Here's a segment from another essay referencing the Hong essay.
"From Jim-Crow to "Color-Blind" Poetics Race and the So-Called Avant-Garde" By Dorothy Wang
"Except for a few lone voices in the past few decades (Mullen, Amiri Baraka, and John Yau immediately come to mind)—voices that were either ignored or shot down—very few poets and virtually no critics dared to speak explicitly about the exclusions, tokenism, and double standards used to judge poems by writers of color in the “avant” world. Poems by minority poets are almost always judged on the basis of their thematic (sociological, ethnographic) content in the “traditional” or “mainstream” poetry world and rarely on their formal or aesthetic structures, properties, modes—in other words, what makes poetry poetry and not a memoir or treatise.
But the flipside of the same coin is true in the world of “innovative” poetry and poetics, where the “absence” of obvious racial identity is to be applauded—for not exhibiting the hallmarks of “bad” poetry” (read: “identity poetry” [read: "minority poetry”])— and this criterion, too, is content-based, albeit in negative form. A poem without any overt ethnic or racial markers is assumed to be racially “unmarked.” Little or no attention is paid to how poetic subjectivity, which overlaps with but is not limited to racial subjectivity, might inhere in a poem’s language and formal structures—in what is unsaid or unspoken at the level of “content” but manifested through aesthetic (poetic) means."
http://bostonreview.net/poetry/dorothy-wang-jim-crow-color-blind-poetics
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