Documentary poetry and tenderness: teaching update

Some questions about documentary poems, misremembered from the white board in my Friday afternoon classroom:

--What genre(s) do we find in the poem?  [Use values?]
--What claim is being made on the reader?
--What is the relationship between the speaker and the documentation?
--Is the poet trying too hard to persuade us?  Not hard enough?
--Talk about the movement between images and words, about lay-out, about empty space.
--Should there be notes?  How should they be presented--in the text, at the end, with or without prose commentaries?

These are mainly technical questions, the kinds you use to investigate poems as if they were word machines set up on blocks, and the workshop members were a group of apprentice mechanics itching to turn their wrenches and loosen (or tighten) some screws.

But what's been most fascinating about my English 713: Documentary Poetry course this semester has been the amount of time spent talking about pain.  I'm as interested in pain as anyone, even have a few things to say on the subject, but my poetry classes tend to be more rollicking, less engaged with tenderness than with "how to do things with words."  I'm as surprised as my students that this class has ventured into such territory: the dying grandfather, the homeless woman, the diabetic, the angry father, the exiled prisoner, the man saved by his art, the mother who died of Alzheimer's. (These questions are quite personal to me, having devoted so many years to writing about my mother's last years)

And so our primary sense of hurt is for others, locates itself as empathy, is the act of bending over at the sight of events on television (Claudia Rankine) or in the streets of Honolulu.

Where pain lives, ethics cannot be far behind, however.  And so one after another, students (a wide ranging group in age, experience, work history) say they do not want to write what they're driven to write.  What if their subject is hurt by their attention to him or her?  What if they reveal bad behaviors in their workplaces or even themselves?  What if their ethnic community feels shame over one of its own?  And on and on.  What if thinking is itself a problematic activity?  What if knowledge is intrusive, not to be trusted?  All of these are real concerns, made stronger yet by living in Hawai`i, where everyone seems to know everyone else, where those who study others have often demeaned them, where our skin is necessarily thin.  Who was it said that William Carlos Williams was a "non-cutaneous" man?

And so my role, more than that of introducing the texts we read, or shepherding the class through the questions at the top of this post, is to pester them to get closer to their subject matter, to this tenderness.  It's not a role I've often assumed in the classroom, where I push students to think harder about their analyses, about their uses of language, about their writing.  Now I find myself pushing writers to get closer to the bone, to use the document not as a way to write about their subject, but to enter a wormhole that may resemble an abyss.  A course about documentation has become one much more akin to self-examination, albeit less confessional than confrontational.  Who might be hurt?  What are you protecting her from?  Are you also protecting yourself?  Are there other goods than privacy?  Is curiosity consumerist, materialist, or can it lead us elsewhere?  What is dignity and why does it feel so necessary to preserve it? What do we publish, and what do we keep to ourselves in this fourth floor classroom?  Or, as Norman Fischer asks in his new book, Conflict: "what's worth protecting / to what extent // & // when // does protection // exceed that worth / its cost in pain[.]"  A rhetorical question without a question mark suggests there is no answer, rhetorical or otherwise.

There are at least two paths out, through.  One is the path Fischer takes in this new book, where he writes down the voices of traumatized vets, those he sits and walks with, but does not identify by name or station.  "we     bear / what we     bear" he writes, and those words belong to all of us.  The other path is by way of the projects the students are discovering themselves starting work on; these projects are far less limited in scope than they'd feared.  It's not grandpa, or the homeless woman, or the angry father: it's these characters in the world that constructed them.  It's not grandpa, though it is grandpa, but it's the journal he kept in his final illness, and it's the cancer that killed him, and it's the doctor who treated him, and so on until the nested eggs--the good ones and the bad ones alike--line up in front of you like the soldiers of Xian.  The poem is order, but it doesn't try to cover the earthly chaos, conflict.

Documentary poetry is perhaps not my favorite form, even now.  But it is the way I love to teach poetry, as it leads further afield and further in-field, engaging questions as large as national identities and as small as the plans for the addition to a house.  And they do that in layers, which attract more layers.  The answer to "a knot ,     is there something // I should be dying for ?          Can I     choose it?" (Fischer, 57) may not be immediately apparent, but we might discover work to live for.

Thanks to Lynn Young for showing us the Jenny Holzer book, whose cover is at the top, where she works with redacted National Security documents.  The first I spotted in the book was a "wish list" for torture methods.

Writing While White: Thoughts on Writing Race as a White Poet

When I think about writing (across) race as a white poet--using a non-universal example of two white poets writing about injustices against African-Americans--Reznikoff of legal cases from early in the 20th century, C.D. Wright during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. I am profoundly skeptical about categories, but am trying to engage discussions being held at Harriet blog, and also here, Claudia Rankine's site, jacket2 and the blog posts that follow, as best I can within the limitations of the question and this form.


Tenets:

I want lyric, but I want lyric responses, not poems.

I want the poet to create the conditions for feeling, thinking, but not to offer her own directly.

I want the truth, but believe the only way to tell it is slant.

I want a poem less about any category than about histories of categories.

I want a poem that both honors boundaries & questions them. One before the other.

I want a poem whose intimacies reside & grow out of their distances.

I want a poem based on facts, not limited by them.

I want a poem that takes language seriously, points to our misuses of it.

I want a poem that makes the reader call herself to action.


Two Examples:

Charles Reznikoff: "Negroes"; and under Aldon Lynn Nielsen, "Negroes"

C.D. Wright, One with Others, Copper Canyon, 2010.


Charles Reznikoff:

Several white men went at night to the Negro's
house,
shot into it,
and set fire to his cotton on the gallery
his wife and children ran under the bed
and as the firing from guns and pistols went on
and the cotton blazed up, ran through a side door
into the woods.
The Negro himself, badly wounded, fled to the
house of a neighbor—
a white man--
and got inside.
He was followed,
and one of those who ran after him
put a shotgun against the white man's door
and shot a hole through it.
Justice, however, was not to be thwarted,
for five of the men who did this to the Negro
were tried:
for "unlawfully and maliciously
injuring and disfiguring"-
the white man's property.

Aldon Lynn Nielsen writes:

"Reznikoff allows the irony of America's racial injustices to foreground itself in these pieces, as in this one, which makes no comment on the fact that there were no charges for destroying a black man's property or for assaulting him and his family."

Reading Race" White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (U of Georgia P, 1986)

C.D. Wright:

"Over at the all-Negro junior high, a popular teacher has been fired for 'insubordination' or a 'derogatory' letter he wrote the superintendent saying the Negro has no voice. No voice at all. It was the start of another cacophonous summer." (3)

What Reznikoff and Wright do in these poems (among other things) is to point at words. They don't point at the words themselves so much as at how those words are being used in particular historical contexts. Reznikoff's quotation comes from the legal case itself; read out of context, or in a more appropriate one, words like "injuring" and especially "disfiguring," suggest bodies, faces, human features. The brief line, "the white man's property," with which Reznikoff concludes the poem, echoes a time when black men were white men's property during slavery, and on the deep and unjust irony that the law will prosecute for destruction of a white man's property, but not a black man's body/figure. On re-reading the poem, the word "justice," cannot not be read with the reader's own quotation marks. A disfigured word re-figured by the reader.

Likewise, C.D. Wright points to the words "insubordination" and "derogatory" by placing them in quotes. These quotes un-veil (by paradoxically clothing in marks) misuses of the words by the school system.

The other day I was in a meeting to discuss the Ph.D. prospectus of a writer from Nepal who writes in English rather than in his native tongue. His writing was too intensely personal, he said, to work in his first language; instead, he chooses to write in the language that offers him distance from his subject and from the face that appears over his shoulder when he writes (read father, read culture). One committee member advised him to look into what might happen if he were to engage the fireworks in his native tongue. I am jealous that he can choose. But not all choices are between languages; some come within a single one. What Reznikoff and Wright have done is to write poetry not in a "native tongue" of feeling and lyricality, but in a "second language" of distance. They don't avoid feelings, but they instigate them in others. They trust their reader to translate back. They also trust themselves to see clearly, not through the damp lenses of passion or anger, instantly gratified.

[I've written elsewhere on being a white poet in Hawai`i; I've tried to complicate the notion of "whiteness" beyond what's inscribed in an essentialist category. One should perhaps add lines of modifiers to any reference to a poet by race or gender . . . I'll leave those modifiers to the poems themselves, which inevitably modify, indeed transform, our categories if we do well by our readers.]

An _impossible_ community: poetry and the private sphere in Daniel Tiffany and Claudia Rankine

About a week ago, I posted an entry about the alphabet as a marker of what is most public (knowledge) and most private (when used as a poetic device, a code with no key). As I wrote there, I've long been curious about the ways in which the private is rendered public in poetry, but also (and more radically) how the private nature of our public experiences gets invoked in poems.

So along comes a free moment to read Daniel Tiffany's new critical book, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (U of Chicago, 2009), which moves away from "imagined communities" posited by Benedict Anderson, communities born of newspapers and other media culture, and into the realm of "impossible" ones. "The community established (or preestablished) by poetry depends neither on meaningfulness nor on external relations--indeed," Tiffany writes, "it may be described as an impossible community" (150). He begins from the notion of "vernacular obscurity," which he finds in the canting songs of beggars and thieves, the riddles of Old English and Mother Goose rhymes, reaches into jargons (which come from bird song) and Pidgins, and comes out the other end into the strange land of avant-garde Modernism. His equation has a beautiful counter-intuitive feel to it, until you begin to hear echoes of "He Do the Police in Different Voices" in your ears. Or until you read his chapter on Mallarme and Mother Goose. "Mallarme and Mother Goose" is one of Tiffany's own riddles, which he teases out over the space of a chapter late in the book, as he shows us how Mallarme taught English to his pupils through the aid of nonsense. Tiffany's central argument--there are many that orbit around it--is that vernacular and high art are similar in their reliance on communities of people who share their obscurities only with themselves. Hence the unlikely link of, say, Ezra Pound with an 18th century purveyor of rhyming slang on London's streets. What he calls "the radiant properties of obscurity" (232) are part of a larger linguistic continuum, not an escape from it. T.S. Eliot might call one form of poetry "personality," the other "impersonal." Tiffany writes that, "acknowledging the priority of expression redraws the map of obscurity, expanding its territorial reach beyond the literary sites of virtuosity and experimentation, thereby blurring divisions (based solely on the criterion of obscurity) between literary and vernacular poetries" (232).

In the end, Tiffany's book calls for a return to anonymity as a literary and a cultural marker. He has taught us already that "anonymity" began its career as a literary term and only later became associated with modern notions of angst. And so he takes the term back, but with a difference, quoting Hannah Arendt at the end of his book about "a flight from the world to concealment, from public life to anonymity" in dark times (234). Not that this anonymity is mere escape for Tiffany, mind you, rather it involves connections between "solipsism and connectedness," "secrecy and expressiveness" (234). The turning in that Tiffany advocates is not so much away from the world as away from its counterfeit realities. Back perhaps toward what Schlegel describes as "the thinking of thinking" (which is a quotation of a quotation on page 92). That meditative poetry is a tradition rarely advertised as transparent, clear, open, glassy, helps to make this point for Tiffany. Poets' thinking is rarely less (or more) than what we term "obscure," even as we value it for its in-sights. Poetry has no outsights to offer us. Thinking is the most inward of acts; to put it on paper hardly makes it less so, though it may share some of that inwardness with its community of readers.

[Editor's note: Daniel Tiffany adds this:
"I do have one thought in response to your comment about a putative call for a retreat from "counterfeit realities" in the name of obscurity, In fact, as the book's Afterword confusedly urges, I'm suggesting a turn TOWARDS inauthenticity (the unavoidable condition now of the vernacular, I think), towards kitsch, as a way of reigniting sentimentality in some atavistic sense--of reclaiming the dialectical substance (the halo) of the commodity for poetry. It's a risk worth taking, I think. Fakery and obscurity become entwined in a brand new way!"]


The other book that launches me from one "low, dishonest decade" into this next (if you think the decade has, in fact, ended) is Claudia Rankine's DON'T LET ME BE LONELY. While the book was published in 2004 (by Graywolf), it reads as an elegy to the aughts, whose tone was set early. Y2K was the false, comedic crisis that 9/11 became, and 9/11 has stayed with us for a long decade. Rankine's "lyric" is, in fact, a book of prose. The back cover calls it "lyric essay/poetry," which reminds me how much I prefer the term "meditation." "Lyric essay" seems another marker of the selling of genres as teachable units; it's a subset of "creative non-fiction," after all. But that's enough complaining. Rankine's work is forensic, getting at our most public moments by way of her most private ones. Not only does she share family stories with her reader, some of them tragic, but she also examines the effects of American life on the inner organs--the brain, the breast, the liver. Medicine is part of this narrative, though any link between medicine and healing is not as neat as one might hope (against hope). The link between human value and that assigned by the insurance industry is even more troubling. The book is held together by the ever-symbolic television screen, that place where our private and public lives most often meet, as we sit (mostly) passively to receive them. Our passivity is what makes us most ill. To meditate upon the public event and the poet's private (very physical) reponses to it is to re-take some notion of agency (though that word loses agency as I type).

DON'T LET ME BE LONELY appears as a billboard in a field of sunflowers on the cover of Rankine's book. It's an unlikely billboard, this private call of anguish set beside a main road (which is empty, save for a thicket of signs.) There's a sense of public obscurity about the clear, private anguish that is the book's subject. While Rankine quotes Levinas on "being for the other," she frames that quotation with assertions of loneliness. And so, on page 120, she begins, "Then all life is a form of waiting, but it is the waiting of loneliness. One waits to recognize the other, to see the other as one sees the self." Then, she quotes the other, Levinas:

"The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays." (120)

I am reminded just now of the hilltops of Rwanda in the mid-90s, during the genocide, when thousands of people milled about, stunned, hungry, and the eye of the media turned itself on them. There was a correspondent for ABC news whose face was narrow, hair gray, voice melancholy. I sat and cried at the images as he spoke into the camera's eye, which mediated between me and him, him and the story he was paid to tell us. Over the course of days, weeks, the correspondent's face fell, his voice began to quiver. I don't remember which gave way first, the correspondent's psyche or the short attention span of the media. But one day they were both gone from my screen. I was alone again, without him, without them. Levinas is surely right about self and other, the word, the prayer that links us. But what if we are all behind television (or computer) screens and our words are spoken only to ourselves? That kind of privacy is hellish. [I google Rwanda and eventually come up with the name of that correspondent, Jim Wooten.]

But Rankine turns away from the screen to face an audience of readers. That act of turning towards us, whoever we may be, does not close the loop that makes her body suffer, but it does invite in the "impossible community" of readers and writers. Our relation may not be "lyrical," but it can be close-knit, our own secret incantatory (from "cant," surely) calling out. That, in any case, is how I want to begin the 2010s, with that hope. And then action?

My first post on Tinfish Editor's Blog was last January 4. I wrote it after making a rare new year's resolution. That one was to write more about Tinfish and all it signifies to me. I wanted to move outside the "invisible handedness" of my position as editor and into "handedness." For Tinfish is an organizing principle that works well beyond the small press publishing world: it organizes my thinking in the classroom, and increasingly becomes the material for my arguments about literature and about the places (real and imagined) that I inhabit. While the blog has taken away energies from "creative" work, I have enjoyed the deadlines it imposes on me, the goad to thinking things through in print. So I will aim to continue the blog for at least another year. We'll see. A very Happy New Year to all of you who get this far!