American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  Like Perez, Barbara Jane Reyes combines autobiographical writing, documentary pastiche, and decolonial practice. As in Hong and Perez, moreover, Reyes’s multiple languages “decenter” English, as her poetics statement “To Decenter English” announces. With eight short poems included in her selection here, Reyes’s collection Poeta en San Francisco established her singular version of a Pinay poetics. The title’s allusion to Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York simultaneously orients and misdirects the reader. Consider these lines from “[ave maria],” included in this volume, which rewrite the Catholic prayer:

  our lady of unbroken hymen

  preteen vessel of god’s seed,

  your uterus is a blessed receptacle.

  our lady of neon strip joints

  our lady of blowjobs in kerouac alley

  our lady of tricked out street kids, pray for us

  blessed mother of cholo tattoos

  you are the tightest homegirl

  our lady of filas and lipliner

  our lady of viernes santo procession

  our lady of garbage-sifting toothless men

  our lady of urban renewal’s blight

  pray for us sinners

  ipanalangin n’yo kaming makasalanan

  now and at the hour

  ngayon at kung

  of our death

  kami ay mamamatay

  Poeta en San Francisco “presents various forms of opacity,” Martin Joseph Ponce writes in “Acts of Poetry in Troubled Times: Barbara Jane Reyes’s Anticolonial Feminist Voicings,” with “passages whose syntactical deformations confound sense making and resemble the ‘surrealism’ of the book’s predecessor.” But Reyes’s Poeta is expressly feminist, anticolonial, polyphonic, and etymological. The presence of Spanish, Tagalog, and Baybayin, with “homophonic translations that are comprehensible only to those literate in the precolonial script,” offers what Ponce calls a cartographic feminist critique of the hypersexualization of Asian women in the United States.

  Sex and power are likewise central to Roberto Tejada’s poetics, but he is expressly interested in the explosive collisions of conquest and erotic desire. Tejada’s “rhizomatic digressions” and “incongruous grafts of diction,” David Colón writes in “Marginal Erotics: Roberto Tejada’s Sexiness,” ultimately turn back “to the body, to tactility—and to sex.” Colón calls these maneuvers a “marginal erotics,” because they always hover beyond rational comprehension and thus beyond any simple calculus of either cause and effect or origin and destination. Tejada’s three full-length collections draw on the lush pictorial language of visual art—photography, primarily, though also painting, film, and installation art—to produce an erotic poetics that is urgent, slippery, violent, libidinal, ornate (even neobaroque), compact, disjunctive, indulgent, and mimetic. In his poetics statement, “The Acoustic Uncanny,” Tejada theorizes a triad of body-world-poem:

  I live between my body and its circumstance, between molecular and political contingencies, between advantage and constraint, between indwelling and social legibility, between borderland self-possession and hemispheric bricolage, between sexed assertions and enacted styles that can make culture in the plural plausible by rehearsing nearness—fantasmatic and physical—in mediated or analog space. Emerging therein is a form of life I want a poem to inhabit in an empathic tense, a social engagement that, belated, will have occurred only by measure of a poem’s audible afterlife.

  A curator, art historian, and translator, Tejada dramatizes, in his poems included here, how this “form of life” reverberates emphatically between the global scale and the embodied individual psyche.

  Edwin Torres makes for a fitting final chapter, and not only because he is the oldest of these fourteen poets. Taken together, Torres’s shape-shifting Nuyorican experimentation, precarious relationship to the poetry business, and approbation from the avant-garde exemplify the unpredictable contingencies among racial-ethnic identity, political commitments, and lyric, conceptual, performance-based, and language-oriented writing. In short, his work facilitates new ways of understanding poetry as social engagement, as Urayoán Noel suggests in his essay “The Us Is Porous: Edwin Torres in Other Words.” “Given all the recent debates about conceptual poetics and identity politics,” Noel writes, “what would happen if we were to take (class-conscious, cross-cultural, multilingual) poetics such as Torres’s as points of departure?” Torres’s poetics statement “Bodycatch/Mindtrap: No Edge But In Things” shows both the value and the challenge of setting such a baseline. There, Torres enacts his interest in the perpetual “edge” of “becoming” and his rejection of essentialisms and stasis. The poem “The Theorist Has No Samba!,” which is included here, launches a playful mock-manifesto invested in this process, further obscuring direct routes to social critique:

  I propose a New Instantism. Take spontaneousness out of the ether and smack it into the throes of the wild screaming bastard maggot that IS poetry! I propose a New NEWness, where we refuse to comply by the aged fumblings of mere MEANING and instead descend into mere HEARING!

  Torres’s poetics statement and Noel’s essay each focus on porosity—between languages, cultures, “receiver and messenger,” page and stage, and sound and sense. For Noel, Torres’s “verbivocovisual poetics,” a term he borrows from the Brazilian concrete poets, cannot be reduced to a formula, movement, or camp, in part because Torres’s writing incorporates an astounding range of influences, from the Russian futurists to the romantic lyric. Above all, Torres’s poetry demonstrates the restless innovation shared by each of the poets in this volume, and which is necessary for poets of social engagement not only “to ‘attend’ to the current moment,” but “to be another moment.”54

  This volume’s poets all write poetry of social engagement, though each finds different modes and forms for entering the fray. Glissant begins the first section of Poetics of Relation, aptly titled “Approaches,” with an epigram that is characteristically direct and enigmatic: “One way ashore, a thousand channels.”55 So, too, these fourteen poets take a thousand channels onto the North American shore, powered by poetic activity of impressive breadth and depth. Once ashore, in the fractured, contentious American polis, their writings critique and fail, innovate and transform, make a mess and tidy up. They channel, echo, and invent the range of voices from diasporas, undercommons, boomtowns, abandoned lots, and street corners; from garbage dumps, rallies, prisons, classrooms, bars, and factories; from all the places where voices ring and are muffled and rise, alone and together, again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their generous and insightful comments on this introduction, I would like to thank Daniel Borzutzky, Rachel Galvin, Brian Glavey, Urayoán Noel, and the two anonymous reviewers.

  NOTES

  1. Lytle Shaw, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013).

  2. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, eds., Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012). Hereafter cited in the text as Poetics Across North America.

  3. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “The Program Era and Mainly White Room,” LA Review of Books, September 20, 2015.

  4. This critique of conceptual poetry centers on the appropriative practices of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. See, for example, Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). In the debate surrounding Place’s Gone with the Wind performance, Michael Derrick Hudson’s use of yellow-face, Goldsmith’s appropriation of Michael Brown’s autopsy report, and Marjorie Perloff’s defense of Goldsmith and her denouncement of Brown’s humanity, there are many useful sources. Most authoritatively, see Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 420–23. “Where else could conceptual poets, in one fell stoop,” Young
asks, “take up themes of ownership, theft, and death, except through the black body?” (423). Also see Chris Chen and Tim Kreiner, “Free Speech, Minstrelsy, and the Avant-Garde,” LA Review of Books, December 10, 2015; Jen Hofer, “If You Hear Something Say Something, Or if You’re Not at the Table You’re on the Menu,” Entropy, December 18, 2015; Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Lana Turner 7 (2014); Fred Moten, “On Marjorie Perloff,” Entropy, December 28, 2015; Brian Kim Stefans, “Open Letter to the New Yorker,” Free Space Comix (blog), October 4, 2015; and “After Yi-Fen Chou: 19 Writers Respond to Michael Derrick Hudson’s Yellowface,” The Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, September 15, 2015.

  5. See Jaswinder Bolina, “Color Coded: On the Poetics of Donald Trump, the Progress of Poetry, and Reverse Racism,” Poetry Foundation, May 11, 2016; and Michael Dowdy, “Ascendance and Abjection: Reading Latina/o Poetry in the Summer of Trump,” American Poetry Review, Sept./Oct. 2016.

  6. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, eds., American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Hereafter cited in the text as The New Poetics. Among recent critiques of “the new,” see Rachel Galvin, “What You Put in Your Mouth,” review of Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, Boston Review, April 7, 2016; and J. Michael Martinez and Jordan Windholz, “A Poetics of Suspicion: Chicana/o Poetry and the New,” Puerto del Sol 45.1 (2010).

  7. In introducing a dossier of poems “On Race and Innovation,” Dawn Lundy Martin (another poet worthy of inclusion here) expresses succinctly our thoughts on our selections: “I do not proclaim this group to be definitive. It is nothing, however, if not timely.” See “The Rules of the Game: An Editor’s Note,” boundary 2 42.4 (2015), 3. The dossier features several of this volume’s poets—Daniel Borzutzky, Cathy Park Hong, and Bhanu Kapil.

  8. Brian Reed, Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), xv. Reed’s is not a ringing endorsement of this convergence. There has been a spate of recent critical books on the lyric. See Lytle Shaw, “Framing the Lyric,” American Literary History 28.2 (2016), which reviews Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of American Poetry (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015).

  9. In The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2016), Nikki Skillman uses the term “avant-garde anti-lyric” to describe the work of Juliana Spahr, Tan Lin, and Harryette Mullen. Skillman argues that despite the “meaningful distinctions” between the modes of contemporary poetry, they have all “emerged upon shared ground”—that is, the agreement that the mind is a materialist rather than metaphysical entity—which has served in “uniting them below the horizon of poets’ intentional differences” (17, 37). Skillman’s elucidation of this “shared ground” usefully cuts across the broad spectrum of US poetries, but her model has little to say about the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality with aesthetic practices. In contrast, in Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Anthony Reed uses the term “postlyric” to describe Douglas Kearney’s and Claudia Rankine’s use of graphic images, allusions to popular culture, and “a voice suspended between ‘I’ and ‘we’” (97). In a formulation useful for reading many of this volume’s poets, Reed argues that “postlyric” “is less a modal distinction than a name for the poetic production of an ‘I’ situated within vectors of power and history whose expression is […] public and intersubjective rather than private” (99).

  10. Cathy Park Hong, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not Kenneth Goldsmith,” New Republic, October 1, 2015.

  11. See, for example, Tan Lin, Heath Course Pak, rev. ed. (Denver, CO: Counterpath Press, 2012); Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2009); and M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011).

  12. Shaw, Fieldworks, 263. In contrast, in The Lyric in the Age of the Brain, Skillman defines “conceptualism’s signature composition practices,” exemplified by Goldsmith, in negative terms: “plagiarism, appropriation, the use of radical artificial constraints, the implementation of ‘uncreative’ procedures of rewriting and repetition, and the subordination of craft to concept” (239–40). For an excellent reading of appropriation, borrowing, copying, recycling, and other techniques of poetic “cannibalism” in hemispheric American contexts, see Rachel Galvin, “Poetry is Theft,” Comparative Literature Studies 51.1 (2014).

  13. Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston, eds., The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 1.

  14. Ibid., 3.

  15. Ibid., 4.

  16. See Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007). Brown writes, “A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is rather a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers” (43).

  17. Fred Moten, B Jenkins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Brent Hayes Edwards’s essay on Moten in this volume addresses this issue.

  18. Dorothy J. Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 12.

  19. In the Trump era, what Gray and Keniston call “the trend toward social engagement in American poetry” (1; our emphasis) has become trendy. See Alexandra Alter, “American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage against the Right,” New York Times Book Review, April 21, 2017; and “Poems of Resistance: A Primer,” New York Times Book Review, April 21, 2017. These otherwise welcome pieces lack historical perspective.

  20. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004); Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afro-centric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000); and Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Reed, Freedom Time.

  21. Kalamu ya Salaam, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews, Francis Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). In contrast, Gray and Keniston’s volume traces the term “engagement” to the French littérature engagée and to South American and Eastern European political poetry (35).

  22. Recent anthologies that cut productively across aesthetic and identity boundaries include Stephanie Burt, The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall, eds., The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015); Abraham Smith and Shelly Taylor, eds., Hick Poetics (Jackson, WY: Lost Roads Press, 2015); John Chávez and Carmen Giménez Smith, eds., Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing (Denver, CO: Counterpath Press, 2014); Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, eds., The Ecopoetry Anthology (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013); and Camille T. Dungy, ed., Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

  23. Recent scholarly studies that address the intersectio
ns of identity, aesthetics, and social engagement in the current historical moment include Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014); Dorothy J. Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Michael Dowdy, Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013); Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011); Chris Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011); Michael Davidson, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011); and Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).