American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  If the word is first of all the term for invasive development (“a project from outside”) and racist population control at the hands of city planners and power brokers, its flip side is the reality of communal potential (“held in / the projects we’re the project they stole”). Rather than an imposed and static space of confinement, though, the projects themselves become the arena in which (black) social life learns its forms through ongoing “projection” (“we project the outside that’s inside us”). The word thus serves as a reminder that no project, no matter how monumental, ever has the last word. As David Scott has written in a different context, a project is by definition projected, a work-in-progress: it “never knows itself in advance; its personality only gradually discloses itself within the very work it does.”21 Subtly, the “we” relegated to a hostile enclosure modulates into direct address, intimacy, solidarity, in a manner that frames the “stealing” and projecting back of the projects as finally a matter of the politics of interpersonal commitment—or, in other words, of love: “tell me how to choose the project I have chosen. are you / the projects I have chosen? you are the project I choose” (LE 33).

  In July 2014 the poet and critic Daniel Tiffany published a much-discussed essay in the Boston Review called “Cheap Signaling: Class Conflict and Diction in Avant-Garde Poetry,” a spirited reading of class politics in contemporary “avant-garde poetry” (perhaps a less self-evident category than he takes it to be) through the dynamics of its diction, by which he means “the kinds of words a poem uses—literary, colloquial, technical, slangy, regional—but also its syntax and orthography.” In Tiffany’s view, “any sort of diction derives from a particular community and therefore resonates with communal experience,” and “class consciousness can therefore be grasped, in part, through aspects of language—especially diction —operating beneath, or above, the markers of individuality.” He is critical of the recourse to what he calls “synthetic vernaculars” in the work of contemporary “vanguard” poets: ways of using language that seem to point at, and even to speak for, particular social classes, but which are false concoctions rather than “authentic” ways of speaking arising out of the poets’ own backgrounds and current situations.22

  Tiffany is interested above all in what he considers a common predilection in “vanguard” poetry to combine or cut among class-specific registers of speech in a glib manner that results in superficial (if flashy) hodge-podge poetics; instead, Tiffany argues, such “mash-ups of diction should be read as enacting the class conflicts inherent in the institutional affiliations, or affinities, of some of these poets.” Although he lists more than two dozen poets and includes brief quotations from a few (Joshua Clover, Dana Ward, Chris Nealon, and Jennifer Scappettone), the most extended critique in the essay is directed at the “variegated diction” of Moten’s work, which for Tiffany is troubling because it “complicates and masks the verbal field of class antagonism by submerging it in the verbal performance of race.” The way Moten’s poetry conjures the “undercommons” through its recourse to a “synthetic vernacular” while at the same time “veiling” class conflict behind a use of “the black vernacular as somehow authentic or genuine,” Tiffany writes, amounts to an example of “‘cheap signaling’ (a circumstance in which the social ‘cost’ of transmitting a message is low enough that senders can transmit it fraudulently without risk).” “Only if the poetic vernacular is acknowledged to be a knockoff, as the throwaway property of the underclasses,” Tiffany concludes, “can it function as a deliberate instrument of class warfare.”23

  There are many ways to respond to Tiffany’s critique, some of them sketched out in the responses solicited by the Boston Review. If Chris Nealon demonstrates with withering force Tiffany’s fundamental misreading of Marx, Ammiel Alcalay offers a more reserved but equally devastating corrective to Tiffany’s peculiar equation of diction and class-consciousness. “Diction varies enormously according to experience,” Alcalay counters, “and working class experience does not have a particular diction.”24 Moten himself did not contribute a response to Tiffany’s provocation,25 although some of the comments from readers of the online debate wondered what it meant that the broad-brush critique came to pivot on a privileged example of an African American poet in whose work “class conflict” was supposedly “veiled” by a recourse to the black vernacular.

  While it is not worth reiterating the responses by Nealon, Alcalay, and others in the Boston Review, which indicate the many flaws of Tiffany’s argument, it may be fruitful to take his misguided critique as an opportunity to think a bit further about some of the implications of Moten’s poetics. Most glaringly, despite Tiffany’s declaration, it is simply not the case that Moten’s poetry “privileges the black vernacular as somehow authentic or genuine.” There is no claim to “authenticity” in the poetry—indeed, it is hard to imagine what form such a claim would take. Instead of such a rhetoric, Moten’s work is driven by a foundational argument that “blackness, which is to say, black radicalism, is not the property of black people. All that we have (and are) is what we hold in our outstretched hands.”26 Thus on the second page of The Feel Trio: “sing a shattered self is just a shelf, young captain, / sea? you perfectly welcome to what we give away” (FT 4). To understand this, though, one would have to not only shiver at the looming specter one might hallucinate in certain lines (“motherfucker I love cars … / come on ride with me to look at them new rims” [FT 51]), but also read Moten’s careful albeit dense argument for “the paraontological distinction between blackness and blacks,”27 elaborated in his scholarship as much as in his poetry and in the inter-imbrication between these realms.

  One would also need to consult some of the voluminous work on black vernacular poetics (from dialects to creoles to “nation language”), which has occasioned a vibrant conversation and field of debate among African diasporic intellectuals at least since James Weldon Johnson’s preface to the 1922 Book of American Negro Poetry. From its inception, that debate has developed a much more nuanced understanding of the complex shadings of the vernacular in the mouths of black speakers, which could never be mapped against (or outside) a static chart of class identity. “The old-time Negro preachers,” Johnson observed in 1927, “though they actually used dialect in their ordinary intercourse, stepped out from its narrow confines when they preached. They were all saturated with the sublime phraseology of the Hebrew prophets and steeped in the idioms of King James English, so when they preached and warmed to their work they spoke another language, a language far removed from traditional Negro dialect.”28 Five decades later, Ralph Ellison marveled at the unpredictability of speech, intellect, and taste in US society, where (as anyone who has visited a black church or barbershop, or spoken to a resident in the Forest Houses might know) one’s “refinement of sensibility” cannot be explained by one’s “family background, formal education or social status.” Modes of conduct, ideas, and styles—including styles of speech—travel “beyond the levels of literacy,” Ellison writes: “even the most esoteric intellectual concepts find their ways into strange places, and even the most unfree or illiterate American is aware of ideas and will act on them.”29 To put this point differently, while Moten’s poetics surely are animated, as I have already noted, by certain sorts of “collision” or “rub” (his terms)30 among registers, none of these registers is necessarily or automatically foreign to the black vernacular. “My folk,” Barbara Christian insisted nearly thirty years ago, “have always been a race for theory.”31

  A more interesting approach to Moten’s poetic language might involve considering the ways his poetry is and yet exceeds American English. A poem dedicated to Moten’s close friend and colleague, the late José Muñoz, in The Little Edges hovers around an oddly worded question: “are you every day and I really do love you every / day for a long time in another tongue?” The poem looks forward to a reunion “at the angels’ library,” glossed as “an annual / fade announced off fenian fenelonian fanonian / tranche but als
o that flange and quequenian la / as a rainbow of saints” (LE 30). In general, when language moves in these sorts of ways in Moten’s poetry (as it does surprisingly often), we might well pause to wonder how the persistent linguistic experimentation in his work is also intriguingly, somehow, the making of a language that, without ever quite leaving English, still trespasses repeatedly beyond the confines of a national tongue. To return to “barbara lee,” this is writing that unearths what might better be called an “ante-national language” through a “bent poetics in which the one who inhabits a history of displacement speaks the ethics that attend that history by way of interstitial jargon, tones and fragments that get under the skin of the standard” (BJ 87). This suggestion is reminiscent of a perplexing and seemingly paradoxical argument in Edouard Glissant’s later work that it is no longer possible to write in a “monolingual” way. “I know that I write in the presence of all the languages in the world,” Glissant says, “even if I don’t know any of them.”32

  There is a deep, rich, and ongoing dialogue between Moten’s poetics and Glissant’s work that there is not space to take up here. Instead we might close by tracking just one of the smaller routes of outer- or ante-national excursion in Moten’s work. There is a phrase in B Jenkins that first surfaces in the third poem in the book and then recurs in a number of poems, at first unobtrusive and intermittent, but gradually increasing in prominence near the end of the volume: “it’s a little alone” (see BJ 3, 23, 65, 66, 68, 69, 80, 81, 93). The more one notices it, the stranger it seems, especially as it comes to function as a kind of refrain in the midst of such varied seriality. But again, quiet as it’s kept, the phrase is a specific allusion: to the end of the first stanza of Antônio Carlos Jobin’s classic 1972 bossa nova tune “Aguas De Março” (Waters of March): “A stick a stone / it’s the end of the road, / it’s the rest of the stump, / it’s a little alone.”33 If the song famously catalogs the flotsam and jetsam carried in the floodwaters that rise after the periodic heavy spring rains in Brazil, it is also a “large array” of symbols, particles, fleeting effects and feelings (“it’s the wind blowing free / it’s the end of a slope / it’s a beam, it’s a void, / it’s a hunch, it’s a hope”) that is not unrelated to the conglomeration and flow enacted in Moten’s poetics. Almost all the other items in Jobim’s song are nouns, and listening to it, you almost start to hear the word “alone” (sozinho) not as an adjective but as a noun, too—a small thing in the stream. It is a singularity, a small solitude, but one caught in the midst of a multitude. This is why it is an “open” secret: it won’t betray its colors, it speaks across tongues, but it floats there, muted, right before your ears.

  NOTES

  1. Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (Tucson, AZ: Letter Machine Editions, 2014), 32. The other four books are The Service Porch (Tucson, AZ: Letter Machine Editions, 2016), The Little Edges (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), B Jenkins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), and Hughson’s Tavern (Providence, RI: Leon Works, 2008). Also see his In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Subsequent references to Moten’s books will be indicated parenthetically using the following abbreviations: The Little Edges (LE); The Feel Trio (FT); B Jenkins (BJ); Hughson’s Tavern (HT); In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (IB).

  2. Houston Donham, “‘Poetry Begins with the Willingness to Subordinate Whatever the Hell It Is That You Have to Say’: An Interview with Fred Moten,” Open House, July 20, 2015.

  3. The title of Moten’s book is a reference to a historical waterfront tavern in lower Manhattan that was one of the main gathering spots of the multiracial group of sailors, prostitutes, and criminals behind the New York Conspiracy of 1741, a stunningly brazen attempt at “urban insurrection.” See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 174 ff.

  4. As Moten notes elsewhere, this line alludes to Foucault’s contention that “life constantly escapes the techniques that govern and administer it.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143. See Charles H. Rowell, “‘Words Don’t Go There’: An Interview with Fred Moten” (BJ 108). Whereas Moten’s poetry strives toward fugitivity in language, some of his theoretical work elaborates this point in regard to politics and governance. See for instance Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Blackness and Governance,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 51.

  5. Moten notes that his understanding of “fugitivity” derives from a broad lineage of African diasporic thinkers (including Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and W. E. B. Du Bois). See especially Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 269–74; and Mackey, “Cante Moro,” in Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 187.

  6. Charles Bernstein, ed., The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (New York: Roof Books, 1990).

  7. Thom Donovan, “A Grave in Exchange for the Commons: Fred Moten and the Resistance of the Object,” Jacket 2, April 6, 2011.

  8. Donovan, “A Grave in Exchange for the Commons.”

  9. On “multidominance” in African diasporic aesthetics, see George E. Lewis, “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity, and Culture in ‘Voyager,’” Leonardo Music Journal 10 (2000): 33.

  10. Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11.2 (2013): 241.

  11. Adam Fitzgerald, “An Interview with Fred Moten, Part 2: On Radical Indistinctness and Thought Flavor à la Derrida,” Literary Hub, August 6, 2015.

  12. Donovan, “A Grave in Exchange for the Commons.”

  13. Archie Shepp, “Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm,” Fire Music (Impulse! Records AS-86, 1965).

  14. I am thinking of this term as it is famously invoked in Hart Crane’s poem “The Broken Tower”: “And so it was I entered the broken world / To trace the visionary company of love, its voice / An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) / But not for long to hold each desperate choice.” Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower,” in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York: Live-right, 1993). Moten and Harney directly invoke Crane’s phrase in The Undercommons: “And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it” (94).

  15. Donovan, “A Grave in Exchange for the Commons.”

  16. Adam Fitzgerald, “An Interview with Fred Moten, Part 1: In Praise of Harold Bloom, Collaboration, and Book Festishes,” Literary Hub, August 5, 2015.

  17. The Quintet, Jazz At Massey Hall (Debut Records DEB-124, 1956).

  18. Elizabeth Willis, “Work This Thing,” Boston Review, July 15, 2015.

  19. See José Esteban Muñoz, “The Event of the Poem: ‘The Gramsci Monument,’” Social Text 118 (2014): 119–21. On the history (and dismantling) of the Gramsci Monument, see Whitney Kimball, “How Do People Feel About the Gramsci Monument, One Year Later ?,” Art F City, August 20, 2014. Available online at artfcity.com.

  20. On Finally Got the News, see Dan Georgakis and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (1975; 2nd ed., Boston: South End Press, 1998), 107–30; and Moten, In the Break, 211–31. The phrase “the architect is in mining” in Moten’s poem alludes to a voice-over in the film by the lawyer and League Executive Committee member Ken Cockrel, who says in part, “It is these motherfuckers who deal with intangibles who are rewarded by this society. The more abstract and intangible your service, the bigger the reward. […] This man is fucking with shit in Bolivia. He is fucking with shit in Chile. He is Kennicott. He is Anaconda. He is United Fruit. He is in mining! He’s in what? He ain’t never produced
anything his whole life.” The speech is transcribed in Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 116–17.

  21. David Scott, “Preface: Small Axe and the Ethos of Journal Work,” Small Axe 50 (2016): viii, ix.

  22. Daniel Tiffany, “Cheap Signaling: Class Conflict and Diction in Avant-Garde Poetry,” Boston Review, July 15, 2014. Available online at bostonreview.net.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Chris Nealon, “Some Thoughts on Class-ology,” Boston Review, September 15, 2014, available online at www.bostonreview.net; Ammiel Alcalay, “Response to ‘Cheap Signaling,’” Boston Review, September 15, 2014, available online at www.bostonreview.net.

  25. Moten’s response is forthcoming in the journal Hambone in 2018.

  26. Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 238.