champ” le Beau?
De dee, de dee, de dee, de dee, de doe.
———
[Sonnet 153 (“Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep”)]
Read more at Wag’s Revue and Salt Hill Journal.
Winning Writers subscriber Martin Steele has kindly permitted me to reprint this piece, which won a Very Highly Commended award in the 2010 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest. (Winning Writers assists with entry handling and promotion for this contest; read the latest winners here.) Born in South Africa and currently a resident of Florida, Martin is a prolific author of poetry and flash fiction characterized by lush imagery and surreal plot twists. “The Girls in the Tree” especially appealed to me because I’m writing a novel-in-progress about a fashion photographer, who would have loved to take part in the scene below.
The Girls in the Tree
The tree that the girls are on is bare because all the bark has been eaten by the elephants.
The crystal orange rays splice the painful hanging branches. Each girl a blushing pink purple petal.
The lithe soft figures blend with the orange and paleness of the earth below.
The watch clicks the minutes on the resting ‘roused sun. The colors whispers secrets onto my eyelids. My canvas tent breathes heavy morning dew. The blended apricot starkness strikes the lens of my camera like an orphaned hyacinth. The proud acacia silhouette kisses the brightening sky. Now at six in the morning the air is an aphrodisiac and my loins stirs to the low sounds of jungle beasts far, far away.
Today I will use all my male skills like a helpful circus trainer, my leica my assistant. Photographing tabloid pieces for fashion shoots is a task as trying as like feeding lions with bare hands.
The girls, the models for the lingerie shoot arrived last night. They will endure 6 hours of patient pain in the acacia tree.
My eye is on the acacia tree I have chosen on this savannah plain gradually maturing to azure. The umbrella shaped top will help with snippets of shade as will the few scant leaves left uneaten. Now as the orange gradually fades to yellow the girls in the branches of the trees smile, squirm, stretch and loll as my shutter heats up from ten hundred frames.
I have chosen this tree with bare bark eaten by elephants.
“What are those girls doing next to the beautiful elephants?”
My elephant returns soon to face his tree. The thick, broad pillar like legs and high grey back reach near to the intersection of bare tree trunk and branches stretching like Lycra. The massive head is beautiful and lotus like ears twist and fan the air. Hooflike nails are not manicured as the girls’ and the grey skin loose and lightly furrowed like chapped hands is tough and reads like a symbol of wisdom. He will never forget this scene ever as he saunters from soft wet grasses.
The skin is hairless and his slender tail is like a tuft of hair on a rabbit’s bottom.
The skin of the girls is pink and tight and soft imaging against purple panties and pink peignoirs. The faces are alive with the passion of posing. As the elephant lifts his trunk to the umbrella topped tree he recognizes a faint sweet fragrance. and will soon emit a trumpet noise when blowing through his nostrils. The girls sigh to Mozart and Chopin as the music is dreamed into their ears.
The sky has almost lost its orangeness. My elephant looks up to the nest of girls enhancing the form of branch shapes, stretches his trunk as in a goodbye salute then ambles off to loneliness and no home in particular.
My shooting is over. The girls are assisted down from the now lonely acacia.
There are smiles and excitement in the red of their cheeks and the silent sighs of their blushes. The bare skins tighten on their model figures as the hazy elephant shadow and his loose grey skin hushes Westwards.
The photos are eye piercing. I am excited.
“Mixing model beauty with African beast is a step in a young life’s excitement. There is even blood on the Polaroid.”
Everything is now packed away. The girls are dressed in jeans and sweaters and bright shirts. The pink foundation wear shows through the garment transparency.
“The last thing left is the beauty of women.”
Readers of this blog have enjoyed the poetry and cultural commentary of my prison pen pal “Conway”, whose distinctive artwork graces my chapbook covers. Today I’d like to share an excerpt from my correspondence with another incarcerated writer, “Jon”, a young man who’s on death row in California for an alleged homicide during a robbery. Jon’s pencil drawings of angels, flowers and holiday scenes are good enough for a Hallmark card. He writes fantasy and sci-fi fiction and devotional poetry.
I’ve been trying to send him a copy of Freddy Fonseca’s anthology This Enduring Gift: A Flowering of Fairfield Poetry, which prison officials keep bouncing back because of some undisclosed postal violation. Meanwhile, Freddy emailed me this article from the Boston Globe: “Escape route: The surprising potential of a prison library“, by Avi Steinberg, author of Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian. Steinberg attests to the power of the prison library as a community space where inmates learn to become citizens:
…The problem with the public discussion about libraries in prison is that it’s the wrong discussion. For over a century now, the debate has centered on reading — on which books should, or more often should not, be included on the prison library’s shelves; which books are “harmful” or “helpful”; whether reading is a privilege or a right. In 1867, Wines argued that a book like “Robinson Crusoe” — at the time, the only secular novel permitted in prison — served the cause of criminal rehabilitation. Others fervently disagreed.
But the issue of reading is only one dimension of the question, and not necessarily the salient one. The crucial point of a prison library may not be its book catalog: The point is that it is a library.
The library is a shared public space, a hub, where people spend significant portions of their time, often daily. It is a place inmates work and, in some important ways, live. It is more purposeful and educational than a recreational yard, less formal than a classroom. The prison library gives inmates an organic way to connect to the world, to each other, to themselves as citizens. It’s a small democratic institution set deep within a prison, one they can choose to join.
This is no small matter. The vast majority of prison inmates will eventually be released back into the free world, back into the community. What happens to them once they are out is the critical piece of the corrections puzzle. It doesn’t take an expert to know that a person who lands in prison, a person often already on the margins of society, will grow further isolated from the norms and routines of society while in prison. And yet, at the very same time, and in this very same building, many inmates — often for the first time in their lives — are also quietly becoming enmeshed in an important social institution….
…One of our regular visitors was a twentysomething woman whose 3-year-old daughter was living with a relative during her prison sentence. I’d first lured this inmate to the library by screening new release movie features. After a while, she was in the library at every opportunity, reading books and magazines and watching movies. She was, in other words, an average prison library visitor: a person who had stumbled in, almost by accident, but who ended up quietly but routinely making use of the library’s resources.
When her sentence was drawing to a close, she told me that she was going to miss using the prison library. I replied with the good news: Libraries also exist outside of prison! The idea seemed to surprise her (which surprised me). In her experience, a library, as an institution, was something one encountered in prison. She’d never set foot in a library in the free world.
She left prison, and the library, excited to give it a try. And, she said, she would do for her daughter what had never been done for her: She would bring the child to the public library every week. Just as a prison ID card, stamped with her mug shot, symbolized her civic isolation, I like to think of her public library card as a powerful token of membership back in society. After hundreds of hours logged in the prison’s library, the thought of using a public library now seemed not only plausible to her, but second nature. After her time in prison it was the thought of not using a library that troubled her.
People tend to see a prison as a monolithic institution, a place solely dedicated to locking criminals up. But many inmates experience prison in a more dynamic way, as a clash between institutions. And what I experienced every day was that, in the collision between the institution of prison and the institution-within-the-institution, the library, something constructive and potentially long-lasting was being formed.
Prison libraries aren’t miracle factories. The day-to-day was often far from inspiring. Glossy magazines and mindless movies were, for many, the main attraction. Pimp memoirs were among the most frequently requested books. And yet, even an inmate motivated by nothing more than a desire to watch “The Incredible Hulk” in the back room of the library was much more likely to come across something educational — a book, a program, a mentor — once he entered the library space. Just as important, this inmate was becoming a loyal patron of the library, something he could carry with him to the outside world, and perhaps pass on to his children.
…
I mailed Jon a printout of this article, and his reply in his Jan. 31 letter was so eloquent that I am sharing it below, unedited (spelling and all):
“Litrature of all sorts is probibly the most important thing an incarcerated person can get their hands upon. When a person is in a cell, they’ve plenty of time to think and to reflect. Reading does a number of things for people, for me, concidering all the various materials I’ve read, including classic novels, fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, psychology, numerology, spanish, history, and spiritual, although spiritual, the bible changes lives, my own included.
“The classic litrature is where my ‘self’ education begain in here. Reading these books gave room for self reflection, and also caused me to love reading. Reading can turn some of the most negative of people into patriots, and highly educated (self educated) members of society. I’ve seen it.
“I myself was a very terrible and lost soul when I came into jail. Yet over the years, and throughout books, such as Les Miserabes, A tale of two citys, Frankenstien, the call of the wild, white fang, the phantom of the opera, the three musketeers (and all Dumas’ other books), even Sherlock Holmes, to kill a mockingbird, just to name a few. Throughout books like these, I’ve learned of virtues, such as humor, honer, artistry, and even in many case what is right and what is wrong. Yet most of all I’ve learned of redemption.
“If books such as Hugo and Dickens wrote were readily available, I believe, no, I know that many criminals with reflection from reading would rehabilitate. For anyone to say that a prison library is of doubtful influence, I would say they are ignorant. The problem is a limited library. I truly know that if more state and county prison and jail finances were spent giving inmates access to literature, there would be less repeat offenders.”
****
Moved by Jon’s message? Donate to Books to Prisoners today.
This is the first in a series of posts about the highlights of my trip to the AWP writers’ conference in Washington, DC this month.
Race relations proved to be a recurring theme in several events I attended, addressed by writers whose strategies ranged from confrontation to elegy to satire. The juxtaposition of these diverse and occasionally discordant approaches continues to make me ponder how we can speak about race in ways that are both skillful and honest, and the reasons we avoid doing so.
Avoiding speaking about race, of course, is a privilege mainly possessed by white people. I have the option, which I usually exercise, to follow the old adage that “It is better to say nothing and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt.” So I am stating up-front that everything I say after this paragraph is unavoidably somewhat tainted by the defensiveness and lack of knowledge that are my heritage as a white American.
Okay, now on to blaming other people…
I am going to venture to say that one factor in white people’s avoidance of race talk is the feeling that we’ll be condemned for speaking out of our experience of whiteness, even if we’re doing so in order to identify and transcend areas of prejudice. We can’t move beyond our racism-influenced misconceptions until we bring them to light and ask for a critique of their deficiencies. However, if the mere act of disclosing those views exposes us to condemnation, the dialogue ends before it began.
Any safe dialogue depends on meeting people where they are. Since racial inequality is a structural problem that shapes every individual’s consciousness whether they want it to or not, I feel that the full force of your justified anger should not be leveled at the white individual who happens to be in front of you, who didn’t choose this situation either.
I wish there was a word other than “racist” that could express the distinction between intentional animus toward nonwhites, and attitudes formed by white privilege that we have the intention to correct but need help achieving the insight. Something like the difference between homophobia and heterosexism. I am pretty sure I’ve never been homophobic, but until I started writing about gay characters and became involved in activism, I was blind to many ways in which my cultural upbringing assumed the normalness of heterosexuality and erased alternative identities. With respect to transpeople, I probably have a little bit of both. I didn’t know any transpeople until a couple of years ago, and so I believed most of the media stereotypes and didn’t take offense at the sensationalized and mocking way they were portrayed. My intentions are in the process of correcting my gut reactions. I think it’s been crucial that folks in the trans community have been really patient with me and welcomed my efforts to educate myself as an ally.
So what does this have to do with AWP?
Each night of the conference, several famous authors were scheduled to give readings. On Friday, we went to the poetry reading by Claudia Rankine and Charles Wright. This was a weird pairing in itself, as Rankine is a passionate, political, experimental African-American writer, and Wright turned out to be a genial old Southern white fellow who read meandering Buddhist poems about nature and death.
Instead of poetry, though, Rankine read an essay, or maybe more of a speech, condemning the racism she found in the Tony Hoagland poem “The Change“. She then read Hoagland’s response to her initial complaint to him, and her reaction to that response.
Regardless of its merits, and it did have some, the format of this absentee dialogue made me uncomfortable. It felt like our audience of several hundred people was being enlisted in an attack on someone who was not there to respond. Rankine’s anger, which drew its force and righteousness from the collective history of racial oppression, was being brought to bear almost entirely on an individual.
To quote another cliche, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” It’s important, when doing justice work, not to get tunnel vision–seeing the person in front of you only as the representative of the one area in which she is more privileged than you. Your audience might include trauma survivors and people who were triangulated into family conflicts. I came for a poetry reading, not to hear Mommy tell me why I should hate Daddy.
That said, I agree with Rankine that Hoagland’s poem has real problems. In it, the white narrator (presumably male, presumably middle-aged because he’s old enough to remember a time before integrated tennis) reports feeling discomfort and resentment while he watches a black American tennis player (obviously based on Venus Williams) soundly defeat a white European. With resigned, self-mocking humor, he concludes that we’ve entered a new era where his “tribe” can no longer expect to be on top. He knows he should feel good about this but a more primal part of him really doesn’t.
Rankine focused her objections on the racial stereotypes in his description of “Vondella Aphrodite”, the aggressive “big black girl” with “complicated hair” and “Zulu bangles”. She was also, I think, generally offended by the idea that someone in Hoagland’s/the narrator’s position of white privilege would dare to feel sorry for himself, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way. She mocked the naivete of thinking that white privilege was a thing of the past, just because a black athlete won a tournament.
I think Hoagland’s poem stands or falls based on whether there’s a separation between author and narrator. That is, is he reporting these views or also advocating them? Rankine insisted on assuming the latter, despite Hoagland’s denial in his letter to her. Because of her strong feelings, she deprived us of a more valuable discussion about poetic craft and authorial intent.
Option one: This is a persona poem about feelings the typical white Americans might have but not wish to admit. By writing the poem, Hoagland is showing that he knows more than the narrator. He’s exaggerating their distorted thinking, to the point of humorous absurdity, so that we as readers can learn something about American race relations that’s obscured by white liberal platitudes–and even have a painful shock of recognition as we admit to these feelings ourselves. (In his letter to Rankine, Hoagland implied that this was his intent.)
Option two: Hoagland shares the narrator’s feelings, and is appointing himself the mouthpiece of other white people who have the same views. In this 2005 article from the Brandeis University student newspaper, interviewing him after a reading of “The Change”, Hoagland picks option two:
…His most controversial poem, “The Change,” was written around the time when Venus Williams first appeared in tennis matches.
“I knew something important had happened, though no one knew it yet,” Hoagland said. He expressed contempt for what he described as the rugged and base way that an African-American came out on top of a white competitor. Hoagland said very few publishers had been willing to associate themselves with this politically incorrect work, but he feels that it is important to always be honest, and likes his poems to upset people.
“I was giving a voice to America’s dirty secret,” said Hoagland. “I like to shock some people.”
In my opinion, “The Change” is not a very good poem because you can’t tell whether he is critiquing or endorsing racism. Since the subject of the poem is race relations, this is a pretty big flaw.
I’m not all that interested in whether Hoagland is personally a racist. More pertinent to me, and the rest of the writers in the audience, is the craft question: how do we honestly portray stereotyped thinking without perpetuating it? How can we surround these painful subjects with an atmosphere of compassion and understanding, so that everyone can speak from the place of their truth and yet be open to change?
On Saturday night, Nick Demske jumped into this arena with two big white feet. Demske is a new addition to the Fence Books community of gutsy experimental poets who make sculptures both monstrous and humorous out of the ever-expanding junkpile of popular culture. Poets like Demske embrace and amplify the degradation of our common language in order to triumph over it by nonetheless achieving a distinctive voice, while remaining honest about how quickly that voice will be assimilated and obliterated by the bit-stream.
Or so I’d like to believe, because the risk that mimicry will overtake critique is the same as in Hoagland’s poetry, though Demske’s work is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the older poet’s lack of self-consciousness.
I first discovered Demske through his Otis Henry poems, which satirically apply the braggadocio of gangsta rap to the persona of the poet. The character of Otis Henry is just barely saved from ridiculousness by the tinge of aggression in these tall tales. He’s not just a nerdy poet pretending to be ghetto. He might actually fuck you up, and you might even enjoy it, because through him, you become part of the legend.
At the Fence reading on Saturday, held at The Big Hunt bar in Dupont Circle, Demske read some work from his manuscript-in-progress, Starfucker, which he said was inspired by the famous gangsta rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a/k/a Big Baby Jesus. Some poems from this book are available online at Sawbuck Poems and Weird Deer , but I haven’t been able to find the one he read that night, which included the repeated shout-out “Niggaz!”
Now, black rappers often use the N-word the same way some gays will use “queer” within their own group, or teen girls will greet each other with “What’s up, bitches?” — as a form of group bonding that also gives the finger to the outside world that would shame them for their identity. Obviously, it’s more problematic when a white poet uses the word, and Demske knows this. To me, he seems to be asserting that gangsta-rap language has crossed over into white culture so much that it has become part of his heritage too, and that this is all the more reason to bring it into the realm of artistic dialogue and critique. Is the popularity of gangsta rap among white middle-American teens a step toward multicultural harmony, or a cover for a new kind of offensive stereotyping, or both? Unlike Hoagland’s narrator in “The Change”, Demske’s not taking the token success of African-Americans in entertainment as proof that we no longer need to worry about racism.
I’m still not sure whether Demske always stays on the right side of the line he’s walking. Merely putting an offensive phrase up-front in a difficult poem doesn’t by itself guarantee that readers will think about it, instead of absorbing the shock value and reading on. When he says in “As Far Away”, a poem from his self-titled collection from Fence, “The Holocaust never happened. Better luck next time,” for whose benefit is he tossing those explosive words around? Based on the context, I trust that he has a humane point to make, maybe something about the muting of human anguish and anger by the data overload that constantly surrounds us. “When you’re finished recording, please hang up and try again,” says the mechanical voice in this poem, unmoved by the most shocking thing he can say to it.
If we’re not offended by this poem, does that mean we’re also dulled and mechanized, no longer fully human? How long can this strategy work to recall us to ourselves, before we become further desensitized?
On Demske’s blog this week, he’s posted an open letter from Claudia Rankine, who’s inviting the poetry community to discuss how we write or don’t write about race. Her questions are excellent and difficult. Let the dialogue continue!
Here are some more reactions to Rankine’s presentation from around the poetry blogosphere:
J’s Theater
Whose Shoes Are These Anyway?
Nothing to Say & Saying It (John Gallaher’s blog; comments section is especially interesting)
Joseph Patrick Wood
My flash fiction piece “Same Love Same Rights” is now online in Issue #6 of Newport Review. It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at my fascination with a certain type of gay male subculture.
Here’s the opener:
Do you think people love the truth? Do you think the truth builds houses? The man with the gray mustache was eating Gorgonzola cheese on toast points while he told the young woman about his travels in Africa, Cambodia and Vietnam.
–People are more alike than they are different, he said. They all want to talk to us, even though we are American. We are only a small part of their bad history. The young woman looked for something on the table that would not fall apart when she bit into it. Not the stuffed tomatoes, not the crab cakes. A plain piece of cheese?
–They were digging tunnels to undermine the French, long before we showed up, he said. Dusk was falling outside the picture window screened by ferns.
–Be sure to tour the garden before you go, said a short wrinkled woman in a tie-dyed gown. Frank and George are so proud of their garden.
–And this is my wife, said the man with the gray mustache. The young woman complimented the wife’s dress, which was purple with starbursts like the red-hearted coleus leaves along the cobbled path to the house. Great, she thought, the only two straight couples at this party and we’re talking to each other.
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