American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  the firm clicking into place of the terms “identity,” “identitarian,” and, most overtly, “identity politics” as the antithesis of (opposite to and opposing) literary value and critical rigor. So it is that one can group the terms “identitarian,” “identity politics,” “cultural,” “social,” [and] “political” […] together and know exactly what is being invoked (that is, demonized).18

  Our use of “poetry of social engagement” to describe a group of innovative contemporary poets is explicitly designed to encompass a range of racial, ethnic, and class identities, as well as a wide array of modes, styles, sites, histories, practices, and forms. Not coincidentally, many of these modes can be traced to the radical social-artistic movements and the “new American poetries” of the Fifties and Sixties, many of which were led by poets and critics of color.

  Second, the writing assembled in this volume consistently highlights the historical presence that Hong’s essay, given the timeliness of her intervention, does not have the space to address. Rather than ushering in a “new” era, many of the poets in this anthology (as well as many of their contemporaries and their predecessors) were agitating and innovating long before 2015.19 This is especially true of poets working in (or adjacent to) the black radical tradition, the Chicano tradition, and the Nuyorican tradition. The intersections between experimentalism and political consciousness underlying these traditions have been identified and theorized by Amiri Baraka, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Lorenzo Thomas, and Alfred Arteaga, among other groundbreaking critics.20 The Black Arts movement was, after all, the first literary movement in the United States “to advance ‘social engagement’ as a sine qua non of its aesthetic.”21

  In recent years, critical studies in poetry and poetics have demonstrated the myriad ways in which poets have combined innovation with investigations and assertions of ethnic, racial, and gender subjectivities. Contesting the idea that multiethnic poets are limited to narrowly representational forms of identity politics, which excluded poets of color from the avantgarde and kept poetry generally within a depoliticized realm of pure aesthetics, recent anthologies and scholarly studies indicate that the shift Hong identifies had been in motion for a number of years prior to the apotheosis detailed earlier.22 In addition to offering aesthetically attuned readings of socially engaged poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Chin, Herrera, Pietri, and Sonia Sanchez, these studies illustrate how ethnic and cultural studies paradigms might reshape rigid understandings of poetry as either (a) art for art’s sake, that is, idealist; or (b) sociological critique, that is, culturalist or materialist.23 Three critics highlight the approaches taken in this volume while offering additional ways to read its poets and their contemporaries. Wang, in Thinking Its Presence, insists on “the inseparability of the aesthetic and the sociopolitical”; Urayoán Noel, in In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, demonstrates “a way of reading raced, gendered, and otherwise marked poetics that can move back and forth between formalist and culturalist concerns”; and Anthony Reed, in Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, advances “a mode of criticism mindful of the radical implications of formal innovation as a mode of social engagement.”24 Broadly conceived, this volume’s poets do not consider poetry a thing apart. Instead, they create sites, forms, modes, vehicles, and inquiries for entering the public sphere, contesting injustices, and reimagining dominant norms, values, and exclusions.

  Beyond their shared commitment to poetry as a space of social engagement, these poets also share some poetic approaches and literary tools. Several trends emerge. First, their work shares an orientation toward the past, in particular as it relates to literary traditions, cultural archives, and official histories. Perez dramatized this orientation at a public reading in 2012. In theorizing a Pacific avant-garde practice, he explained his interest in the Anglo-American avant-garde ironically, as a form of decolonial reappropriation. White modernists, he deadpanned, stole Oceanic cultures “to make their work less boring.” Now, he concluded, he is stealing it back in order “to make my work more boring.”25 This tension between skepticism of and openness to received literary traditions is reenacted across global networks of exchange, underscoring the fraught reckonings with the entanglements of poetry and history, the powerful and the powerless, and desire and revulsion. Such tensions structure, for instance, the multilingual Pinay (Filipina) poetics of Barbara Jane Reyes and the mimetic desires and decadent stylings of Tejada.

  In describing Borzutzky’s poetry, Johannes Göransson outlines a corollary aspect of this historical orientation: the fugitive transport of unknown, disavowed, and discomfiting traditions and histories from the occluded spaces of American empire, all of which challenge the dominant order.26 These traditions threaten equally the “ahistorical nihilism” of some modes of conceptual poetry and the ironic detachment of “official verse culture,” in Charles Bernstein’s well-known term. Transporting these histories into the archive exposes a lacuna in US culture, where the ongoing consequences of US imperialism, especially in Latin America, are obscured. In this volume, such transport takes various shapes, though each shares a suspicion of convention. Introducing a poetry forum, “On Race and Innovation,” in a 2015 issue of boundary 2, Dawn Lundy Martin wrote,

  Poetry in this historical moment that takes up race as a concern or poetry written by racialized subjects must, almost by necessity, step outside of conventional knowledges, languages, and approaches to the poem if it is going to say anything of any importance at all. Convention, really, is a killer. […] If there is a possibility for poetics and poetry that innovates something outside of this embedded dichotomy [of “marked” and “unmarked” bodies], together the writers and artists included in this dossier disrupt the rules, crack open the game, in a kind of collective disorganization.27

  Another way of putting this “collective disorganization” is that the fourteen poets gathered here, in various ways, embrace the spirit of Alice Notley’s poetics of “disobedience.”28 Consider Kapil’s aspiration to a “literature not made from literature.” Take Torres’s “diasporous” poetics, Urayoán Noel’s term for writing that is exposed on all surfaces to unexpected, even unwelcome, languages. Sift through Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s densely woven palimpsests of Colombian history, which his poetry encounters but refuses to explain to North American readers. And brace for Borzutzky’s grotesque fables in which historical atrocities haunt and torment.

  Second, many of the poets use documentary forms. Mark Nowak has described documentary poetry as a set of aesthetic practices with a range of tools, most prominently appropriation, quotation, and the use of multiple media. For Nowak, these practices can be placed along a continuum from “subjective” first-person auto-ethnographies to “objective” third-person “documentarian tendencies.”29 As in The New Poetics (Kevin Young, Spahr, Nowak, and Goldsmith) and Poetics Across North America (Philip, Lisa Robertson, and C. D. Wright), many of the poets gathered here (Alcalá, Borzutzky, Hong, Kapil, and Perez, most explicitly) work on this continuum. Poets and critics have recently begun taking up in earnest the questions raised by and the aesthetic possibilities presented by docupoetry, with renewed critical interest in Muriel Rukeyser and other groundbreaking documentary poets. In addition to incisive writings by Susan Briante, Philip Metres, and David Ray Vance, Joseph Harrington has examined how the rise of documentary forms and impulses has put tremendous pressure on “Poetry” as a generic category and utopian ideal.30 Harrington identifies the ways in which documentary poetics challenges the subjective individual experiences that are the realm of lyric by engaging collective histories, which are often bound up with the forces of alienation and oppression related to conquest, colonization, and global capitalism.

  This shift from an ostensibly pure poetry untainted by “facts” or “events” (Romantic and Symbolist lyric ideals, respectively) has, Harrington notes, produced a long trail of critical dismissals of documentary poetry (and topical “political” p
oetry generally) as artistically inferior. Given these contexts, Harrington proposes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a new (non) genre. “Like creative nonfiction,” he writes,

  creative nonpoetry defines itself over-against a genre which historically has refused its content, but which it often resembles quite a bit. Creative nonpoetry borrows and burrows from the traditional conventions of the poetic; or mashes them up; or disclaims them altogether, by turns. It can contain verse, prose, dialogue, pictures.

  “‘Creative nonpoetry,’” Harrington concludes in “Docupoetry and Archive Desire,” “is a way of describing what actually-existing poetry has become in the US, over the last twenty years or so—an indeterminate space where the histories of genres clash, combine, morph, or dissolve.” We are not advocating for the use of Harrington’s (non)generic designation.31 Rather, his description of “actually-existing poetry” and his emphasis on “creative freedom” foreground how the poetic ferment in recent decades has overflowed and undone generic boundaries. In sum, Harrington’s partial remapping of contemporary poetry sheds new light on some influential precursor texts for this volume’s poets (that is, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera).32 Most capaciously, it provides a sufficiently wide aperture for viewing the writing praxes of “creative freedom” of each of this volume’s fourteen poets, who collectively “borrow” from, “mash-up,” and “disclaim” numerous genres.33

  Similar generic concerns entangled in the politics of representation and memory have given rise to “undocumentary” practices among Latina/o poets. Juan Felipe Herrera has theorized an “undocumentary” writing, while Alcalá’s first collection, Undocumentaries, investigates the limits of representational language key to documentary forms. Her title also alludes to undocumented persons, who are paradoxically invisible, anonymous, and rightless, even as their marked bodies function as media and political spectacles. Undocumentary poetics thus calls into question the clarity and lucidity typically valued in lyric and documentary forms, while also troubling the narrow epistemological foundations of nation-state citizenship. Such poetic practices make space for radical ontologies that emerge from outside of the state and circulate in and out of (and beyond) genres. In reading Perez’s poetics, the critic Paul Lai calls the unincorporated territories of the United States (colonies such as Guam and Puerto Rico) “the discontiguous states of America.”34 For many of these poets, poetry of witness (what Perez refers to as writing from) and documentary poetry offer necessary tools, with notable shortcomings, for writing against the dissolution of their communities.35 On many political and cartographic maps, Perez writes in the introduction to his first book, from unincorporated territory [hacha], Guam does not appear at all.

  Third, this group of poets has often turned resolutely to narrative forms, to prose, and to the sentence as the basic unit of the poem, over against the syllable, image, or line. Although many write prose poems (see Alcalá, Hedge Coke, Hong, Hume, Kilwein Guevara, Reyes, and Tejada), this sort of sentence is both more systematic and more dissonant and unpredictable than the prototypical “prose” poem. For one, it often structures entire books, rather than discrete poems. In the lineage of writers such as Juliana Spahr, Maggie Nelson, Laura Mullen, Claudia Rankine, and Lisa Robertson, these poets’ sentences vary among sinuous, matter-of-fact, fragmented, and elliptical. Borzutzky and Kapil are self-described “failed novelists” who foreground the dual meaning of “sentence” in their writing—to compose in its logic and form, and to endure its punishment and isolation. Giménez Smith and Kilwein Guevara are writing novels. Blanchfield’s autobiographical essays, Proxies, like Giménez Smith’s prose memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, employs lyric intensity, affect, and condensation. The title of Hedge Coke’s prose memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, charts its poetic tools—archetype, list, parataxis, myth, symbol.36 Like Kapil’s fragmented sentences and Borzutzky’s accretive sentences, Moten’s “shaped prose” in his collection Little Edges and Perez’s “islands” of haibun (similar to concrete poems) move, at different paces, into paragraphs rather than into stanzas. Anne Boyer’s equation of literature and pornography, in Garments Against Women, is instructive for reading these poets’ sentences—their density resists commodification, excerpting, and display.37 What’s more, their turn toward the sentence is bound up in poetry’s increasing visibility in the public sphere, with prose offering traction for engaging more readers. But it is also part of the productivity culture of the United States, in which poets must have many sorts of publications.

  In this sense, Maria Damon values “poetic activity”—processes rather than products—as a capacious index to the forms and locations of contemporary poetry. “Poetic activity” can be seen as the shared ground for the engagements and aesthetics of this volume’s poets. One significant mode of poetic activity identified by Damon toggles between poetic and ethnographic writing. Comparing the ethnography to its source texts (field notes, journals, diaries), Damon indicates that just as these sources embody the poetic, the ethnography embodies the novelistic. She describes their difference in terms of thin and thick description. The thin source materials display an “affective welter of expression,” “allusive suggestiveness,” parataxis, indeterminacy, and a nonhierarchical, depthless “deterritorialized egalitarianism of information.” In contrast, thick description is organized, narrative, novelistic, “finished.”38 It is notable that many of this volume’s poets use both modes, juxtaposing and blending them in inventive ways. We might posit that thickness addresses the global circulation of capital, information, cultures, and bodies, while thinness entails the local interventions from sites of poetic activity. This dialogical process characterizes Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, where the Historian and the Guide use detached prose vignettes and “Desert pidgin” lyric speech, respectively. It is also exemplified by Hong’s frontier and speculative “boomtowns” in Engine Empire. Each book is globalized, polyglot, and hyper-colloquial, suffused with the tropes of capital, pop culture, high theory, and the corporate boardroom. And each wryly courts and subverts in inimitable fashion (ironically, in part, through Hong’s brilliant imitations) a stereotype identified by Wang. Poets of color, Wang writes, are assumed to produce writing “that functions mimetically and sociologically as an ethnographic window into another ‘subculture,’” wherein the poet functions as a “native informant,” like a Chinatown tour guide.39 For two final examples, this dialogic process describes the documentary field notes and journalistic meditations concerning the feral wolf-children in India that structure Kapil’s Hum-animal, a Project for Future Children,40 and Tejada’s “Art Institute Service Bureau” guidebook parodies (recalling Lisa Robertson’s “Office of Soft Architecture”) in Exposition Park.

  Most comprehensively, the “poetic activity” of this volume’s poets might be best articulated through Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.41 Glissant provides a theoretical footing while also suggesting more direct, practical questions about how to read these poets. How do the social engagements of dissimilar poets, with divergent aesthetics, identities, and locations vis-à-vis the academy and the poetry world, relate to each other? How can they be viewed as participating in a common project or, to borrow Moten’s term, in the life of an “undercommons”? Several aspects of Glissant’s argument are salient for answering these questions. “The main themes” of a “Poetics of Relation,” according to Glissant, are as follows: “the dialectics between the oral and the written, the thought of multilingualism, the balance between the present moment and duration, the questioning of literary genres, the power of the baroque, [and] the nonprojectile imaginary construct.”42 A reader would be hard pressed to find a more apt, encompassing, and evocative collective description of the fourteen poets in this volume. At its core, poetry of social engagement embodies the movements of a “Poetics of Relation”: it would be multivalent, multidirectional, radically interrelational, centerless, constantly shifting and in-process, alert and sensitiv
e, curious and bold.

  Yet it is also crucial to point out that poetry of social engagement isn’t necessarily triumphant, meliorist, or even hopeful. In contrast, it often takes failure as the ground of writing, social life, and ultimately political possibility. In introducing Kapil’s work, Lundy Martin says that her writing “succeeds in its inability.”43 Tejada opens his collection Full Foreground by articulating a “failed practice” that is “[b]ent back more severely than the other moderns.”44 Torres, in his mock-manifesto “The Theorist Has No Samba!,” proclaims, “I choose a revelry of failure.” So, too, Blanchfield’s “single source” essays, Proxies, adapted here for his poetics statement, “permit,” even court, errors. Likewise, the preference for messiness that Borzutzky espouses in his collection In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy.45 Such reconsiderations of failure validate, following Judith Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure and Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism, possibilities outside of “the logics of success and failure with which we currently live.”46 For Halberstam, as for many of these poets, “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, [and] not knowing” create space for social engagement on very different terms and grounds than that of the dominant culture.47

  II

  Because her surname comes at the beginning of the alphabet, Rosa Alcalá has in recent years opened several anthologies.48 Her poetry offers a provocative entrée into many of the debates in this volume and in contemporary poetry generally. Alcalá’s poetics statement “Poetics of Not-Mother Tongue” meditates on the contours of one of these debates: the slippery relationships among languages, origins, and poems. When the poem is estranged from the poet’s mother tongue, she suggests, the mother’s body, her language, and her myriad historical figurations will haunt the poem. Where and how, Alcalá asks, does her mother’s tongue—Spanish—reside in and circulate within her English-language poems? These poems, as Alcalá writes, seem so comfortable in their English-language skin. John Alba Cutler’s essay “Rosa Alcalá’s Aesthetics of Alienation” takes up these forms of alienation, multiplicity, and intergenerational tension. “Indeterminacy is not valuable for its own sake in Alcalá’s poetry,” Cutler argues, but instead serves “as a way of posing and responding to material historical circumstances.” From her first collection, Undocumentaries, to 2017’s MyOTHER TONGUE, Cutler traces in Alcalá’s poetry the development of an aesthetics attuned to the ways in which migration, class, and gender shape cultural production. In poems such as “A Girl Leaves the Croft,” Alcalá interrupts spare (anti-)pastoral lyric with incisive, disenchanted fragments. The poem ends: