American Poets in the 21st Century Read online

  Christine Hume. “A Million Futures of Late” from Musca Domestica by Christine Hume. Copyright © 2000 by Christine Hume. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston, MA. “Comprehension Questions” and “Hume’s Suicide of the External World” from Alaskaphrenia © 2004 by Christine Hume are reprinted with the permission of New Issues Poetry and Prose, Kalamazoo, MI, newissuespress.com. “I Exhume Myself” and “Induction” from Shot © 2010 by Christine Hume are reprinted with the permission of Counterpath Press, Denver, CO, counterpath press.org.

  Bhanu Kapil. Excerpts from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers © 2001 by Bhanu Kapil, and from Humanimal, a Project for Future Children © 2009 by Bhanu Kapil, are reprinted with the permission of Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, CA, www.kelseyst.com. Excerpt from Incubation: A Space for Monsters © 2006 by Bhanu Kapil, originally published by Leon Works, Providence, RI, is reprinted by permission of Bhanu Kapil. Excerpts from Schizophrene © 2011 by Bhanu Kapil, and from Ban en Banlieue © 2015 by Bhanu Kapil, are reprinted with the permission of Nightboat Books, New York, NY, www.nightboat.org.

  Mauricio Kilwein Guevara. “Postmortem” from Postmortem © 1994 by Maurice Kilwein Guevara, originally published by the University of Georgia Press, is reprinted by permission of Mauricio Kilwein Guevara. “A City Prophet Talks to God on the 56c to Hazelwood” and “The Easter Revolt Painted on a Tablespoon” from Poems of the River Spirit, by Maurice Kilwein Guevara, © 1996. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. “The American Flag,” “A Tongue Is a Rope Bridge,” “Mirror, Mirror,” and “Self-Portrait” from Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose © 2001 by Maurice Kilwein Guevara are reprinted with the permission of New Issues Poetry and Prose, Kalamazoo, MI, newissuespress.com. “Against Metaphor,” “At rest,” “Pepenador de palabras,” and “Poema without hands” from POEMA by Mauricio Kilwein Guevara. © 2009 Maurice Kilwein Guevara. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

  Fred Moten. “Rock the party, fuck the smackdown” and “five points, ten points” from Hughson’s Tavern © 2008 by Fred Moten, originally published by Leon Works, Providence, RI, are reprinted by permission of Fred Moten. “gayl jones,” “frank ramsay/nancy wilson,” and “william parker/fred mcdowell” from B Jenkins, Fred Moten, © 2010, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu. “the gramsci monument” from The Little Edges © 2015 by Fred Moten, reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press. Excerpts from “block chapel” and “I ran from it and was still in it” from The Feel Trio © 2015 by Fred Moten, and “it’s not that I want to say” from The Service Porch © 2016 by Fred Moten, are all reprinted with the permission of Letter Machine Editions, Tucson, AZ, www.lettermachine.org.

  Craig Santos Perez. The sequence “from aerial roots” from from unincorporated territory [saina] © 2010 by Craig Santos Perez is reprinted with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond, CA, www.omnidawn.com.

  Barbara Jane Reyes. “[ave maria],” “(ā' zhə fīl),” “[galleon prayer],” “[Kumintang],” “[objet d’art: exhibition of beauty in art loft victorian claw tub],” “[prayer to san francisco de asís],” “[why choose pilipinas?],” and “[why choose pilipinas, remix]” from Poeta en San Francisco © 2005 by Barbara Jane Reyes are reprinted with the permission of Tinfish Press, Kāne‘ohe, HI, tinfishpress.com. “The Bamboo’s Insomnia,” “Polyglot Incantation,” “The Villagers Sing of the Woman Who Becomes a Wave Who Becomes the Water Who Becomes the Wind,” “In the City, a New Congregation Finds Her,” and “Aswang” from Diwata. Copyright © 2010 by Barbara Jane Reyes. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

  Roberto Tejada. “Debris in Pink and Black” from Exposition Park © 2010 by Roberto Tejada is reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press. “[Not a word of my surrounding]” and “[Impulse in the great organism of terror]” from Full Foreground, by Roberto Tejada. © 2012 Roberto Tejada. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. “Kill Time Objective” from Why the Assembly Disbanded is reprinted with the permission of Roberto Tejada.

  Manuel Álvarez Bravo. “Parábola Optica” (Optical Parable), 1931, and “La buena fama durmiendo” (The Good Reputation, Sleeping), 1938, black-and-white photographs, are used by permission of Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C., Mexico City, Mexico. © Colette Urbajtel/Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C.

  Edwin Torres. “Barrio/Barrier,” “Dirtspeech,” and “The Theorist Has No Samba!” from The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language © 2007 by Edwin Torres are reprinted with the permission of Atelos, Berkeley, CA, www.atelos.org. “Of Natural Disasters And Love” from Yes Thing No Thing © 2010 by Edwin Torres is reprinted with the permission of Roof Books, New York, NY, www.roofbooks.com. “And In Trying” and “Viva La Viva” from Ameriscopia, by Edwin Torres. © 2014 Edwin Torres. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. Excerpts from “Dome” are used by permission of Edwin Torres.

  AMERICAN POETS

  IN THE 21ST CENTURY

  INTRODUCTION

  Michael Dowdy

  I

  We have assembled this anthology during a critical juncture in the history of the United States. Our editing process has thus been guided by a two-part premise. First, this volume’s poets offer a robust history of the present that challenges the norms and narratives of social and political life, as well as conceptions of poetry as an art apart from society and politics. When poets reinvent the roles of historians, ethnographers, and, most broadly, activists, Lytle Shaw argues in Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, they create alternative conceptions of the processes that produce the cultures and subjectivities of the United States.1 Second, the range of aesthetic practices and cultural commitments in this volume demonstrates some of the ways that contemporary poets have anticipated the “new” era that was consolidated in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. These poets remind readers that this era is decades, even centuries, if not millennia, in the making. Their writings provide unique lenses onto the histories and outcomes of conquest and colonization, slavery and mass incarceration, neoliberalism and globalization, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and anti-immigrant nativism. But they also find momentary joys and glimpse liberatory futures, all the while showing how the effects of these sociohistorical processes are inscribed in literary sources and forms.

  Since the publication in 2012 of the most recent volume in this series, Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America, the relationships among ethnicity, race, class, and gender, on the one hand, and the “poetry business,” comprised of poets, publishers, editors, and critics, on the other, came into focus in a series of disturbing events.2 These racially charged appropriations of blackface, yellowface, and autopsy reports, by critically acclaimed and lesser-known poets alike, are small stakes in comparison to the precarious lives of unaccompanied minors, undocumented migrants, and refugees fleeing climate change and the shape-shifting forms of contemporary warfare. Yet these small stakes are manifestations of, and thus inextricable from, the big stakes. After all, these poetry-specific acts represented the nadir of the poetry world’s “mainly white room,” in Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s terms.3 For many poets and critics, moreover, these literary events clarified an emerging consensus—conceptual poetry’s promotion of “post-identity” and “against expression” models is functionally racist and classist—that exposed the long-standing political fault lines between avant-garde formations and identity-based multiethnic poetries.4 Subsequent consciousness-raising and organizing around the possibility that poets should participate in social critique took a range of forms, from the tenacious activism of the anonymous collective Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo to the affirmative solidarity of Asian American poets identifying under the Twitter hashtag #actualasianpoet. These events also illuminated movement
s already in motion, such as the Undocupoets, a group of undocumented poets that successfully pressured publishers and poetry presses to remove citizenship requirements from book prizes.

  These tectonic shifts in the poetry world underscored the ways in which innovative poets have long blended art and activism. Nowhere was this dynamic more apparent than in the ascendance of Juan Felipe Herrera to national prominence. Herrera’s experimental, improvisational, multilingual, anti-imperialist poetics led him, remarkably, to his appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States, the first Latino to be so named. Simultaneously, however, the rise of Donald Trump, whose rhetorical vehicle was racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and anti-Latino nativism, ironically highlighted the issues that Herrera has written against since the late 1960s.5 In sum, these events and counter-events foreground the role of poets in the contentious public sphere of a nation, publishing industry, and academy hesitantly confronting (and acting out) living histories of inequality and injustice. This anthology features fourteen innovative poets who grapple, in various forms and from various angles, with these conditions, and whose poetic practices engage with and seek to transform social reality: Rosa Alcalá, Brian Blanchfield, Daniel Borzutzky, Carmen Giménez Smith, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Cathy Park Hong, Christine Hume, Bhanu Kapil, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, Fred Moten, Craig Santos Perez, Barbara Jane Reyes, Roberto Tejada, and Edwin Torres. Some already have national and international reputations, while others, we believe, deserve increased scholarly and critical attention. More capaciously, these poets take readers into the world, beyond academic conversations, by providing unique ways to apprehend, resist, and survive the disasters of the twenty-first century and to imagine emancipatory otherwises.

  We have followed the organization of the previous three collections in the series, with each chapter featuring a selection of the poet’s poems, the poet’s poetics statement, and a critical essay. Readers of the earlier volumes will notice subtle differences in our selections and in the historical and theoretical framing in this introduction. Our title, Poetics of Social Engagement, reflects the shifting landscapes of the avant-garde and the poetry world more broadly. Most simply, the title indicates our lack of recourse to models of identity (that is, women poets) or newness. Although many of these poets can claim the mantle of “the new,” and half are women, the present volume is not a second edition of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, which was published in 2007.6 This volume’s poets have each published at least three full-length books, though one, Brian Blanchfield, has done so in multiple genres. In introducing Poetics Across North America, Lisa Sewell writes that the volume’s thirteen women poets inhabit a shared “thriving center of alterity.” Alterity is likewise important to the poets here, and their shared “center” is largely a function of affinity and affiliation rather than of shared identities or aesthetics. These factors may expose our selections to greater scrutiny. Yet that many other poets deserve inclusion testifies to our historical moment’s abundance of innovative poets, some of whom appear here as critics. Urayoán Noel, Chris Nealon, Joyelle McSweeney, and J. Michael Martinez, who contribute essays on Edwin Torres, Brian Blanchfield, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Craig Santos Perez, respectively, have strong claims to inclusion as poets. Their excellence in both roles exemplifies the prevalence of poet-critics in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Other poets who come to mind—Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Mónica de la Torre, Terrance Hayes, Evie Shockley, Rodrigo Toscano, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Rachel Zucker, to name a few—would launch another volume of equal excellence. Even so, we believe the poets gathered here highlight the powerful range and depth of the field of poetry and poetics in the United States.7

  Because this range is on full display in the present volume, it is challenging to articulate sufficiently wide aesthetic parameters that would help readers navigate the differences. The first volume in this series, Where Lyric Meets Language, offered a useful frame for assessing the tensions and convergences between lyric- and language-oriented poetics while also pointing out the (then) current terms of the debate. As was true of the second and third volumes, however, even a capacious dialectical frame no longer proves useful or appropriate to the current moment. In short, this group of poets is not easy to pin down. The contentious debate between lyric and Language poetries has dissipated, giving way to a field of contemporary poetry in which their modes have combined, blended, and enriched each other. As Brian M. Reed notes in Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics, the convergence of lyric and Language modes has produced a “new consensus” with “traditionally literary ends.”8 The writer in this volume most firmly working, by her own account, in a lyric mode—Giménez Smith—emphasizes its suitability to her project by its qualities of “atemporality, enigma, and corporeality,” each of which also arguably defines various strands of “language,” “conceptual,” “materialist,” “postlyric,” and “anti-lyric” practices.9 On the other end of the spectrum, Bhanu Kapil cannot be said to be working in, or anywhere near, the lyric. Nor is she, by any light, a descendant of the Language poets, though her prose sentences have some of the characteristics of Ron Silliman’s “new sentence.” Between Christine Hume’s interests in acoustic memory, sound poetics, and the limits of cognition and Craig Santos Perez’s serial “book-islands,” which adapt the Japanese haibun (among other forms) to decolonizing ends, there is dissonance, multiplicity, and incommensurability.

  A careful reading of these innovative poets reveals many surprising connections. We have taken the volume’s subtitle, Poetics of Social Engagement, from Cathy Park Hong’s touchstone intervention in the debate around race, conceptual poetry, and the avant-garde. The title reflects the primary realm of these connections—the dramatically unequal, and unjust, social reality for people of color, women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and the poor in the United States. “Poetry,” Hong writes, “is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.”10 Hong’s 2015 essay was simultaneously a call to action for socially engaged poets and an accurate description of the current field of poetry and poetics. The fourteen poets included here can be counted among the best of “the poetry of social engagement.” We would, however, like to broaden two of Hong’s claims, which will help to define “social engagement.” First, Hong takes somewhat for granted what counts as socially engaged poetry, an assumption that is produced in part by her understanding of what (and who) counts as conceptual poetry—Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Expanding the parameters of the conceptual would encompass older writers such as Herrera and Pedro Pietri, who have influenced many of the poets included here, as well as Tan Lin, Mark Nowak, and M. NourbeSe Philip, among others.11 Poets of color and working-class poets are generally not afforded this distinction because, as the nefarious thinking goes, they are too occupied with identity to be concerned with high concept. Lytle Shaw offers one way to “site” conceptual poetry differently: “Appropriation,” he argues, “only becomes meaningfully ‘conceptual’ (and ultimately valuable) when it helps one analyze or read actual sites—from the empirical to the discursive.” “What is ‘conceptual,’” Shaw continues, “is how a work situates itself in relation to its claimed context or site of intervention.” Conceptual practices, he concludes, “depend on their insightful placement.”12 In this volume, the empirical and discursive “sites” in Daniel Borzutzky’s Chicago poems and Hong’s “boomtown” poems, for instance, can be read in these ways as conceptual. Poetry of social engagement is defined as much by the aesthetic tools, strategic interventions, and “placements” used by poets as it is a category ascribed to poems after the fact. Even so, most of the poems included here are not narrowly but rather capaciously political. In apprehending the material world, they find forms to challenge the ways that world is recreated through discourses of power.

  In the recent critical
anthology The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement, the editors Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston define “poetry of engagement” broadly as “writing about concerns beyond the personal, epiphanic, or aesthetic.”13 While their emphasis on the varied modes and forms of engagement is a welcome critical move, their suggestion that aesthetics are private concerns apart from politics, power, and public life has the effect of reinforcing the narrow conception of poetry their model aims to overturn—that socially engaged poems are inevitably artistically compromised. By foregrounding “events” (that is, September 11, 2001) and “effects” (that is, of climate change) as sites of engagement, Gray and Keniston provide ways to read Alcalá’s long poem on the femicide in Ciudad Juárez and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poems on the Oneota earthworks site Blood Run, both of which are included here.14 Such poems enfold what Gray and Keniston call a “heightened awareness of mediation,”15 an awareness that is obsessive, recursive, and omnipresent in Borzutzky’s poems, wherein disembodied voices interrupt poems with the rhetoric of overheard headlines of violence and crisis—“have you heard the one about.”

  Reading Gray and Keniston’s volume alongside Hong’s essay begs the question: What does “social” add to Gray and Keniston’s unmodified “engagement”? In other words, why do we, following Hong, insist on social engagement? In calling engaged poems “the new public poetry” (our emphasis), Gray and Keniston reinforce a binary that has been eroded by neoliberal ideology and outcomes, from the expansion of the surveillance state to the privatization of public goods and services.16 This volume’s poets show that socially engaged poetry can be private, personal, and at first glance shunted off from public events and concerns. This is especially true of the queer poets Blanchfield and Roberto Tejada; of poets who write about mothering, such as Alcalá, Giménez Smith, and Hume; and for Fred Moten, whose book B Jenkins includes dozens of seemingly private homages.17 Understood most broadly, “social” emphasizes the cultural, political, and historical dimensions of aesthetic practices, which are often contentious. The word “social” has frequently served in poetry criticism as a euphemism for racial and ethnic identity. In Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, Dorothy J. Wang identifies over the last two decades