I know Dorothy - and will be meeting with her on Friday.
I agree with Tim's reservations about the second paragraph.
On a historical note: I co-edited a poetry magazine through the 1970s, which might be called 'avant garde'. We had a consciously anti-sexist, anti-racist editorial policy. In the early part of this period, I was in touch with the Black Writers Association in London, and we solicited work from Linton Kwesi Johnson (who replied that he was giving up poetry). As a result, his work didn't appear in the magazine, but not because we were excluding it.
From a different angle, the work of other poets we published was 'colour blind' in so far as we often had no idea of the ethnicity of people we approached - and certainly not of people who submitted work. This was particularly the case with US poets: Rae Armantrout, Emanuel Ro ...
Ro's 'even the title changes' has plenty of 'identity markers'. It begins:
when I get a place/I want the walls to move/with the energy of bisons/and prairie spasms of buffaloes
but the identity being marked is US rather than UK, and the different identity was part of the attraction.
Robert
-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Lace
Sent: 25 August 2015 13:30
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde" by Cathy Park Hong
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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